What does it take to start your journey to Advanced Analytics? How can facts and numbers shape your pricing insights?

As many of our personal gurus have stated it the past, math will rock your world, and analytics is the new cool. So cool, actually, that the word is now being used and abused and many seem to lose track of what it actually really means. Our cozy pricing world is not immune to this trend, and we have enough material to spend days discussing about what it really means for us.

For example, did you ever stop to think for a minute that reporting hasn’t fundamentally changed since 1869? And there are no typos in this date; often we just keep applying the same old approach on a new medium, leaving untapped the incredible potential sleeping in our databases. Of course, “Advanced” analytics is something different, because it changes the game fundamentally. Or does it? And what type of skills does it require?

And when you start playing with the data you have available, what are the pitfalls to avoid? And with the plethora of data sources, software solutions, magical formulas and cutting edge processes, where should you begin your journey and what can you do with the data?

We started with a simple question: What information do we regularly use to make decisions, and how can we improve the insights by being a bit creative with analytics? The answer was as simple: we all have sales figures, an internet connection, and from time to time we get to do some market research. And with these three entry points, we want to show that it’s already possible to integrate pricing facts in your organization, and rationalize discussions and the decision making process.

After our extensive research and relentless passion for the subject, we came out with enough material to talk about this for a full-day. We selected real examples to illustrate our discussion; for example we will show you that the iphone did not, actually, make people smoke more. We will discuss why you should always build models, yet never trust them blindly, and realize why price elasticity is such a complicated thing to evaluate precisely. We will see how perceptions shape market reality and that failing to convert preferences to sales is NOT always a pricing issue, and why it’s a good idea to look for perception patterns before jumping to pricing actions. Finally, still with a real case to illustrate it, we will also see how you can run simulation and combine industry acumen with market data to set price strategies.

And we also found the best time and venue to share all of this with you! 

We called it  “Improve Your Pricing by Fact-Based Decision Making” and it will be a full-day live workshop on this subject conducted by Daniel Soto Zeevaert and Frank Korf from Deloitte; the workshop will be part of the PPS Annual European & Global Pricing Conference and Workshops to be held in in Amsterdam on 4-6 December 2012. For more information about this workshop and many other pricing training sessions please visit www.pricingsociety.com/amsterdam2012