PricingBrew

Insights & Tips

Already a subscriber? Login

Become a subscriber and unlock an information arsenal focused on making your pricing efforts more effective.

Three Terrible Excuses for Pricing Teams

As publishers of the PricingBrew Journal, we clearly have a vested interest in trying to understand why many pricing teams are eager to learn and grow, while some others seem to be content with the status quo. After all, our entire business is about enabling the former—so it behooves us to better understand the latter.

Of course, every laggard pricing group has their reasons for “sticking to their knitting”, “keeping their heads down”, “staying focused on the task at-hand” or whatever other cliché comes to mind. And to them, these reasons are perfectly rational and pragmatic.

But knowing what I know about the pricing teams that are already headed down the improvement path, these reasons seem to me to be little more than excuses. And not just harmless excuses, either. In fact, some of the most common excuses I’ve heard can be career limiting:

“Nobody’s asking us to do anything different, so we must be OK.”

Who exactly is going to ask you to develop a more accurate price segmentation model? Who exactly is going to tell you to measure elasticities in order to provide better deal-level pricing guidance to the sales team? Who are these pricing experts you’re waiting on to tell you what improvements need to be made? And if they do happen to exist in your company, why haven’t they taken over your group? And how long will it be before they start asking the very same question?

The point is that upper management rarely knows what pricing deficiencies may exist or how to shore them up. They’re waiting for you to tell them, not the other way around. And if you can’t do it, they’ll eventually find someone who can.

“Our plates are full and we don’t need any more to think about.”

Maybe your plates are so full precisely because you’re not thinking about the right things. Maybe your plates are full of tactical tasks that could be eliminated with a little more strategic thought. Maybe your plates are overloaded because you haven’t yet learned what some other pricing teams figured out years ago.

There’s always a task or ten that can be scrapped in the interest of focusing on something more important. But you can’t really know what’s more important unless you make time to learn and expose yourself to new and different ideas.

“We’re just not ready to think seriously about improvement.”

This one is a bit difficult to understand. The thinking here seems to be that once all the fires are put out and all the tactical tasks on the to-do list have been checked off, then you’ll finally have enough time, energy, and resources to focus on doing all that stuff more efficiently, or doing more effective stuff altogether.

To my mind, this is a little like saying, “I just need to finish painting this house before I can focus on painting it properly or figuring out if it’s the even right house to paint.” Improvement is a process, not an event. And there is no “getting ready” to improve—you just have to make the decision and get started.

Standing still is easy. I get that. And standing still seems safe. I get that, too. But the marketplace never stands still. It’s always moving—like an avalanche of progress. And using excuses like these to rationalize standing still in front of that oncoming avalanche? That may be easy, but it’s definitely not safe.

Get Immediate Access To Everything In The PricingBrew Journal

Related Resources

  • Getting Them to Pay More

    How you get your customers to pay more without having to handhold every single transaction? In this session, learn how to influence willingness-to-pay consistently, systematically, and at-scale.

    View This Webinar
  • Fighting Over-Discounting in the Field

    Over-discounting in the field is a frustrating reality for most B2B pricing teams. So, how do you prevent it from happening? In this Expert Interview, Chaz Napoli shares the strategies and tactics he's found to be effective through hundreds of customer engagements.

    View This Interview
  • Survival Strategies for Raising Prices

    In this on-demand training seminar, learn why some B2B companies struggle with price increases while others are able to do it with far less pain and angst. What are leading companies doing differently to execute price increases with far less risk, conflict, and uncertainty?

    View This Webinar
  • Identifying the Right Unit of Value for Pricing

    Simple pricing structures can hurt revenues and profits when they fail to align customer value and costs. This case study demonstrates how to identify the right "unit of value" for both pricing and costing purposes.

    View This Case Study