As with just about any other career, it’s easy to find yourself laser-focused the pricing function—keep your head down and worry about your department before you worry about anyone else’s. But pricing is rather unique. More than most other professions, pricing requires careful coordination between many different business functions and disciplines.
Why? Because many of those other functions are making decisions every day that can greatly impact how successful your pricing function really is.
A well-executed pricing strategy can’t be done in a silo. It will always require well-orchestrated roles to be played by sales, marketing, finance–sometimes even accounting. Not only do they all need to be on-board with your pricing objectives and strategy, but you also have to align and influence the tactical decisions that these business functions make each day.
Because pricing is so inter-connected, pricing practitioners need to be good at getting out of the pricing “box” to be most effective. Take a look at these 3 key reasons and you’ll understand why getting your head out of pricing can make you so much more effective:
- You can keep others honest…and they can’t use your ignorance to dismiss you. For example, when you know about how sales or marketing should be functioning, people in those groups can’t get away with bluffing you and not holding up their end of things.
- You can work more effectively with those other groups and departments. The more you know about someone else’s job function, the greater the rapport you’re going to be able to build. And when you have a better working relationship with these other groups, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to achieve the outcomes and results you’re all looking for.
- You can help those functions improve in ways that result in better pricing outcomes. For example, you might recognize that the real discounting pressure has nothing to do with the price-points themselves and everything to do with how the value of your offerings is being conveyed by marketing materials and sales presentations.
So don’t get yourself thinking that staying in the pricing box is the safest approach. By having a greater understanding of all of the roles that come into play in pricing, your job can get much easier—and you might even be able to move your career forward more.
Get outside the box and give yourself the license to fix the real issues and get results.
