José Vela is the Director of Pricing at Spandex Barcelona, known as one of the leading suppliers of graphics and digital materials worldwide. He is a strategic and business savvy leader who empowers business development and profitability improvements for global businesses, with an expertise in directing international trade, manufacturing, and services operations. José moved into pricing after having a General Manager's role. In this episode, José talks about the importance of getting the right price in selling your services as he relates it to the change and value you’re providing to your customers.   Why you have to check out today’s podcast: Understand why it’s a must for you to be able to price your products and services right in relation to winning more deals even at a high price; Discover how experience adds up to a pricing person’s credibility, therefore, resulting to high rates of success in sales; and Find out how necessary it is for you to think like your customers in order to provide the best value in the market.   “You need to be able to analyze your own data in order to identify where your margin, your profitability is, what are the leakages, and then you need to act on them.” – José Vela   Topics Covered: 01:49 – Getting into the world of pricing: Winning more deals through knowing the right price 05:52 – General managers providing more credibility to the table and being able to demonstrate success through experience 09:00 – The value being present on the extended product; thinking like the customers 13:15 – Building the analytics capability to prove the impact of pricing decisions 16:49 – Why list prices matter so much 18:00 – How to effectively manage list prices in relation to the benchmarks 23:07 – José’s piece of pricing advice for today’s listeners   Key Takeaways: “Most of the time, sales people – they are driven when we are talking about pricing. They are driven by fear. They are afraid of losing the deal, losing the customer if they base off them. And if you are able to provide them data, reliable information, they feel more confident and they know that they can offer a right price and they know it right because other similar customers are paying.” – José Vela “Country managers are really competitive. We are competitive animals and we know to overperform. We want to overachieve. And if we see that some of our colleagues are succeeding, we want to know what's the deal, what's going on there, because we want to replicate this, these tools, those processes, whatever they are doing to succeed. We want to make sure that we are doing the best in order to succeed too. So, if you are able to find early adopters that are able to show and demonstrate quick wins, this also helps a lot.” – José Vela “The impact of pricing is, how do we manage the list prices? And how do we manage the discounts that we are giving to our customer? The main driver for margin value is – without any doubt – how do you manage your pricing? And if you are not able to organically growth a lot for whatever the reason, how you manage your list prices is the biggest driver to increase your revenue.” – José Vela “In general, it's not just pricing the prices. It’s making the right price. Pricing goes in two directions. It’s not only about rising prices. Sometimes, you decrease.” – José Vela “Most of the pricing initiatives, the critical piece is never the technology, or at least from my point of view, because there are different ways to do stuff, different platforms, but how do you manage the change? How do you train the people? How do you make them feel comfortable and embrace the change? That's the most difficult part. Ever. Always.” – José Vela   People / Resources Mentioned: Spandex: https://www.spandex.com/ Toyota: http://www.toyota.com/   Connect with José Vela: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jvela/ Email: jjvelar@gmail.com   Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.co