Josh Gold

Director of Marketing, Head of Global Pricing Strategy, LinkedIn

About the talk: What does it take to stand up a pricing strategy team at one of the most innovative and fast paced companies in the world? Josh will talk about the lessons learned from the first year of the team’s journey, from its inception to establishing it as an integral part of LinkedIn’s go-to-market strategy with C-level engagement. He will also discuss the team’s multi-method approach to driving a comprehensive global pricing change.

About Josh:　Josh has over a decade of experience helping some of the most innovative and disruptive companies (e.g. LinkedIn, PayPal, Trulia, LegalZoom) accelerate profitable growth both as a trusted advisor and directly in industry.

Last June, he joined LinkedIn to lead a new Pricing Strategy team focused on driving growth, increasing value capture, and improving go-to-market strategy across all of LinkedIn’s businesses. Prior to LinkedIn, Josh led 33 projects for 25 leading technology companies as a Director at Simon-Kucher & Partners. His consulting engagements focused on monetization strategy, packaging & pricing design / optimization, disruptive business models, competitive positioning, new product launch strategy, customer segmentation, and value selling & negotiation training. Before Simon-Kucher, Josh led strategic sourcing and procurement process improvement initiatives for 3 private and 4 public sector clients as a consultant, generating millions in annual cost savings.

Josh holds a B.S., magna cum laude, from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A., with honors, from Johns Hopkins University.

Joel Birnbaum

Pricing Program Manager, Hewlett-Packard

About the talk: Learn how HP employed a combination of big-data analytics and PROS revenue management solutions to systematically identify margin opportunities and build the foundation for driving pricing transformation. Joel’s talk will cover the overall vision and pricing framework at HP, the tools and processes put in place to optimize prices and provide quotes for customers / partners, as well as the lessons learnt from their transformation journey.

About Joel:　Joel leads pricing programs in Sales Operations for Hewlett-Packard. He works closely with HP operations, HP IT, and third party teams to create pricing solutions for sales, bid desks, business units, finance, and marketing. He is passionate about turning early stage ideas into production reality.

Joel is currently the solution lead for HP’s Pricing Analytics program, which integrates ongoing analysis of HP’s vast orders and claims data with the pricing operations to drive faster and more profitable pricing. Previous roles included providing product managers the ability to create optimal product lineups and price offerings with more agility and collaboration, channel partner pricing, low touch pricing and special pricing programs, including worldwide deployments which are used today by thousands of HP and partner employees and support over $25 billion of annual deal revenue.

Joel joined Hewlett Packard in 1998 as a financial analyst for calculators and palmtops in the North America Distribution Organization. He has a B.A. in Economics from Cornell University, and an MBA from University of Texas. He enjoys basketball, golf, and windsurfing, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children.

Deepak Sharma

Senior Director, Simon-Kucher & Partners

About the talk: In the Subscription Economy, there has been a profound shift in the way consumers buy products and services. Your customers want pricing and packaging simplicity to make the buying process easy, but they also need more flexible models that fit their changing needs and deliver more value over time. When was the last time you changed your pricing and packaging approach to suit your customers? Is it flexible enough to keep up with the changing market demands?

Deepak will talk about how to design pricing and packaging to fit customer segments and needs, how to achieve balance between packaging simplicity and flexibility – all without compromising on price.

About Deepak:　Deepak Sharma is a Senior Director in the San Francisco office of Simon-Kucher & Partners. He has 15+ years of professional experience in Software and Internet verticals and has advised companies ranging from established global leaders to venture-funded startups on innovative pricing and subscription models.

Prior to joining Simon-Kucher, Deepak held roles in pricing, product strategy and professional services - most recently at Ariba, now an SAP company, and at i2 Technologies, now part of JDA. He holds an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley, a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from The Ohio State University and a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Adam Echter

Director, Simon-Kucher & Partners

About the talk: You’ve overhauled your product portfolio, optimized your prices and aligned them both to your customer segments. Fantastic! But what about your sales team? Have you established the required sales excellence practices that would enable them to execute flawlessly against your strategy?

In this talk, Adam will cover a comprehensive framework for optimizing sales activity, setting and managing against the right KPIs, installing a focused incentive structure, determining the appropriate sales mix and establishing a rigorous training program for your sales team.

About Adam:　Adam Echter is a Director at Simon-Kucher & Partners in San Francisco and specializes in pricing and marketing for B2B and industrial goods.

He has 10+ years of pricing experience including 5 years of sales engineering experience. Adam has designed, built and managed pricing departments for industrial businesses ranging from $250M to $1Bn+.

Adam has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Universiy at Buffalo, and an MBA from the University of Rochester.