The Foundations of Pricing Leadership: Driving Strategy, Credibility, and Tech Readiness with Lee Mackedanz

In this episode of Pricing Heroes, we speak with Lee Mackedanz, Founder and Managing Partner of Value Capture Consulting, and a veteran pricing executive with leadership roles at Kohl’s, JCPenney, Fossil Group, Office Depot, SuperValu, and Advance Auto Parts. Lee shares his journey from merchant at Best Buy to becoming a pricing leader responsible for more than $700 million in incremental sales and margin improvements. He explains what it takes to build credibility with merchants, lead organizational change, and lay the right foundations before investing in technology.

Key Topics:

• Transitioning from merchandising to pricing leadership
• Competing with Amazon by pricing to value, not just price
• Building pricing maturity at Kohl’s and winning buy-in for a new discipline
• Why persuasion, influence, and small wins drive change management success
• How to structure promotions and discounts as strategic resources
• The foundations required for AI pricing — data, governance, and clear strategy
• Why courage, collaboration, and transparency define great pricing leaders

Recommended Resources:

• The Pricing Roadmap by Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt
• ChiefPricingOfficer.com

Connect with Lee Mackedanz:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leemackedanz-mba/

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Get your free copy of Get Ready for the Future Of Pricing with our A-Z Guide.

For more information about AI pricing solutions, visit Competera.ai.

Transcript

Aaron: Hello and welcome to Pricing Heroes, a podcast sponsored by Competera. This is a series of interviews with the best-in-class retail pricing experts driving bottom-line metrics for major retail brands and the industry as a whole. Today’s guest is Lee Mackedanz. Lee is the founder and managing partner of Value Capture Consulting and a seasoned pricing and revenue management executive with more than 20 years of experience leading pricing strategy at major retailers, including Fossil Group, JCPenney, Kohl’s, Office Depot, SuperValu, and Advance Auto Parts.

Over the course of his career, Lee has delivered more than $700 million in incremental sales and margin improvements through smarter pricing, strategic promotions, and scalable revenue growth programs. He’s built pricing organizations from the ground up, implemented enterprise pricing systems, and developed global frameworks that align positioning with profitability across retail, e-commerce, and wholesale channels.

Lee is also a member of the board of directors at ChiefPricingOfficer.com. Lee, welcome to Pricing Heroes.

Lee: Thank you for having me. Looking forward to it.

Aaron: Would you like to begin by telling us a little bit about yourself and how you found your way into pricing?

Lee: I think, like just about everybody else in the space, I fell into pricing. I started my retail career at Best Buy. I was a merchant there and loved working there. I got to move around to a lot of different spots. Then I got recruited over to Advance Auto Parts, and I went there as a merchant.

I was a merchant there for two years. A manager of pricing had left the company, and the role sat open. Some people at the company suggested I might be interested in it. I thought about it and realized that I’m a fan of analytics, I love the psychology of pricing, and I liked the idea that I’d be able to work on a bunch of different parts of the business and not just spend my time focused on my little world as a merchant. So I went into it believing it was going to be a two-year stint, and then I’d come back into the merchant world with a new set of skills that would help separate me from all the other merchants out there.

That was 2010, so it’s been 15 years. As soon as I got in, I realized it was the right spot for me. What I liked was that I could spend my days working with Category A on Wednesday, and then spend all of Tuesday diving into Category B. I got to be this internal consultant focused on a very specific piece of the business that ended up influencing the rest of the business. Again, like everybody else, I kind of fell into it.

Aaron: Yeah, that’s a common theme. No one says they planned on going into pricing. They just happened into it, decided they loved it, and stuck with it. I’d love to ask a follow-up on that. Do you feel like your experience as a merchant prepared you for your career in pricing?

Lee: Yeah, I think it did two things for me. Number one, when you’re a merchant, you have to touch all parts of the business. You have to learn a lot about everything. You have to understand how shipping impacts your P&L. You have to understand the marketing aspect of it. You have to understand how to build an assortment. So it gave me a really good framework for understanding how the business ran.

The other part is that once I moved into pricing, the merchants were essentially my customers. My time was spent having to convince the merchants to do things, to view their business differently, or to make changes. Having come from that space made me better able to put together an argument that could be convincing to them, and it gave me a little bit of credibility because I could say, “Yeah, I’ve been in your spot. I understand your pressures.” Sometimes you don’t even have to say those words overtly. Just by saying, “Hey, I bet this is a problem for you,” they get that you intuitively pick up some of their problems. Having come from that spot, as opposed to, say, having been in finance, gave me a little bit of a leg up on some of my peers, I think.

Aaron: So would you recommend some pricing professionals spend time as merchants, or would you even try to persuade some merchants to come over to pricing?

Lee: When I was building teams, I looked for merchants right away. That was always my first spot. I think for a lot of different roles within companies—again, because the merchants have to do so much, at least in the organizations I was in—I don’t know that pricing people moving over to merchandising would necessarily help them. I think the focus is ensuring they spend enough time with merchants to understand the pain points and the drivers. The grind that is being a merchant—I respect them wildly because it’s a very difficult job—and I don’t know that a pricing person has to live the life, but understanding what they’re going through is a big help.

Aaron: Okay, so you became a pricing manager at Advance Auto Parts, and then you later worked within pricing leadership at SuperValu. From there you went on to hold VP roles at Kohl’s, JCPenney, and Fossil Group. Could you describe what that career development looked like for you?

Lee: Part of it was I got into pricing at exactly the right time—right as organizations were starting to understand that this is a need and a way to differentiate. There were probably three or four real pricing software providers at that time. I got in right as folks started to build out those capabilities, so I was able to take phone calls and end up at different spots.

The other piece that worked out really well for me is that I was able to move into a bunch of different industries. Going from the automotive aftermarket—where your items turn slowly, elasticity is very low, and there are specific struggles—to grocery, where it’s almost the opposite and a 25-cent change on an item can have a real impact on the bottom line. Then going back into office supplies, where again it’s pretty slow, and it was right as Amazon was really starting to take people’s share. Now I had to learn how to compete with a behemoth that operates under a completely different paradigm.

The biggest shift was going into apparel, because apparel is run completely differently. At Office Depot, we used to refer to certain seasonal goods as a one-time buy—you buy a big chunk that you plan to sell through in six months, and you hope it’s all gone. In apparel, that’s most of what you deal with, and almost everything you buy has a determined end date. That end date isn’t two years from now; it’s nine months from now. That shift was a big one for me, but it helped me broaden my skill set and understand the business in a different way. A lot of it was hitting the space at the right time and then finding the right opportunities that worked to help advance me and give me new skills.

Aaron: I’m really interested in going back to what you mentioned about Office Depot. You were at Office Depot; how do you compete with a behemoth like Amazon on pricing? When I think about competing against Amazon, it’s the in-store experience that might be able to differentiate. It’s the expertise of the people on the ground that might draw traffic away from purchasing online from Amazon. From a pricing perspective, what were you thinking about, or how were you approaching that particular challenge?

Lee: It’s about value. You have to understand the value you provide to the consumer. If you’re just going to play a transactional price game, you’re battling uphill because Amazon is built with an SG&A structure and a capability stack meant to focus on providing the lowest price. Most other companies—particularly ones that existed before Amazon—weren’t built that way.

So you have to think about what value you provide and how you price to that value, or how you provide differentiation that Amazon can’t. Is there a rewards proposition? A customer service play? Some added assortment or value-add service? Is it the fact that I have stores and you can come in and pick something up today or return it today? Those are the pieces you have to focus on because if you get lost in just price, they’re built to play that game. If you look at their scraping capabilities and their sheer capacity to change price en masse really quickly, most folks aren’t built to do that. You come back to who you are and what you offer and focus there to figure out your best way to compete.

Aaron: Would you mind telling us what the value or differentiation was that you leaned into?

Lee: Part of what we did was build a dynamic pricing capability, and we found it was more than the organization could consume—our merchant teams couldn’t keep track of the actual selling price at any instant. Amazon’s teams are set up to live with that uncertainty. So we focused on being able to say, “Okay, you can buy online and pick up in store today.” For things like ink—back when you were printing a boarding pass—if I needed something printed, I needed it today. That was a piece we could leverage.

For expensive things like furniture, you can come see the chair in our store and ensure it’s the right chair. At that point, Amazon hadn’t fully leaned into private label across many office supply categories, so we could compete there because we had a private label assortment we could price competitively. Those were the spots we focused on to provide something you could get from us that they couldn’t easily provide.

Aaron: You said that you got into pricing at the right time, and I think this is further elucidated in your story with Kohl’s. When you joined Kohl’s, you stepped into a completely new role as VP. Since this was the first formal pricing leadership role at the organization, what were the biggest challenges you faced introducing pricing as a strategic discipline, and how did you build credibility and earn buy-in?

Lee: My move to Kohl’s—honestly, I was pretty naïve about what it would be like being the first pricing person. I also learned that Kohl’s had a culture where people got in and didn’t leave. It’s very Midwestern. Most people had worked there for decades or had never worked anywhere else, and for a lot of them both were true: “I’ve only worked at Kohl’s, and I’ve been here for 14 years.” For me to come in as an outsider at a VP level was rare because they were very good at promoting from within.

To be a VP in a role that didn’t exist, taking a responsibility the merchant team typically owned, was difficult. We had to get people to think of pricing as a discipline rather than just an activity. People would price because of what happened around them, as opposed to having a strategy to guide decisions. We wanted everything done with a purpose rather than “the business is rough; we have to move.”

For Kohl’s, you’ve got a ticket price, the item is often on sale under the ticket price, and then there are discounts that can be layered in with Kohl’s Cash and coupons. I got teams to think about those discounts as a resource—just like space in the store or space in a flyer. It’s a resource you want to use on items that will produce the most return. Instead of discounting across the assortment, understand that item A responds a lot better to a discount than item B does. We don’t have to peanut-butter our approach. Use the resource to drive the business and put it in the right spots.

To garner credibility, it was a lot of “we’re going to work this together.” I wasn’t going to come in and tell them how to run their business. We did a lot of testing and iterative work to build a snowball. An example: the data suggested that the juniors category is pretty inelastic—apparel for girls between, say, 13 and 19. The team would struggle in sales, and the first thing they’d do was discount. We realized it makes sense: if a shirt is ugly to a 13-year-old girl at $24, marking it down to $19 doesn’t change her mind. It’s not even her money; it’s mom’s. For poor performers, the best thing you can do is hold the price because you’re going to sell 200 units either way, and you’d rather sell 200 units at $24 than at $19. Instead, save those dollars for markdowns and get the item into clearance to get it off the floor. That’s using markdown dollars as a resource.

As we did that and got documented wins, we could snowball. That team uses you more; their performance gets better; their peers notice. Suddenly you’ve got a story that gets folks to say, “Maybe I should do things differently; maybe they can help me.” It didn’t happen overnight. We went somewhat slow, but it was better to go slow and win than to go fast and lose.

Aaron: I like that. It’s a bit of the psychology of pricing—understanding how girls think about the clothes they wear. It sounds like you were doing a form of A/B testing across targeted categories and iteratively demonstrating the value of the disciplined pricing you were offering the organization. I’m assuming that over time people saw the value and you were able to scale your pricing strategy across the organization. Or did you run into challenges you didn’t foresee that were hard to address at Kohl’s?

Lee: We always had some folks who were more standoffish. In the end, we had the entire organization running through the tool we used. They worked with us in their planning process and used us for things like, “Item A is struggling, what can I do?” Promotional planning was a big one. As events would change—maybe last year the coupon was 25% off and this year it’s 20%—how do I adjust my price? We got good buy-in there.

There’s always a group that’s stuck in the circumstances around them. I ran into this a lot at JCPenney: I’d say, “I see that you’re priced below the market, and I don’t think the item is moving anymore because of your pricing. You should raise the price by $3 to get in line.” The feedback would be, “My inventory is up 14% from last year, so if I raise my price my boss is going to ask questions.” Sometimes the circumstances dictate how persuasive you can be. Getting folks smaller, less risky ways to give you an opportunity was usually the best approach.

Aaron: Of course. That makes sense. I saw that while you were at Kohl’s you received the 2017 Chairman’s Award for Innovation. What was that award for—was it a software implementation, or was it your use of data?

Lee: The company was very high-low, utilizing the ticket price, a sale price, and then a coupon event. They wanted to step away from some coupons because they felt customers didn’t always realize the deal they were getting, and that when you factor in what the customer pays out the door, it was well below the rest of the market—but customers didn’t perceive it that way. They said, “What if we created an event where we didn’t have a coupon at all?” They came to the pricing team and asked how we could help. Our team worked through ways to get the pricing right so you could convey value to the customer and still make the financials make sense. Back then they called the event “Epic Deals.” Our team spearheaded the rollout of two of those events, and pricing and marketing led it. That’s where we got the award.

Aaron: Was this an initiative that was then replicated within the organization?

Lee: Kohl’s was very calendar-led—this is when we run this event, this is when we run that one. The event became part of their standard promotional calendar. It was a steady, regular part of their cadence after that.

Aaron: I’m sure it feels good to see something you pushed for succeed and then be implemented across the organization with great impact.

Lee: It’s always nice to have something as a legacy, if you will.

Aaron: You stepped into the VP role when it was entirely new, but you’ve also stepped into other VP roles since Kohl’s—JCPenney and Fossil Group. When you enter a new role, whether it’s a new function entirely or an inherited team, how do you approach the first few months? What does your initial diagnostic look like?

Lee: One of the first things I do is take the pulse of the team. How is my team feeling? Pricing can be a difficult spot. When the company has a bad week, “pricing was wrong.” When the company has a good week, “merchants picked good assortments.” I gauge the byplay and interaction between my team and cross-functional teams and get a lay of the land.

Then I work short-term early on. Who seems to be an advocate? Who likes what our team is doing, and how can I get in there? As I build a long-term vision, I try to find little nuggets that prove it out before unveiling it. It’s tricky: you want to come in with credibility as someone who knows what they’re doing, but if you come in seeming like you know better than everyone else, you can set yourself up for failure. Creating partnerships is important early on.

Aaron: Do you have a specific example of a retailer or organization you joined where it was particularly challenging—or one where you thought, “Wow, this is phenomenal; it’s set up perfectly,” and why?

Lee: JCPenney was somewhere in between. The company had gone through layoffs, and the organization was much leaner. There wasn’t a good structure for planning pricing. The good news was the team knew it needed to be done; we just didn’t have the right structure or framework. We asked which merchant teams could partner with us, and then we built a framework: “This is men’s shorts. We’ll plan pricing. The shorts come in February. In the second week of March, we’ll hit this price point,” and so on. Using that, we created a template for the rest of the organization. While it was a difficult state when I got there, the team knew where they wanted to go. We found a team to partner with and avoided the finger-pointing of “good weeks are merchants, bad weeks are pricing.”

Aaron: One thing you’ve mentioned several times is that influence plays a primary function in pricing leadership. When a pricing team owns responsibility for margins, and success depends on alignment with buying, sales, finance, etc., what does influence look like when not everyone can get their way? If you believe you know what’s best, merchants believe they know what’s best, and finance says something else—how are you using influence?

Lee: I focus on a level of openness that says, “I think I’m right; I don’t know I’m right.” That openness says, “Let’s see if I’m right.” I’m 100% willing to say I might be wrong, but to do that, you have to give me an opportunity to try what I want to do. That’s the main thing in pricing: “Can I find a way to see if this drives the business?”

In retail, it’s easier because you can run a price for a week and learn quickly. If you’re in a business where you only get one shot—like printing a catalog price—you stake a claim and hope you’re right. In retail, pricing changes often, so you can test. Influence is about, “Neither of us knows for sure. Let’s determine which of us is more right.” That approach tends to work. Some folks are more hardheaded, so you have to find other ways in, but long-term results are rarely good when someone pounds the table and says, “This is the way.”

Aaron: Maybe you can provide an example of the most notable instance where you used persuasion rather than authority to achieve your aim.

Lee: When I first got to Kohl’s, there was a push in men’s suiting. It’s very inelastic. Folks come in for a graduation, a wedding, maybe a funeral. They need it today or tomorrow. The sale isn’t driving the business. The VP who owned the space felt strongly about his calendar. After a lot of “give us a try,” we got him to adjust one of his events—take it down. If the discount was typically 30%, we took it to 20%. We showed that units held where he would have expected. Now we had a convert and a story we could use across the organization. After that, he became one of our biggest advocates. Getting those instances can be challenging.

Aaron: It really comes down to getting that one win—finding the person most likely to be persuaded, working with them to demonstrate value. Once you have that internal advocate, you can scale the approach across the organization. To get that advocate, you focus on a small win. That’s a very good approach because sometimes when I enter an organization, I think, “I’m going to change it all,” and then you become disheartened if you’re not focusing on the first step, that first quick win.

Lee: So much of pricing is change management. There are consultants dedicated to change management for a reason—it’s not easy. Understanding how the business runs and how pricing decisions are made—often inherent and latent in parts of the organization—and thinking you’ll upend that in a short time can set you up for disappointment.

Aaron: That’s true across sectors. In tech we say “fail fast,” because the faster you fail, the faster you can improve. Iteration is part of the process. If you don’t have the courage to take big chances, you won’t get big wins.

Lee: I’ve had pricing decisions I was sure would work. Sometimes I’m right; sometimes I’m not, and that’s okay. You have to have courage; otherwise, you’ll sink back and won’t be the change agent you need to be.

Aaron: I want to pivot and talk about technology implementation. I saw on your LinkedIn profile that you’ve overseen software implementations. There’s a lot of buzz around new pricing technologies, especially AI. It’s easy for companies to feel like they need to buy the latest tech and implement it, then suddenly they streamline processes and see double-digit margin gains. But that’s not reality. It’s much more difficult. You’ve argued that tools only work when the right foundations are already in place. What are those foundational elements, and how should pricing leaders assess whether they’re truly ready for a tech-driven transformation?

Lee: One of the first ones is data. If your organization doesn’t have data structured in a way that helps you get to clear measurement—if it can’t be cut and adjusted to tell you, “Did we win or lose?”—implementing tools doesn’t change that.

Aaron: You mean they can’t just rely on competitor data?

Lee: No. Understanding where competitors are is good, but that doesn’t directly influence my P&L. Candidly, that was a struggle at JCPenney—our ability to get to clear measurement of whether something was a win or a loss. The folks at Kohl’s figured out a way through that. Another piece is that tools have to be guided by something. I’ve worked in a bunch of them, and most of the time you have to tell a tool whether to drive units, top-line sales, or margin dollars, typically with a governor on it: drive units but don’t go below X margin rate, or drive margin dollars but don’t let units drop below Y. If you, as a company, can’t answer that question, the tool doesn’t do anything for you. Sometimes bringing in a tool forces the conversation, but without it, the tool is rudderless.

You also need to understand your process flow: How frequently do we want to change price? How frequently can we change price? How does that work within a tool? Governance: who owns the price, and if a tool recommends a change, does someone need to approve it? Without those pieces, a tool might get you something, but you won’t maximize it.

Have a clear strategy and understanding of the value you provide. How does that dictate how you price relative to competition and to other items within your assortment? If you bring in a tool and tell it to use elasticity to maximize margin dollars, your assortment might look odd—you could end up with private brand items priced above national brands because of elasticity. Maybe that’s fine, but most places have a pricing architecture they want to keep. If you haven’t had those conversations and done that work, the tool won’t create the vision you expect.

Aaron: The tool is not going to fix bad pricing architecture.

Lee: Correct.

Aaron: You still need someone making those decisions.

Lee: Someone once told me, “If you don’t have a set strategy and you have bad prices, bring in a tool and you’ll have bad prices in the future—you’ll just have them faster.”

Aaron: Yeah, that’s good—and more expensive.

Lee: Yes, and time-consuming. The tools are great, but they require a lot of information. If you want automation that works within your stack and feeds pricing, there’s a decent amount of work that goes into that.

Aaron: It takes a toll on the team. They’re learning a new tool and a new workflow. If it doesn’t work out, you have a team that spent nine to twelve months trying to adopt a tool that didn’t work because you didn’t have quality data or the right pricing architecture. It makes sense to ensure you have those in place. What can pricing leaders do to quickly audit and determine readiness? They need quality data and to consider pricing architecture. Is there anything else before they look for a tool and where it fits?

Lee: Anchor on the problem you’re trying to solve. If you’ve set rules—can’t be more than X above competitor A, B, or C; can’t be below a margin rate—and you have a wide chasm between those numbers and don’t know which price to pick, and you’re slow at doing it or can’t measure when it happens, that’s a perfect instance for a tool. If the problem is understanding where your pricing should be relative to competitors or in general, you probably need to figure that out before bringing in a tool. If your problem is, “I can’t measure whether a price helped or hurt,” you need to get that in line first. A tool can help, but if you can’t do any of it yourself, you’ve got to line up some basics before you bring in greater capabilities.

Aaron: A Ferrari isn’t going to make you an F1 driver. You have to have the skills and the training. Buying a fancy tool isn’t going to improve the organization and your function.

Lee: I use the “Ferrari on a gravel road” analogy. If you don’t have those pieces in place, it doesn’t matter—you just spent a lot of money on something you can’t really use.

Aaron: We’ve talked about technology and your background. In your experience, what makes effective pricing functions and leadership? What skills and traits are absolutely needed—what sets apart the best from those just getting by?

Lee: A willingness to collaborate. Pricing is one element of the business. It’s influential and gets visibility, but it’s still one element. Work with other teams to determine, when you run into problems, what is and isn’t a pricing problem versus an inventory problem or something else. Transparency is important—lay out for folks the impact you see and how you calculated it to gain credibility. And courage—you have to make calls, and sometimes you’ll be wrong. That’s okay.

Aaron: Okay, I like to occasionally turn to what’s happening in the news, and it’s easy with pricing. We keep hearing about inflation. We hear about tariffs. People are accusing companies like Walmart, Wendy’s, and Kroger of price gouging. New York State recently implemented a law requiring disclosures when retailers use AI to set pricing. Pricing has become a flashpoint for public and political scrutiny. As someone who’s led pricing in high-pressure environments, how should pricing leaders operate in this climate? What internal structures, communication practices, or decision-making frameworks help organizations price responsibly without being reactive?

Lee: Anytime you make a pricing decision you intentionally try to hide, that should raise red flags. If customer A were to see the price customer B gets and be upset, that’s something to look into. There are industries where we allow for it—everyone understands that on an airplane, the person next to you probably paid a different price. But buying a T-shirt is different. If you’re running pricing you’re trying to keep hidden, think about that.

The great thing about pricing is that at the end of the day, the customer will tell us. We get clear signals when we’ve made missteps. Ensure you align pricing decisions with the overarching company vision—who you are and why you’re here. That tends to be your best piece to split ties and make decisions. There’s your North Star.

Aaron: So have a rationale tied to the brand, and practice transparency. Nothing shady. The example of people paying different prices always gets me. People are okay if another person gets a discount they don’t get for whatever reason. There are instances where someone might be upset paying more because of a price increase, but people don’t seem to care as much when the person next to them got a 20% discount for being a loyal customer.

Lee: There were debates at a lot of places I worked about pricing differently online versus in-store. As you’d guess, elasticity differs: a customer shopping in-store is likely willing to pay more than online because of the ease of finding alternatives online. Many companies said, “We can’t do that; that’s not fair.” But if you buy a Coke at a gas station versus from someone pushing a cart on a beach, people understand those will be different prices. It’s the same Coke. It’s a decision for the company: where do we want to stand and what limits do we want? If you sell a T-shirt in-store for $17 and online for $6, you set up an opportunity for upset customers. If the delta is $2, the difference matters less. It’s an interesting situation to handle.

Aaron: At the end of the day, it’s about the customer. I’ve read about businesses that use a tariff-pricing notification to indicate price increases due to tariffs. Some say customers appreciate the transparency—why prices are increasing and by how much. Others received backlash that it was too political or opportunistic. There isn’t one right approach. It depends on your customer base, the value you deliver, and your ability to communicate that. It’s holistic: keep that North Star, be transparent, and understand that the customer will let you know if they’re not okay with it.

I’ll be interested to see what happens with Delta Air Lines. They recently mentioned dynamic pricing per customer which, as you said, has been happening for a long time. Maybe their approach to individualized pricing will be different, but who knows? The airline industry isn’t necessarily one where there’s enough competition to impact margins.

Lee: The airline industry’s pricing has always had a veil of mystery. Nobody could clearly understand how much a flight would cost or why, and it’s been that way for so long that anyone they’re going to frustrate is probably already frustrated.

Aaron: Okay. Final question: what books, podcasts, or resources would you recommend to our Pricing Heroes community?

Lee: With the influx of SaaS pricing in our space—if you look on LinkedIn at pricing discussions and forums—it’s really SaaS-heavy right now. Being someone who has spent most of his time in retail, I’ve been interested in understanding that space. It’s not dramatically different, but there are aspects that are different. One book I recently read is The Pricing Roadmap by Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt. It was really good for seeing what’s the same and what’s different in a SaaS environment compared to retail.

You mentioned the ChiefPricingOfficer.com group and some of the stuff I’m doing with them—they’ve got good newsletters. I also spend time going back and forth with folks on LinkedIn. A lot of people put out good content that, if nothing else, makes for good debate. Anytime you’ve got a pricing situation—like the tariff surcharge piece you mentioned—there are many ways in. Hearing different people’s decisions and why is a good exercise. It’s almost like a case study you can do on your own. That’s where I’ve been looking lately.

Aaron: Yeah, that community on LinkedIn is a phenomenal resource. I enjoy browsing what people are posting. Especially with the tariff surcharge, I’m shocked at how many opinions there are. In a forum of 2,000 pricing experts, there are 2,001 opinions on how to address the tariff situation. I’ll link those resources in the show notes for this episode. Lee, thank you so much for being on the show and sharing your insights with us today

Lee: Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.

Aaron: I hope you enjoyed our conversation with Lee Mackedanz. Be sure to follow and connect with our guest on LinkedIn. For more information about AI pricing solutions, visit Competera.ai. Remember to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app to ensure you don’t miss future episodes. And please help us reach others in the pricing community by leaving a five-star review.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of Pricing Heroes. Take care. Until next time.