What if you could play Dr. Frankenstein and assemble the ideal B2B pricing analyst from scratch? What attitudes and mindsets would they have? Which skill and abilities would they possess? What capabilities and competencies would be crucial for their success in a business-to-business setting?
Well, we recently asked our Network of Experts for their input on the subject and compiled the results in a PricingBrew Journal guide entitled, The Anatomy of a Successful B2B Pricing Analyst.
Organized like an expanded job description, the guide is a great tool for subscribers looking to hire new pricing analysts that can hit the ground running, or existing pricing teams looking to develop and expand their current capabilities.
But I have to admit that I assumed our super analyst would be comprised of mostly technical skills and competencies—mathematics, statistical modeling, etc. After all, that’s what pricing analysts do, right? Wrong.
Among those who’ve been doing this quite a while, there is clear recognition that technical pricing analysis is just one part of the equation. And some were so bold as to suggest that it isn’t even the most important part of the equation:
An analyst with pretty good technical skills, who can get their ideas across and get others to change their behaviors, will almost always outperform a technical wizard that no one pays any attention to.
While the pricing analysis itself is indeed a technical endeavor, the ability to actually generate results from pricing analysis in a B2B environment requires abilities well-beyond the technical.
In fact, of the 21 major categories of attributes, skills, and competencies detailed in the guide, only 8 of them are actually technical in nature.
So here again, Frankenstein’s creation is sorely misunderstood. While it’s easy to assume that he or she is just a data-whipping machine, they’re really much more than that—because it takes more than technical skill to produce results in B2B.
