Pricing Hero Interview with Chris Chrisafides of The Dow Chemical Company
Posted by Tapan Bhatt on Wed, Oct 28, 2009 @ 05:10 AM
As part of our Pricing Hero interview series, we recently had a chance to talk to Chris Chrisafides of the Dow Chemical Company. This blog post includes Part 1 of our two part interview with Chris.
Meet Chris Chrisafides
Reporting to the Chief Marketing Officer, Chris is responsible for developing and executing the vision of pro-active price and margin management across The Dow Chemical Company.
Chris is a 20 year industry veteran. His experience includes global leadership roles of increasing responsibility in engineering, manufacturing operations, and quality; with a focus on commercial leadership over the past 12 years including business development, marketing and sales.
For the past two years, Chris has provided commercial and functional leadership to the successful development and deployment of price analytics and execution across all businesses in heritage Rohm and Haas, and most recently with Dow Chemical.
Chris holds a BS in Industrial Engineering and an MS in Manufacturing Engineering.
Chris and his family reside in New Hampshire.
THE INTERVIEW
How do you define pricing change management as it relates to pricing?
Chris: Based on my personal experience with heritage Rohm & Haas and now with Dow, change management is really about the sustainability aspects of pricing. Its key components include education, collaboration, and execution. The ultimate objective of change management is to drive effective pricing behavior internally and encourage a more thoughtful, sustainable and strategic approach to pricing.
How have you worked with the business to educate them on various pricing topics?
Chris: From an education standpoint, as we engage with businesses we educate them on topics like pricing waterfalls, price leakage and outliers. Looking at pricing changes in the rearview mirror helps you figure out what's wrong in your business and how you can do the deal more strategically to get it right the first time. To help with training, we also created an e-learning area where anyone can go on and look at all different analyses that are in our tool kit. We have modules that talk about value pricing versus cost plus scenarios and how you incorporate those as well.
What process did you follow in collaborating with business on a pricing initiative?
Chris: Good pricing change management is also about more thoughtful collaboration and integration with business processes. For example, we'll have an engagement with a business and conduct a transactional pricing assessment with them over a period of 12-16 weeks. We make sure they look at things with us and we learn a lot about what they're acting on when it comes to deals and prices. The most important part comes after deployment when we have someone sit down and work with the business to discuss what they'll look at on a regular basis and how they'll respond. By delivering pricing dashboards at an executive level, we help organizations drive behavior internally and encourage a more thoughtful, sustainable approach to pricing. This thoughtfulness is true change management because it helps people use pricing capabilities and strategies to change how they do business going forward.
What is the importance of executive sponsorship in driving pricing change management?
Chris: Executive sponsorship is very, very key. It's just like a sale to a strategic account; you've got to have buy-in at the very top and people need to know about that support. You also need to be able to get the support and implementation across the board: at the general manager level, at the commercial director level, at the sales person level, etc. These are the people that need to live and die by these tools. Without this buy-in you won't be successful.
In our case, we established a steering team that included our executive sponsor, which was our chief marketing officer, as well as the CFO. The CEO sat in on occasion, and several key business vice presidents also had responsibility to engage. When we engage with a business, we bring that business in front of the steering team on a quarterly basis and they report on what we found, what they acted on and what they didn't act on. We sit there and we facilitate, but ultimately, the steering team owns each engagement. This executive level support and governance creates that sense of urgency and ensures that people take it very, very seriously. It's helped us to be successful, and there's no doubt that you need it to be successful.
Please note: Part 2 of the interview will posted next week.