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What’s Next for the Pricing Department?

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Burton for the PricingBrew Journal. Not that Mark needs much introduction, but he’s a co-founder of Holden Advisors and a co-author of the book, Pricing with Confidence: 10 Ways to Stop Leaving Money on the Table.

We had a long conversation about what Mark sees as the next evolution of the pricing department: The embedded pricing organization.

Now, if you’ve ever felt like you should have a bodyguard as a result of creating a dedicated pricing function, you should pay close attention to this approach. To my mind, this development delivers four huge benefits:

  1. It reduces the internal conflicts and power struggles that are so typical with traditional “command-and-control” pricing organization structures.
  2. It allows pricing professionals to get well-beyond transactional pricing and leverage a much broader range of pricing skills and knowledge.
  3. It’s better-aligned to the needs and objectives of the company, and where major pricing decisions are being made throughout the organization.
  4. It sets the stage for augmenting quantitative benefit measurements with qualitative measures that more accurately represent actual contribution.

I should also mention that Mark isn’t posing some “future-state” theory here. Leading pricing organizations are doing this right now, and it’s fast becoming best practice for how pricing functions operate.

I just wish I’d have heard about it ten years ago—then maybe security wouldn’t have had to walk me to my car.

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