Bringing a New Product to the Marketplace

At Treacy & Company, we work with companies across a variety of industries to help them grow faster, more profitably, and more steadily than before. One of the best parts of our jobs is working alongside the movers and shakers, revolutionizing everyday products. Gordon Robertson, Chief Executive Officer at Verdant Technologies (Verdant), is one of them. Verdant’s technology helps deliver products to consumers as intended, staying fresh and protected throughout the supply chain. Their solutions create new opportunities and expand markets while using fewer natural resources and lessening negative environmental impacts.

Gordon was kind enough to reflect on his experience working with T&Co on our recent engagement to help them determine a go-to-market pricing strategy to launch their innovative solution.

Here’s what Gordon had to say about his experience working with T&Co.

Question: What was the background on how you came about working with T&Co and what that was like?

Gordon: I knew about Treacy & Company through mutual connections at Deloitte and Verdant. I met Francesco Fazio (Partner and head of innovation at T&Co) through common business partners who had worked with Francesco when he worked for a subsidiary of Deloitte, so I was aware of their reputation and working relationships, so it was natural to begin our work with them. We started with initial conference calls, followed by interviews with Francesco and members of the T&Co team and got into the business to figure out what we wanted to do. This was then followed by questions like, how do we bring this idea to market? What are some key needs we see in the business?

Our initial insights were that there were roadblocks regarding our pricing strategy, specifically the execution of the strategy with our customers in the marketplace. Additionally, we needed to emphasize sustainability as it is vital to our customer audience. This set the ground for discussion and framework moving forward. We continued our dialogue and made a trip out to Chicago to meet with the T&Co team. That was several months ago—we’ve spent the last quarter digging deeply into an entire pricing strategy and execution of that strategy. We are now in the process of rolling it out to the Verdant sales team, our organization, and our customers. It’s been a significant body of work, but with a team that is creative in thinking. Sometimes, with consultants, you get what you ask for, but T&Co digs deeper and works alongside you to get something truly valuable out of the relationship.

Question: Why did you choose T&Co over the competition?

Gordon: We’ve worked with other consultants and had similar work done for us in the past and we’ve also done some ourselves. The results have been good, but not great. Our business has evolved from being a technology-based company born around scientists. Now more than ever, we must think creatively and go to the marketplace with our ideas in an incredibly strategic manner. We called upon T&Co to challenge our assumptions and firm up our ideas to instill more confidence in a sales organization that frankly didn’t even exist seven or eight months ago. The business is in a transition from a technology-based organization with big ideas to commercializing business and making an impact with our thoughts. T&Co has brought very sound, deep thinking to that process.

We’re building a global platform of thinking—the last thing we want to be is commoditized. So, we have to think through everything very thoroughly. How do we price? How do we differentiate? What do we think about the pricing model in particular? These are precisely the types of questions that T&Co excels at solving through creative thinking.

Question: How has the experience working with the T&Co team been so far?

Gordon: The experience has been very good. We’ve had high engagement from the top of the house to the analyst population. The work that Francesco, Vess Pentcheva and Gary Gebenlian have brought to the table has been impressive. The beauty is we’ve had their level of engagement throughout the process.

Vess is the primary statistician in getting the data and building the incredible analytics behind it. Francesco is the artist and draws the vision, but then you have to translate the drawing into a story. A lot of good dialogue and thinking has come out of our meetings.

Question: What’s been the feedback from your company?

Gordon: After I started the relationship between Verdant and T&Co, my Chief Revenue Officer was the primary person engaged with T&Co and our Director of Product was heavily involved. Several team members have been a part of the process, on the pricing side in particular, and the feedback has all been very positive. T&Co is very detail oriented, has deep analytics capabilities, and has a genuine desire to precisely understand what we’re doing, how we do it, and where we do it. We even took the T&Co team to packing house to show how products move through our system. Understanding this is imperative in creating a viable solution or strategy for what we’re looking to bring to the marketplace.

The other thing about T&Co is that they were very open to bringing in outside resources and employees that we wanted to be involved in the project. Their openness to engage with our team and anyone we brought on to the project and the depth of the analytics made this process very valuable to us.

Question: What have been the results so far?

Gordon: You must understand where we’re at as a company—we’re just introducing our products into the marketplace. We can’t say one size fits all, we have to understand and learn more. Now, the rubber begins to hit the road. It’s about making sure we have a deep understanding of the databases at the proper levels of the organization and turning those numbers and insights into digestible information and tools for sales. At the end of the day, we’re here to inspire confidence. We can say what we think a price is, but when you bring forth the analytics to back your decision up as we’ve done, you’re going to find yourself in a much better position.

As we near the end of our engagement, this is not the end of our relationship with T&Co—we will look for a new way for our relationship to evolve. We have plenty of work ahead of us; we just have to figure out where T&Co fits into that so we can work together again in the future.