Out of the nearly two dozen subscriber-only webinars we’ve conducted over the last couple of years, Powerhouse Pricing Teams has been one of our most popular to-date. Clearly, a lot of people are interested in learning about the traits and behaviors that have helped leading B2B pricing teams achieve success and stay ahead of the curve.
One of the traits discussed in the webinar is somewhat counter-intuitive:
Powerhouse pricing teams tend to concern themselves with more than just pricing. They recognize that while pricing is one of the most powerful profit levers, it’s not the ONLY profit lever.
To many, this is counter-intuitive because excellence in anything generally requires extreme focus. So…one would naturally assume that these leading teams are focused exclusively on pricing, right?
Well…not exactly.
As we also discuss in the webinar, these leading pricing teams view themselves as business people first and pricing people second. And as such, they understand that “great pricing” isn’t really the goal. They understand that the real goal is profitable growth…and that pricing is just one of many powerful means toward that end.
Take something like “whitespace” sales opportunities, for example. These are the products or categories that your customers are buying from someone else, when they could be buying them from you. For many B2B companies, these types of sales opportunities are worth tens of millions in additional revenues and profits. Yet, these opportunities are so hard for individual salespeople to spot that they remain largely untapped.
And guess what? Accurately identifying these whitespace sales opportunities requires many of the same analytical skills and processes as accurately identifying pricing opportunities—data transformation, objective-based segmentation, comparative analysis, positive/negative outlier identification, etc.
These powerhouse teams recognize how the capabilities they’ve developed toward pricing improvement can also be used to address other profitable problems such as cross-selling, up-selling, customer defection detection, and so on. And because they think like business people first and foremost, they’re all about maximizing their leverage to add as much value as they can…however they can.
In hindsight, it might have been more accurate to refer to them as Powerhouse Profitability Teams 🙂
Powerhouse Pricing Teams
In B2B, dedicated pricing teams are still a relatively new development. And as such, there are no long-standing rules for how everything should work. In this on-demand webinar, explore the common traits, characteristics, and behaviors of successful pricing teams that have been around longer than most.
