Impact Pricing Why Pricing Deserves a Seat at the CEO Table with John Norkus
John Norkus is the founder of chiefpricingofficer.com and has led pricing transformation teams at several large consulting companies including Deloitte and KPMG. He started his career as an aircraft engineer before transitioning into business, bringing his analytical mindset to understanding the behavioral economics of pricing decisions.
In this episode, John makes a compelling case for why pricing professionals deserve a seat at the executive table, exploring the disconnect between pricing's impact on enterprise value and its typical organizational placement. He discusses his new platform designed to unite senior pricing professionals and elevate the discipline to C-suite recognition.
Why you have to check out today's podcast:
- Discover why pricing professionals are typically buried 2-3 levels below the CEO despite controlling one of four key profit drivers.
- Learn the difference between traditional pricing roles and true chief pricing officer responsibilities.
- Understand how to position pricing as enterprise value creation rather than just cost management.
"Pricing may be part marketing, part analytics, part behavioral, part external, part internal, but it is the piece that aligns us on how we're actually squaring off against the market."
– John Norkus
Topics Covered:
01:43 – John's journey to pricing transformation: From aircraft engineer to behavioral economics and CRM to pricing strategy
05:18 – Positioning pricing as organizational connective tissue: Why pricing deserves equal footing with volume, cost, and mix initiatives 08:01 – The pricing control dilemma among departments: How sales, marketing, finance, and operations all claim ownership of pricing decisions
12:24 – Defining the Chief Pricing Officer's role: Executive alignment versus operational pricing work and transformation implementation
15:45 – Pricing strategies in business: Inside-out versus outside-in approaches and competitive intelligence versus customer willingness to pay
16:32 – Critical senior alignment in pricing projects: Why CEO buy-in as a top-3 initiative determines transformation success or failure
19:39 – Pricing and enterprise value analysis: Demonstrating 2-7% bottom-line impact within 12-18 months to justify executive investment
23:35 – The activist CFO and enterprise value: Finding CFOs who understand value creation beyond cost reduction and margin improvement
29:29 – Pricing as organizational alignment: How pricing serves as the ultimate test of market positioning and competitive strategy
Key Takeaways:
"If the pricing transformation of the pricing program isn't number one on the CEO's list of one, two, or three most important thing they can do this year... then quite frankly, it's not as important and it doesn't have the kind of alignment that you thought it did." – John Norkus
"Organizations who get it are the ones that we should be engaging with... change comes from within. And if somebody believes that this is the right thing to do and they just need somebody to help them do it and somebody who has done it before, that's where people like you and I actually succeed." – John Norkus
"I consider 20% of everything we do in pricing to be analytics or data and objective based, and the other 80% to be about behaviors, either internal behaviors or external behaviors that need to be captured and understood." – John Norkus
People / Resources Mentioned:
- Professional Pricing Society (PPS): Established organization for pricing professionals and education
- Simon Sinek
- Four Drivers of Enterprise Profit: Volume, Cost, Mix, and Price - and their typical organizational reporting structures
Connect with John Norkus:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmnorkus/
- Email: john@chiefpricingofficer.com
- Website: https://www.chiefpricingofficer.com/
Connect with Mark Stiving:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
- Email: mark@impactpricing.com