What didn’t you get done today?
If you’re like most of us, you probably finish each day with a few items still left on your to-do list. You probably tell yourself that you’ll get around to those things tomorrow. But sometimes you have projects that just never make it to the top of the list. These back-burner items sometimes sit around for months—their presence on your list a constant, nagging reminder of all the things you need to do but haven’t done yet.
If you’re like most of us, you spend more than a little time worrying about these things you haven’t done. It adds to your stress load, leaving you feeling even more tired at the end of every day.
And if you’re like most of us, you don’t really know what to do about it, other than buckle down and work harder tomorrow.
As a pricing practitioner, you have a lot on your plate: compliance, price lists, bid turnarounds, reporting. You have more than enough tasks to fill eight hours (or more) of work every day—and more than enough to worry to fill eight hours (or less) of sleep each night.
But what if you could eliminate a lot of that worry by changing your mindset?
No, we’re not going to offer you platitudes about living one day at a time or working smarter, not harder. Instead, we’d like to suggest that you switch from a tactical perspective to a strategic perspective.
Tactics are the nuts and bolts of what you do each day. Putting together reports, updating the price list, approving bids—these are all tactical activities. These tactical items probably make up the bulk of the items on your to-do list. But while some of them are necessary, tactical activities don’t make a big difference in the company’s bottom line on their own.
Strategy is about the big picture. For pricing teams, strategy involves focusing on objectives and outcomes, not on the nitty gritty details of how things happen. We define strategic pricing as “proactively creating the conditions under which better and more-profitable pricing outcomes are the natural result.”
The Essence of Strategic Pricing
It's easy to fill your to-do list with all sorts of tactical pricing tasks. But if you're only focusing on those, it's hard to generate significant results. View this recorded training seminar and learn about tackling the most powerful and effective aspects of real strategic pricing.
If you switch from a tactical perspective to a strategic perspective, you’ll find yourself focusing on the things that are most important for your company. These big-picture, strategic efforts can have a huge impact on your company’s bottom line, so you should spend much of your time here.
Of course, you can’t forget about the tactical items entirely. You still have to run reports and update prices. But you may find that some of the to-do list items that were taking up a lot of your time really aren’t all that important from a strategic perspective.
You already intuitively knew that some of the things on your to-do list weren’t as important as others. After all, that’s why they were getting shoved to the back burner day after day.
Having a more strategic perspective gives you permission to let those things go. You can take them off your to-do list entirely because they really aren’t all that necessary. The strategic mindset gives you the freedom not to worry about the things that aren’t getting done because you know that the most important and most valuable things are getting done.
We cover this concept in far greater depth in the webinar The Essence of Strategic Pricing. It details the four areas of focus that should occupy the bulk of your time and energy, and it offers tips to help you develop the right perspective.
