This past week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Paul Hunt, the President of Pricing Solutions, for the PricingBrew Journal. In the time we had together, we covered a lot of ground—from diagnosing and addressing the real causes behind pricing problems in the field to getting executives to recognize the need for change.
Journal subscribers can hear the interview in its entirety, of course. But for our newsletter readers, I wanted to pass along something Paul said—it’s not only really catchy, I think it carries an important lesson for anyone involved in B2B pricing.
We were discussing how Pricing Solutions has helped various companies identify, create, and price offerings that align to the needs of specific customer segments in the marketplace. Of course, I had to know more—a pricing consultancy helping with offering development?
Paul then said this:
Pricing is the tail. It’s not the dog.
He went on to explain how you first need to craft offerings that align to the needs and value-drivers of specific segments of your market. Then, you price appropriately based on the value being delivered through those offerings.
The offerings are the dog—they deliver the value. The price-points are the tail—they merely enumerate the value being delivered by the offerings.
It seems so fundamental. But how many of us miss it? How many of us are so focused on the wagging of the tail that we forget that it’s the dog that matters most? That it’s the dog that controls the tail, and not the other way around? That it’s our offerings that determine the prices we can ultimately command in the marketplace?
