When you’re learning to do something new, you aren’t going to get it perfect the first time.
Recently, there’s been a commercial on TV that expresses this sentiment. It’s full of cute pictures of kids learning to walk, swim, bike, drive, and use the bathroom. At first, none of them are very successful, but over time, they get better at whatever they are trying. In this case, the ad is about managing your credit, but it could just have easily have been about pricing.
The first time you implement a new pricing initiative, you’re not going to get it 100 percent right. For that matter, even if you’ve been in pricing for twenty years and this is the ten-thousandth time you’ve updated your pricing strategy, you’re not going to get it perfect.
Because market conditions are always changing, you’ll always have room for improvement. Over time, you’ll get better at spotting opportunities for pricing improvements, but you’ll never reach a point where you don’t have anything to learn. In fact, if you get to the place where you think your company’s pricing cannot be improved, it’s probably time for you to retire.
You see, in order to succeed in pricing, you really need to be an investigator. You have to look for what’s working and what’s not. You have to be willing to try some experiments and experience failures as well as success. You have to have a diagnostic mindset that is constantly looking for ways to do pricing better.
If you’d like to help your company improve its pricing and it’s bottom line, but you aren’t sure where to begin, we have some resources that can help:
- 21 Questions About Your Price Segmentation is a self-assessment that will help you gauge how well your current segmentation model is working and identify potential improvements.
- Finding Margin Leaks in Your Sales Processes explains how to diagnose sales problems that are eroding profits and how to solve those problems without descending into finger-pointing or starting a war with the sales team.
- Avoiding Three Costly Price Segmentation Mistakes can help you make sure you haven’t made one of the most common errors when establishing your segmentation model.
- Identifying Three Types of Customer Defection demonstrates how to identify and resolve issues with customer retention as early as possible.
While none of these resources include super-adorable video of children or pets, they do give you plenty of insight on how to get better at pricing. And that can set you on the course to continuous improvement that leads to ultimate success.
21 Questions About Your Price Segmentation
It can be difficult to know if your price segmentation model is as effective as it should be. This 21-point diagnostic assessment helps you measure how good your model really is and uncover potential areas of improvement.
Finding Margin Leaks in Your Sales Processes
Every sale is the result of a process. With any process, the quality of the final product is determined by the raw materials. This diagnostic helps improve pricing results by identifying root causes in your sales processes.
Avoiding 3 Costly Price Segmentation Mistakes
Price segmentation is the cornerstone of any successful pricing program but it's easy to make costly mistakes that can jeopardize your efforts. In this guide, learn how to sidestep three common mistakes.
Identifying Three Types of Customer Defection
This video guide shows how to identify the early signs of three costly types of customer defection and how to take action before it's too late to turn it around.
