B2B Reimagined 2023 Highlights: The Essential Episodes

Zilliant’s B2B Reimagined podcast is a unique resource for commercial leaders across the B2B world, and it continued to grow its listenership in 2023. You can catch up on every episode of the show here, or start with these five favorites from the past year.

B2B Reimagined: 5 Must-Listen Episodes from 2023

The mission behind B2B Reimagined is to provide consistent thought leadership to help our listeners gain strategic control of their commercial performance. We do this by bringing in unique and authoritative voices from a wide range of vertical industries, technology domains, and commercial backgrounds.

Here are five episodes that stood out with our audience in 2023:

Pricing Resiliency Requires Brains and Brawn w/ Accenture (Episode #72)

“You need to combine the pricing brain and the pricing muscles…the bruscles of pricing.”

What does this mean? According to our guests from Accenture – Strategy Principal Director Daniel Lindner and Managing Director, Pricing and Commercial Strategy Daniel Antolin – it means embedding powerful pricing tools into your pricing strategy from the very start.

When B2B pricing teams combine the thinking and the doing, so to speak, they earn a seat at the table with company decision-makers and overcome the common obstacles to resiliency. Namely, they can achieve agility, consistency, transparency, and differentiated pricing.

Learn how Zilliant and Accenture are busting age-old myths about B2B pricing and how we help our clients find quick wins that serve to fund the rest of their pricing journey.

Listen:

Will AI Eat the Software World? (Episode #77)

Read enough headlines about generative AI and you will start to mull some big questions: Is it the next big paradigm shift? Is it a grave threat to the modern workforce? Can it be smarter than me?

“It’s about a six-month-old puppy at this point,” says Lou Simon, vice president of Uptima Elevate.

However, like a puppy, Lou expects generative AI tools like ChatGPT to learn and grow very quickly. He and host Barrett Thompson share ideas on what that evolution will look like for B2B companies, and how generative AI can combine with purpose-built AI platforms like Zilliant and other best-of-breed technologies to create something even bigger.

Listen:

Why Pricing Transformation Isn’t a “Chicken or Egg” Problem (Episode #79)

What should come first: pricing technology or pricing strategy? Our guest on this episode, PwC Partner Ron Otocki, made a strong case for why the two should go hand-in-hand.

Ron leans on his vast experience guiding companies through digital transformations to explain how pricing fits into larger transformative projects, and how the most successful pricing initiatives mix strategy and the right tools from the very start.

Learn how to marry strategy with technology in your pricing and digital transformation initiatives.

Listen:

Pricing Should Be at the Heart of Your Organization (Episode #80)

Profitability and customer experience are important. That’s about as noncontroversial a statement as you can make in B2B. So, pricing – which is perhaps the biggest driver of both – should be at the heart of every B2B company, right?

“That is quite a controversial statement whenever I make it,” said pricing expert Karan Sood. “When I show people my spider chart of how pricing is the heart of the organization, some people are very supportive and some people are like, ‘You're smoking something.’ But I do believe pricing is at the heart of the organization.”

Karan and host Barrett Thompson examined the distance between pricing’s theoretical strategic value and the reality - its common lack of organizational influence - through the lens of four pricing paradoxes:

Pricing should be considered first in a new campaign or product launch, but it often comes last. Pricing teams should be forward-looking, but most toil in the past (last quarter’s profitability, what went wrong?). Pricing should lead the organization in data-driven capabilities, but it’s usually one of the last adopters. Pricing should have visibility to the C-suite, but it’s relegated to the back office.

They diagnose the reasons behind these disconnects and prescribe immediate actions pricing leaders can take to expand their influence, based on real-world examples.

Listen:

Subscription Pricing Models on the Rise in B2B (Episode #78)

In the subscription economy, a company’s product takes a backseat to its subscriber. What does this mean for a company’s go-to-market strategy? For starters, value-added services and customer support become paramount.

In your everyday life, you most likely subscribe to various streaming services or office software tools. But subscription and usage-based models are expanding far beyond the consumer realm, becoming more and more popular in traditional B2B spaces.

Dan Balcauski, founder and chief pricing officer of Product Tranquility, joined the show to explain why this shift is happening, the ramifications for the B2B world, benefits versus risks, best practices, and much more.

Listen:

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