Regret is a part of life—even for the most successful among us.
For example, baseball legend Ty Cobb once said, “I regret to this day that I never went to college. I feel I should have been a doctor.” Filmmaker Woody Allen half-joked, “My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.” And celebrated novelist Zoar Neale Huston lamented, “I regret all of my books.”
In our conversations with pricing practitioners, we hear them share a lot of regrets too.
- “If only we had thought about that when we initially priced the product.”
- “If only we had anticipated how the sales team was incentivized.”
- “If only we thought about how the channel would deal with this”
- “If only we had timed this price change better.”
- “If only we responded to our competitors more strategically.”
- “If only we had known how our customers would respond.”
After hearing all these regrets, we’ve noticed something: you tend to regret decisions that were made with the short term in mind.
We understand how it happens. Sometimes you are pressed for time and opt for the “good enough” decision rather than making the best long-term choice. Sometimes its easier to sell a decision with good short-term benefits internally. Sometimes it’s just way easier to kick the can down the road than to deal with it now.
We get it.
But we also know that if you allow yourself to get mired in short-sighted thinking, you’re going to regret it. We don’t want that for you. That’s why we’ve put together resources that show you how to deal with long-term issues. Some of our favorites that address the “if onlys” above include the following:
- How to Price New Products
- Revamping Sales Comp to Improve Pricing
- Managing Multichannel Pricing
- Timing Your Pricing Actions for Success
- How to Fight a Price War
- Business-to-Business Price Elasticity
The PricingBrew library has plenty of other resources covering best practices as well.
The goal with all these webinars and guides is to help you avoid pricing regrets by planning for the future. They’re a great first step in preparing for long-term pricing success.
In conclusion, we’ll leave you with one more quote about regret, this time from Olympic athlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee: “It is better to look ahead and prepare than to look back and regret.”
