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So what can you do to improve your pricing? Pricing part 11.  Tips if you are a CEO, Marketer, Salesperson, or CFO

What can a CEO do?

• You are the holder of common sense. Does the pricing policy ( you do have policy? ) make sense to the customers?
• Manage the change process expectations. Of course it will take time and hard work.
• Set up cross functional teams to set your pricing policy
• Keep your marketing dept focused on maintaining constant  deep market research
• Move to pricing excellence, not blaming sales and marketing.

What can the CFO do?

• Track the price waterfall for individual transactions, especially Outlaw customers
• Track contract compliance by customer
• Monitor discounts ( discount creep) including unplanned ones. *(eg extended credit, missed deadlines, rebates, one time promos, signing bonus, partial shipments and so on
• Have quarterly analysis on pricing initiatives given to sales/marketing to track real impact on net profits
• Keep long term look aheads on pricing trend and impacts

What can marketing do?

• Be on top of the value drivers (stories) for every stage of customer progress through engagement, buy and close.
• Manage communications to ensure price changes are open, transparent and believeable.
• Test before you deploy
• Create templates, policies, and documentation to support value selling by sales.

What can sales do?

• Actively create and train on tactics and tools to demonstrate and maintain value through the sales process.
• Collect supporting customer stories, competitive data, and validate buyer stories. get this back to marketing.
• calendar tender and contract expiry dates – Pre call proactively and early.

Resources.

• Strategy & Tactics of Pricing – 5^th ed. Thomas T. Nagle
• Practical Pricing. Michael Calogrides. 2010
• Sixteenventures.com
• McKinseyQuarterly.com
• http://marketreadiness.blogspot.com
• http://www.strategy-business.com/article/16333

Related articles

• Solicit Sales Feedback Marketers Can Use (customerthink.com)
• How to Manage a One-Person Sales Force (inc.com)
• When does the customer first ask about price? Pricing part 2. (regnordman.com)
• Hiring Your First Salesperson: How to Pass the Torch (entrepreneur.com)
• The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. A guide to growing more profitably. Thomas T. Nagle, John E. Hogan, Joseph Zale. (regnordman.com)
• Customer history, is it helpful in raising prices? Pricing part 5. (regnordman.com)
• Your Company culture often works to resist raising prices. Pricing part 4 (regnordman.com)
• Are you still using Groupthink to set prices? Pricing panel 8 (regnordman.com)
• Pricing survey indicates you are dropping prices, but for the right reasons? Part 1. (regnordman.com)