Imagine that you’re standing near an isolated coastline on a foggy night. A ship carrying vital supplies for your small community is due any minute. If it runs aground on the rocks that ring the harbor, the food and fuel it carries could be ruined. The lives of the sailors and the people who depend on that cargo are at risk.
The ship needs a light to show the way.
You turn on a small camping lantern. But the light it emits is diffuse and not very powerful. It scatters in every direction and is quickly swallowed by the swirling mist. It’s invisible to anyone standing more than 10 feet away.
However, you can use that lantern to light the path that leads you to the lighthouse at the end of the jetty. You climb the steps, prime the breaker, and turn on the powerful spotlight at the top of the structure. The mirrors and lenses focus the beam so it can be seen 5 miles out to sea, providing the illumination that the ship needs to make it safely to the dock.
Lantern pricing
When it comes to B2B pricing, some teams are, unfortunately, more like the lantern in this story than the lighthouse.
They send scattered, inconsistent signals. Ad-hoc discounts. Conflicting regional price strategies. Shifting value stories. From up close, these activities make it seem like there’s a lot going on, but they aren’t focused enough to pierce the fog of the market.
Here are some examples:
- Endless Promotions: A company runs a “limited-time” 20% off promotion every quarter. Customers quickly learn to wait out list prices, and sales teams hold deals until the next scheduled discount. The company thinks it’s creating urgency. In reality, it trains buyers to delay and de-values the product.
- One-Off Exceptions: Leadership approves a big discount for a strategic deal but never communicates the rationale. When the other reps hear about it, they take it as precedent and offer their customers the same discount. Soon, the exception becomes an unspoken standard.
- Shifting Value Stories: Marketing touts “premium engineering” in Q1, “fastest delivery” in Q2, and “AI-enabled analytics” in Q3. Each message sounds appealing, but together they confuse prospects. Sales reps struggle to articulate why the price is justified this quarter versus the last.
Each of these tactics, while well-intentioned, has the affect of undercutting your pricing.
Lighthouse pricing
Lighthouse pricing is just the opposite. It sends a clear, focused, unwavering signal to the market. It involves consistent value messaging and predictable guidance so that sales knows where to steer the deal. It cuts through the competitive noise and internal chaos. It’s calm, constant, and strong.
We have a host of different resources that can help you learn how to do lighthouse pricing. Here are a few:
- Getting Sales to Sell the Value explains how to articulate the company’s value proposition so clearly that sales reps can repeat it verbatim in every conversation.
- Driving Consistent Price Execution shows you how to set up predictable guardrails— discount thresholds, approval flows, and escalation paths that are known and trusted—so reps spend time selling instead of second-guessing.
- Earning Pricing a Seat at the Table demonstrates how to illuminate the path for leadership, providing coherent views of the market so decisions aren’t driven by rumor or gut feel.
- Making Pricing More Responsive offers a blueprint for reacting to shifting market conditions without allowing your beam to flicker. It describes how to adjust deliberately and communicate why, reinforcing confidence rather than feeding panic.
What about you? Are you maintaining your lamp or just feebly waving a lantern in the fog? Take some time to evaluate whether your signals are steady enough for sales and customers to navigate by.
Getting Sales To Sell the Value
Your offerings deliver greater value. But at the slightest pushback from a buyer, your salespeople give in and start discounting that value away. In this webinar, we explore how to change this dynamic for good.
Driving Consistent Price Execution
Every B2B pricing team wants to ensure that their sales team is consistently applying the appropriate pricing levels and policies. How do you make it happen? What do you need to know?
Earning Pricing a Seat At the Table
Pricing drives business outcomes — but rarely has a seat where those outcomes are decided. Move from executing handed-down plans to having a real hand in shaping them.
Making Pricing More Responsive
How do we design our pricing models, systems, and processes to maximize ongoing responsiveness, flexibility, and agility? And how do we do it without sacrificing pricing quality and accuracy?
