Where Pricing Teams Are Focusing Next

At PricingBrew, we hear from a number of pricing practitioners who are wondering what other pricing teams are doing to drive profitable growth. Of course, we’re also in a unique position to be able to talk to many pricing teams and answer that question.

What we’ve found is that established pricing teams start asking themselves “What’s next?” once they’ve harvested much of the low hanging fruit. And as they move forward, they tend to take one of two paths:

Some pricing teams take their pricing expertise deeper into the company. They’ve been able to drive transactional pricing improvements and establish credibility–especially with sales and finance. But their next phase of improvement is about distributing their expertise to other parts of the company. These pricing teams will seek to foster deeper collaboration so that pricing can play a more end-to-end role throughout the company. This can give the pricing team a say in critical areas like new product development, go-to-market strategy, and large deal negotiations where they might otherwise be unable to contribute.  Here are a few resources around that discuss this approach:

• Embracing The Embedded Pricing Organization
• Building a Center of Excellence Around Pricing

The other path that established pricing teams tend to go down is about broadening their scope beyond pricing to uncover new opportunities for margin growth. They’re likely to have already done the hard work to pull together important product and customer data, and have well-developed analytical skill sets. In turn, they’re able to leverage what they’ve built to expand into other areas that are ignored, but very valuable to the bottom line. In similar fashion to how they improved pricing practices and results, they’ll use their skills to improve things like customer retention, cross-selling, up-selling, portfolio expansion, and customer mix. Here are some additional resources on this path:

• Getting Beyond Pricing to Make a Real Impact
• There’s More to Profit than Price

Regardless of the path that they take, there’s one common thread: These teams are focused on their company’s overall objectives and constantly looking for where they can make strategic contributions that deliver results.