Photos and Marketing Survey Results From Our Pricing and Profit Management Winter ’24 Tour Luncheons!

We hit the road earlier this month and visited 4 cities across 2 weeks: Chicago, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Kansas City, and Bentonville.

We had 25 attendees in Chicago. In Minneapolis–St. Paul, we networked with 15 business professionals. We were happy that 8 people graced us with their presence in Kansas City. And we were joined by 17 individuals in Bentonville. It was lovely to meet and discuss pricing with people from across the central United States.

We had several speakers at our events. Laurie Flowers (Senior Manager, Price and Margin Excellence at Stanley Black & Decker) spoke in Chicago. Elaine Chong (Director of Global Pricing at nVent Hoffman) spoke in Minneapolis. Mark Gilham (Evangelist at Enable) spoke in Kansas City. And Lloyd Ruffle (Manager of Revenue Management at Tyson Foods) spoke in Bentonville. Tim J. Smith (Founder and CEO at Wiglaf Pricing) discussed his Pricing Spineometer at all 4 luncheons. We were happy to have all our speakers share their knowledge with us!

Next Events

We all had a great time, and we are planning for our next Pricing and Profit Management luncheons next summer. We will be organizing events for the week of July 8^th to July 12^th.

Currently, we are planning to hold events in Chicago, Atlanta, and Charlotte, NC. (Our choices are due in large part to results from our event marketing survey, discussed below.)

But we do need your help! We are looking for a city between Chicago and Atlanta to hold an event. Do you have a company headquarters between Chicago and Atlanta? Do you have a pricing community between Chicago and Atlanta?

Reach out to me at [email protected] if you want us to come to your city! Events will be posted on Eventbrite by the time we see you at the PPS Spring Conference in Chicago.

Thank-Yous

We would like to offer a big THANK YOU to Enable for sponsoring our Pricing and Profit Management luncheons in Chicago, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Kansas City, and Bentonville. We are very glad that Mark Gilham, Cale Parks, Leah Kempe, and Maureen “Mo” Barsema from Enable could join us.

Finally, thank you to Jackie Kuehl for volunteering to take photos at our Chicagoland event. Thanks to your diligence, we have a visual record!!

We cannot wait to see everyone again in July!

Marketing Survey Results

As all of our event attendees know, we conducted a marketing survey at each of our events. We wanted to find out:

• Who pays for the event tickets?
• Which cities should we visit this summer?
• What event format would work best?

For the first two questions, we simply collected responses at the events and via Google Surveys. For the third question, we opted to use conjoint analysis to gain insight into attendee preferences.

A discussion of the conjoint analysis will have to wait until next month’s Wiglaf Journal. But we can dive into the first two questions right now.

First, we learned that the split was approximately 50-50 for whether the event tickets were paid for by the attendee or by the attendee’s employer:

This question allowed us to identify who the buyer is for these events. As in many B2B products, the user and the buyer can be completely different people. This impacts how we can best frame and communicate the value for these events. A deeper analysis will have to wait until the conjoint results are finalized. It could potentially tell us if there is a statistical difference in event preferences based on who is actually paying for the ticket.

Second, we tabulated the city choices:

As you can see, the top 4 results were Charlotte, Minneapolis, Atlanta, and Chicago. We are based in Chicago, so that is an easy choice to include. Atlanta sounds like a great choice, especially since it’s the home of the Professional Pricing Society. And Charlotte received the most votes out of any city, so we must bring our pricing tour there.

Unfortunately, we just visited Minneapolis this month, and we would like to visit some cities in the Southeast during the summer. (Sorry, Minneapolis! We’ll be back before you know it!)

For the conjoint analysis, we tested several price points, several event times, and 2 food options. We’ll dissect the findings after we complete the full analysis. Stay tuned for the results next month!

Chicago Photos

Minneapolis–St. Paul Photos

Kansas City Photos

Bentonville Photos