Toptal is a marketplace for top pricing consultants, experts, and specialists. Top companies and startups hire pricing analysis freelancers from Toptal for their mission critical projects.
Eric is a financial services professional with 15+ years of experience as a sell-side, buy-side, and startup professional, advising on debt and equity deals from $10 million to over $1 billion. He has deployed more than $2 billion into funds at Apollo across various structures and sectors. During his experience at boutique firms and on his own, he has worked with both large and early-stage companies. Eric wants to work on challenging projects alongside his other small business owner endeavors.
Will is an executive consultant with a wealth of experience supporting startups and mid-sized business growth. He has successfully led M&A transactions for $350 million, developed pricing and GTM strategies for emerging-technology startups, and supported clients through VC pitches. Will has a genuine passion for helping businesses navigate volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) to fundraise, refine their strategy, and ultimately accelerate growth.
Ed is an experienced entrepreneur, growth-company CFO, and investment banker with a background in many industries, including technology, media, finance, and business services. He has launched several companies, raised over $70 million in growth capital, and helped a company expand internationally and scale 5x in three years. Ed enjoys helping fix businesses and operating and financial challenges that prevent clients from reaching their potential.
Ben is a thoughtful and creative investor with a background in public equity, distressed credit, and PE. He has applied his experience to large ($15B) public and mid-market companies in dozens of industries, including aerospace, wireless networking, SaaS, and retail. Ben is currently building a private credit investment vehicle and is available for short-term projects to help clients improve business strategy, evaluate and execute financing/fundraising, and develop financial forecasts/models.
Laura is a business consultant with over 20 years of experience in strategy, business expansion, competitive analysis, consumer insights, data analysis, and research. She has consulted with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and pre-revenue start-ups and has an established track record of improving revenue, margins, and scale. Laura started her career at Morgan Stanley New York, where she researched, conceptualized, and executed financing deals for almost one billion dollars.
Sean has driven $3 billion+ in new revenue by helping B2B technology leaders grow their businesses. He blends 20 years of experience as a PwC consultant, an operating executive (president) for Cognizant, and the chief revenue officer at Toptal to create and execute market-winning strategies. Working with startups and Fortune 500 companies, Sean has deep expertise in sales, operations, finance, M&A, and the PE/VC ecosystem. He has an MBA from Wharton and a BS in computer science from Cornell.
With 10+ years of finance experience, Pradeep excels in evaluating and investing in global private businesses. As a former chief executive and senior investment director, he is actively involved in deal analysis, execution, capital raising, investor relations, corporate finance, M&A, and FP&A. His strengths are due diligence, financial modeling, and fostering strong connections in global capital markets. Pradeep holds a master's in finance from London Business School and is a CFA charterholder.
A business expert with an engineering background, Özgür is highly experienced in business planning, reporting, and finance. Throughout his 7-year career, he worked for high-growth startups and scaleups and co-founded an up-and-coming startup. He acted as an in-house consultant, built departments, partook in strategic decisions, and participated in funding rounds and an exit through a merger. Özgür is willing to work on new projects leveraging his experience to help clients scale their business.
Emilio has 25 years of CFO experience in Europe and Latin America. An expert in cross-border M&A, he has executed two $300+ million acquisitions and one $400+ million disposal. Emilio has worked on strategic reorganization projects and started subsidiaries in the oil and gas, automotive and industrial sectors. He enjoys freelancing to use his experience and international exposure to maximize value for his clients.
Muqeet is a seasoned finance professional with 13 years of experience. He worked for Deloitte and gained experience in consultancy, advisory and assurance. At Coca-Cola, he developed expertise in FP&A and commercial finance, reporting to top executives. He has secured an investment of $10 million for a startup and has expertise in M&As and feasibilities. As a freelancer, Muqeet enjoys working on different projects by leveraging his skills to provide value and growth to clients.
An MIT MBA graduate, Michael served large corporations at Bain and helped build new businesses at firms backed by top-tier VCs (Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Softbank). He's led pricing work at a Silicon Valley firm acquired for $185 million and joined Toptal to work on challenging business problems. His work has led to the discovery of multimillion-dollar business optimization opportunities and contributed to a client’s multi-fold revenue increase.
Pricing consultants can help companies find the right pricing strategy for their products and services to maximize profitability and share price. This guide to hiring a pricing consultant outlines the attributes of an ideal candidate and the questions to ask in the interview process.
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How to Hire Pricing Consultants Through Toptal
1
Talk to One of Our Client Advisors
A Toptal client advisor will work with you to understand your goals, technical needs, and team dynamics.
2
Work With Hand-selected Talent
Within days, we'll introduce you to the right pricing consultant for your project. Average time to match is under 24 hours.
3
The Right Fit, Guaranteed
Work with your new pricing consultant for a trial period (pay only if satisfied), ensuring they're the right fit before starting the engagement.
Find Experts With Related Skills
Access a vast pool of skilled finance experts in our talent network and hire the top 3% within just 48 hours.
How much does it cost to hire a pricing consultant?
The cost associated with hiring a pricing consultant depends on various factors, including preferred talent location, complexity and size of the project you’re hiring for, seniority, engagement commitment (hourly, part-time, or full-time), and more. In the US, for example, Glassdoor’s reported average total annual pay for pricing consultants is $165,000 as of October 2024. With Toptal, you can speak with an expert talent matcher who will help you understand the cost of talent with the right skills and seniority level for your needs. To get started, schedule a call with us — it’s free, and there’s no obligation to hire with Toptal.
How quickly can you hire with Toptal?
Typically, you can hire a pricing consultant with Toptal in about 48 hours. For larger teams of talent or Managed Delivery, timelines may vary. Our talent matchers are highly skilled in the same fields they’re matching in—they’re not recruiters or HR reps. They’ll work with you to understand your goals, technical needs, and team dynamics, and match you with ideal candidates from our vetted global talent network.
Once you select your pricing consultant, you’ll have a no-risk trial period to ensure they’re the perfect fit. Our matching process has a 98% trial-to-hire rate, so you can rest assured that you’re getting the best fit every time.
How do I hire a pricing consultant?
To hire the right pricing consultant, it’s important to evaluate a candidate’s experience, technical skills, and communication skills. You’ll also want to consider the fit with your particular industry, company, and project. Toptal’s rigorous screening process ensures that every member of our network has excellent experience and skills, and our team will match you with the perfect pricing consultants for your project.
How are Toptal pricing consultants different?
At Toptal, we thoroughly screen our pricing consultants to ensure we only match you with the highest caliber of talent. Of the more than 200,000 people who apply to join the Toptal network each year, fewer than 3% make the cut.
In addition to screening for industry-leading expertise, we also assess candidates’ language and interpersonal skills to ensure that you have a smooth working relationship.
When you hire with Toptal, you’ll always work with world-class, custom-matched pricing consultants ready to help you achieve your goals.
Can you hire pricing consultants on an hourly basis or for project-based tasks?
You can hire pricing consultants on an hourly, part-time, or full-time basis. Toptal can also manage the entire project from end-to-end with our Managed Delivery offering. Whether you hire an expert for a full- or part-time position, you’ll have the control and flexibility to scale your team up or down as your needs evolve. Our pricing consultants can fully integrate into your existing team for a seamless working experience.
What is the no-risk trial period for Toptal pricing consultants?
We make sure that each engagement between you and your pricing consultant begins with a trial period of up to two weeks. This means that you have time to confirm the engagement will be successful. If you’re completely satisfied with the results, we’ll bill you for the time and continue the engagement for as long as you’d like. If you’re not completely satisfied, you won’t be billed. From there, we can either part ways, or we can provide you with another expert who may be a better fit and with whom we will begin a second, no-risk trial.
Pradeep is a finance expert specializing in pricing consulting, corporate finance, and financial forecasting. He has held leadership roles at finance, investment, and tech companies.
A Great Pricing Consultant Is Critical for Business Success
Setting the right price for a new product or service has become increasingly challenging. Customers have ever more resources at their disposal to compare prices online, such as search tools, price comparison sites, specialized apps, and social networks. But even businesses that have carefully weighed each variable and set a seemingly fair price are at risk. Being second-guessed by customers, whether justified or not, can be absolutely devastating for the success of a business.
Getting pricing right is one of the trickiest decisions a company can make; done right, it can have an immediate positive impact on the bottom line and share performance. This makes finding the right pricing expert all the more crucial.
This guide will help you sort out the qualified candidates from the others by providing scenarios to help test candidates’ strategic thinking, depth of expertise, and pricing innovation ability.
What Does a Pricing Consultant Do?
Pricing touches every department in a company—finance, marketing, product, sales, and even customer support. The right hire understands that, but also grasps that pricing decisions impact customers and the competition.
To get to the optimal pricing for a company’s product, a good pricing analyst must take into consideration its effects on the company’s financials, strategy, customers, partners, investors, and competition. They must also consider how these various elements affect pricing. Once they figure it all out, they must have the ability to explain their decisions’ consequences to all stakeholders, both internal and external.
To show that they understand these diverse perspectives, candidates should be able to address queries on their pricing choices from across the company. They should be prepared to respond to questions like these from corporate leaders and stakeholders:
CFO: How will a new pricing structure impact the company’s revenue growth, margins, and key financial ratios?
CMO: How does the pricing shift impact messaging to different customer segments?
Director of Business Development: How will the new pricing structure affect revenues of competitors and what pricing programs are they likely to respond with?
Director of Sales: What will be the impact on sale totals, sales channels, and commissions for sales teams?
Investors: How will a pricing change affect share prices?
Clients: How is the price shift justified and what benefits do we get?
What Attributes Distinguish a Great Pricing Expert?
Here are four key qualities shared by top pricing experts.
1. No Fear of Complexity
To understand the perspective and concern of each stakeholder, a candidate must perceive each complexity within a company in order to assign a number to the totality of its product or service offering. The right candidate must assess how this number will impact revenue, cash flow, profit margins, return on invested capital (ROIC), units sold, and ultimately market share. We’re not saying they need to complete a Sudoku puzzle in under 30 seconds, but demonstrating that puzzle-solving ability is crucial.
A good pricing expert will be able to develop a demand model that measures the change in demand in response to variations in price and other factors (e.g., time of year). A proficiency in statistical tools, such as SAS or IBM SPSS, is useful as these can be employed to build multivariable regression models to measure the effect of price on demand.
However, the data needed for a pricing model or analysis may not be readily available. A talented pricing expert cannot be content with the numbers provided; they must also be relentless in hunting down the data needed to feed their pricing model.
The following question can be used to gauge a candidate’s approach to finding the data necessary for a thorough analysis.
Q: Company A has invested $5M in the last two years to develop a new product to be launched in six months. The market is dominated by incumbents whose products have been in the market for five years. This company’s product possesses a more effective approach to solving the customer’s problem and a superior user interface. However, management’s goal is not market share maximization but to maximize the value of this new business. How would you go about setting go-to-market pricing for this new product?
The right candidate could be expected to ask as many of the following questions as needed to gain enough information:
What pricing approach is most suited for this pricing given product offering, market dynamics, and management’s goals? Cost-based, competitor-based, value-based, or a mix?
What are the product’s ongoing engineering, infrastructure, and support costs?
What are the anticipated customer acquisition costs? What is the anticipated customer churn?
What are the company’s targets on ROI, breakeven period, and margins?
What are the competitors’ product offering and pricing? Does the competition possess any cost advantage or disadvantage?
What is the business case for customers? What do they value in the product? How have they responded to past pricing changes from the competition?
How much product differentiation does the company have versus the competition?
How much premium can the company charge for unique feature X?
How much brand power does the firm or the competition have?
What is the switching cost incurred by a customer moving away from a competitor product?
How much is the market growing? What revenue can be won without impacting competitor revenues?
Based on the initial answers to these questions, an experienced pricing candidate should be able to develop a course of action to set prices.
2. Strategic Thinking
Pricing is an important lever to maximize revenue for the company and is well understood as one of the 4Ps of marketing. However, a pricing expert views it as far more than a simple numerical value placed on a product. Used strategically, pricing can be an effective way to achieve a company’s strategic goals from market share dominance to building customer loyalty. Penetration pricing can be used to aggressively gain market share where network effects exist. Product bundle pricing can be used to boost sales.
The candidate must also demonstrate the effects of pricing elasticity for each case. When price is set too high or too low, revenue is left on the table. If demand for a company’s product is elastic, increasing its price will reduce demand disproportionately, causing revenues to fall despite the price increase. If demand for its product is inelastic, decreasing its price will not raise demand significantly, causing revenues to drop due to the price decrease. Understanding whether a product should be inelastic (necessities) or elastic (luxuries) and accurately gauging how consumers will respond to specific changes is the hallmark of a qualified pricing analyst.
The following question can shed light on a candidate’s ability to strategically use pricing to achieve business goals.
Q: A company operates a marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of sneakers, which are growing in demand. There is no clear market leader and several key players are vying for dominant market share. Sellers are charged a monthly fee plus commission for sales while buyers do not pay to use the marketplace. Strong network effects are clearly in place. How would developing the right pricing structure help the company become the dominant market player within the next two years?
With such a clear mission outlined, the right candidate will seek to analyze the company’s past strategies to gain market share, how customers have responded to its offering, and how pricing changes can help make that goal a reality. To undertake this analysis, the candidate may ask these questions:
What market share must the company claim in order to achieve an effective critical mass of buyers and sellers?
Does the company have the necessary balance sheet and cash flows to get to its market share goals?
What pricing levels or incentives are necessary to achieve market share goals?
How would this change affect the customer’s business case, in both the short and long term? What impact will this have on the company’s cash flow?
What is the price elasticity of demand? How will demand change with a 1% decrease in pricing?
What other non-price factors affect demand?
What is the company’s unit variable cost?
How will this pricing change affect the company’s balance sheet, revenue, and cash flows, short and long term? What will be the impact on margins and key financial ratios?
What are the competitors’ balance sheet position and cash flows?
Internally, how will this price change affect the sales process and sales compensation?
How is this pricing structure change a win for each of the various stakeholders?
By addressing these questions, an accomplished pricing expert will be able to quantify the price elasticity of demand and determine the pricing needed to achieve the company’s market share goals. They will also be able to understand what the company’s concerns are and what a “win” looks like for each of the different stakeholders.
3. Innovation in Design and Pricing
Pricing is more than the price tag on a product. An innovative pricing expert helps a company to not only innovate in product pricing, but also in product marketing. With some creativity, pricing can be used to achieve marketing goals such as building customer loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value. Creative product bundling can help increase sales, like selling a product bundle at a price lower than the sum of the individual product prices (e.g., Microsoft Office bundle). Pricing can also become the center of a company’s market positioning and messaging (e.g., Dollar Shave Club and its focus on affordable grooming).
The following question can be used or adapted as a baseline to test a pricing candidate’s ability to innovate.
Q: Company B’s products face many competitors. Customer churn has been increasing, resulting in a less-than-desired customer lifetime value and ballooning acquisition costs. To maintain market share, annual expenses to replace lost customers are high and eating up profits. The company needs to find ways to build customer loyalty. You must develop a pricing program to reward and build customer loyalty, including some quick hits to stem the churn and a long-term program to achieve customer retention goals.
A top candidate would ask a variation of the following questions:
What are the customer churn rate and the average customer lifetime period?
What is the customer lifetime value? What is the customer acquisition cost?
What is the target ratio of customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost?
What is the gain in value of extending customer lifetime period by X months?
How much should the company be willing to pay to extend customer lifetime period by X months?
What are some effective ways to structure discounts and rewards aimed at customer retention?
How to ensure these discounts and rewards are earned and not freely given away?
What “soft” rewards (e.g., VIP recognition) should be added with monetary rewards to further enhance loyalty?
Who are the high-value customers? What do they value? Exclusive discounts and rewards? Expedited product delivery?
Who are the high-churn customers? What do they value? Free items? Option to exchange reward points for cash?
Unlike certain other financial tasks, pricing analysis cannot be done without a thorough understanding of how customers react and what they seek. This information can be very diverse and difficult to boil down into a pricing model, but an innovative expert will be able to provide a pricing structure that hits just the right notes with a customer base.
Innovation is also key because behavioral economics can undo even the most carefully planned model. A growing body of research shows how customers do not always respond to pricing in an economically “rational” way, meaning “pricing strategies should not only react to a predefined and quantified willingness to pay but should focus on actively enlarging price acceptance.” Having a candidate well-versed in the impact of behavioral economics on pricing is also a major asset to allow models to account for this.
4. Approaching Pricing as a Journey, Not a Destination
No qualified candidate will present their pricing structure as a final resolution. No matter how forward-thinking a model is, pricing is a continuous process of optimization based on existing costs, competitive behavior, and customer needs. The publication of a price sheet actually marks the beginning, not the end, of that process. To see if it is having the desired impact, customer surveys, blog and social media reviews, and comparison sites will all have to be monitored closely—in addition to tracking the financial impact. The right candidate understands that pricing assumptions need to be tested frequently and adjusted, as needed, in the face of changing market conditions.
While the Internet poses specific challenges for pricing, it also creates unique opportunities given the availability of massive amounts of data for granular optimization. Armed with such data, e-commerce companies are now able to adjust pricing quickly in response to competitive price changes and customer responses.
Examples include companies such as Clear Demand and Revionics, which offer technological solutions to help retailers with pricing optimization from promotions to markdowns. Further down the pricing technology spectrum, companies such as Uber and Grab track supply and demand in real time, adjusting prices dynamically to remove supply-demand gaps. When demand outstrips supply, prices are raised dynamically so as to increase supply to meet demand spikes, resulting in revenue gains.
While this is more critical in certain industries than others, a pricing expert must be able to continuously track relevant demand and supply data, and ensure ongoing or dynamic pricing alterations, while deploying the right technological solutions to do so. Experience in implementing or using dynamic pricing technology is a particular plus at this stage.
The following question should be expected by candidates, if the company interviewing them calls for this dynamism.
Q: A company offers a perishable product in a highly competitive space. Lately, it has been facing a high volume of unsold inventories as a result of aggressive competitive pricing. This competition has caused revenues and margins to fall. How do you build a pricing system that delivers maximum revenue, given the perishable nature of the product and a highly competitive marketplace?
The candidate’s response should seek to understand how well the company balances supply-demand gaps, what data points are gathered and at what intervals, and how much this has already influenced the company’s pricing strategies. A solid candidate may cover these questions:
What is the price elasticity of demand for the product?
What is the competition’s pricing strategy?
How best to track sales volume changes against pricing changes by competitors?
How best to track unsold inventory and time to perish?
How best to pull together different data over time?
What should an actionable dashboard look like?
What pricing optimization software is the company using/considering using? How much does it cost? What are its data input requirements? How configurable is it?
Should the company consider developing the pricing optimization application in-house or turning to a third party? What are build and maintenance costs?
How much of a real competitive advantage would be provided by such technology?
A seasoned pricing consultant will be able to address these questions and guide the company toward the best course of action in building a pricing infrastructure that is dynamic and optimizes pricing over time.
The Importance of Hiring the Right Pricing Consultant
Truly useful pricing insights are hard to come by, as they are intimately tied to a company’s current reality, customer expectations, and conclusions from past trial and error.
The right pricing analyst eliminates much of this uncertainty, allowing a board of directors or executive management team to be confident about the positive impact of a new pricing strategy. This guide should help you get well on your way to finding the best candidate for your business needs.
