Are you familiar with the concept of a platonic ideal?
If it’s been a long time since your last philosophy class (or if you never took one), here’s a refresher. Plato said that the most perfect example of anything exists as an abstract idea. For instance, the perfect form of a chair exists as an abstract thought. All the physical chairs that exist in the world are our attempts to copy that perfect chair. In Plato’s philosophy, when we see an object and recognize it as a chair, it’s because the physical chair in some way resembles the abstract ideal that we have in our minds.
A lot of pricing practitioners are chasing the platonic ideal of the perfect price. They want to find exactly the highest price that each customer is willing to pay — the maximum price that would leave each buyer feeling like they got a good deal.
While perfect pricing is great in theory, like any platonic ideal, it’s almost impossible to achieve in real life. We’ve talked to many of the best B2B pricing teams around, and none of them have ever said that they achieved perfection.
In fact, for plenty of pricing groups, just following best practices seems unrealistic. Sure, they agree that most of the best practices they’ve read about are good ideas, but their organizations have so many hurdles in place that the pricing teams don’t see how they could ever put those ideas into practice.
Fortunately, you don’t need to achieve perfection or even follow all the best practices to have an impact on your company.
Rather than striving for “perfect,” we encourage you to simply do a little better. Perfection is intimidating, but “slightly better” — well, that’s something almost anyone can do.
And if you keep striving to do a little better all the time, you will slowly get closer to that platonic ideal.
The key is that you have to actually do something. Just hoping things get better isn’t going to do the trick.
If you’re not sure where to start, check out the webinar on ‘Better’ Practices for Pricing Improvement. Like everything we do here at PricingBrew, it’s focused on pragmatic, practical approaches to improving pricing. Rather than setting pie-in-the-sky goals, it draws on real-world research to reveals actionable steps you can take today to improve your prices.
You should also watch Pricing Process Improvement. It too contains realistic advice on improving your workflows with the ultimate goal of increasing margins.
Ideals are great — but don’t let them get in the way of real-world improvements.
"Better" Practices for Pricing Improvement
That lofty place of "best practice" can sometimes seem very far away. Fortunately, pricing has so much power that amazing results can be generated by just getting "better." In this webinar, learn how to adapt best practices in less than ideal situations.
Pricing Process Improvement
In this session, we discuss the critical differences between process types, how to use end-to-end process mapping for diagnostics and prioritization, pricing technology considerations, and common mistakes to avoid.
