In 1859, an explorer and naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace was traveling through the islands of Indonesia when he made a curious observation. The animals on one side of the archipelago were very different than the animals on the other side. In fact, the difference was so distinct that Wallace was able to draw a line through the islands marking a point the various species did not cross.
To the west of the Wallace Line (as it is known today), the animals are similar those found in southeast Asia—think tigers, elephants, and primates. To the east, the animals are more like those found in Australia—think kangaroos, wallabies, and monitor lizards. And even though islands on opposite sides of the line are as close as 22 miles apart, the species haven’t intermingled. The deep water in the channels found at the boundary between tectonic plates kept the animals from crossing the invisible line. As a result, they evolved independently on each side of the line.
If you look around, you can see some similar invisible lines in the world of B2B pricing.
Companies like to keep their pricing strategies secret—understandably so. After all, they don’t want to give up a competitive edge.
But when you add that secrecy to the fact that pricing people tend to stay within a single industry for their entire careers, it results in a decided lack of knowledge sharing.
In most professions, the best practices are widely known. Accountants, product managers, marketers, finance experts—they all do basically the same things no matter what industry they are in. The fundamental principles are generally agreed upon. You can even learn about them in college courses.
But it isn’t the same in pricing.
It’s almost like pricing professionals in individual industries, or in some cases, in individual companies, are on their own islands. They are evolving in isolation without any cross-pollination from the outside world.
This can have dramatic consequences for pricing teams. In many cases, they miss out on the latest innovations. They rely on outdated methods that reduce margins and cause them to lose business.
Those of us here at PricingBrew are constantly surprised by this phenomenon—even though we see it regularly. Some industries have come up with highly effective approaches to organizational structure, pricing guidance, and processes. And ither industries could make use of these advances—if they knew about them.
One of our primary goals at PricingBrew is to eliminate these invisible lines. We want to help people like you hear about innovative ideas that would otherwise remain a secret. If you’re new here, you can find some of our favorites in the following resources:
- Profitable Pricing Enablement
- The Top “Lessons Learned” by Pricing Leaders
- The Fundamentals of Price Structure
And you can find even more ideas worth sharing in the PricingBrew Catalog.
In closing, it’s worth noting that Wallace’s ideas didn’t get sidelined the way so many pricing innovations do. Other scientists spread them widely and noted how similar they were to some of the early writings of Charles Darwin. And Darwin himself read Wallace’s work and used it to write a pretty influential book of his own: On the Origin of Species, which you may know as foundation for the modern understanding of biological evolution.
Profitable Pricing Enablement
In this on-demand webinar, you'll learn about the new "best practice" of leveraging data and technology to distribute pricing authority and control, without sacrificing improved pricing performance.
The Top "Lessons Learned" by Pricing Leaders
How have pricing leaders become leaders? What can their 20/20 hindsight teach us to streamline our own path? In this on-demand webinar, learn the top lessons gleaned through our research.
The Fundamentals of Price Structure
In this on-demand webinar, we explore ten different approaches for structuring your prices to align to customer needs and priorities---from bundling, add-ons and multi-part prices to volume schedules, surcharges, and more.
