Tuesday, March 25, 2014

How to Price and Design Products for Profitability

ScottDavisEffective product design considers the trade-off between what a customer is willing to pay for various potential features and what it costs to provide them.  When designing a product line with a customer orientation a manager should contemplate which market segments will be the primary targets and what each segment will be willing to pay for each set of features.

How do you develop a product line that achieves the desired market penetration while minimizing unprofitable cannibalization?


To do so successfully, consider different approaches to pricing new products such as skimming and penetration pricing.  Improve product line and product mix profitability by using bundled pricing. In addition to cannibalization – consider competition and customer psychology in designing and pricing product lines.

During the Pricing and Designing Products and Product Lines for Optimal Results workshop at the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Conference in Chicago, Scott Davis will review the primary ways of estimating customers’ wiliness to pay for product features. Valuable for product and brand managers responsible for designing and pricing product offerings; this workshop includes interactive discussions and opportunities to analyze simplified case studies to understand how to apply the key concepts with the assistance of spreadsheet models.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Value Price Like a Pro

Value pricing, when done right, can provide higher profits, more competitive products, and customer-oriented marketing. To effectively execute value pricing, pricing professionals must be able to think like a CFO and communicate like a sales professional to determine the target customer’s true willingness to pay for a particular product. 

How do you effectively execute value pricing?

To do so successfully, you must understand the basic elements of financial statements and how your product and service benefits translate into quantifiable economic terms that make a difference to customers. 

Learn the basic rules on how much is a fair share of value an organization can keep and how much they must share with the customer.


During the Financial Management for Value Pricing workshop at the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Conference in Chicago, Adrienne Gordon will break value pricing down into simple, concrete steps. 

Attendees will learn a method to view customer income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements as a simple one page process flow map where each element has a purpose. Case studies of well communicated value statements will be reviewed along with examples of value creation and how it affects each financial element in the process.

Friday, March 14, 2014

Foolproof your Price Improvement Effort

 Pricing done right can have a huge impact on a company’s profitability. Reliable price intelligence can enable them to develop new pricing and promotional strategies in order to compete more effectively and maintain margins.  However, many pricing initiatives prove ineffective because of unanticipated factors that are counterproductive to obtaining results.

Is your company struggling in pricing between sales generation functions and sales disruption functions?


How can your company achieve a quick-win through intuitive analytics?

Because Asian companies are familiar with working in a traditional paradigm, the sales function has to lead revenues and take full responsibility of its results. In a matured pricing perspective, if your company is still looking at the shadows and not the reality of these functions, you have the chance to be a successful pricer and leader of change in your organisation and across industries.

Learn step-by-step approaches to earn the engagement of internal stakeholders around pricing.

 

During the PPS 2nd Annual Asia-Pacific Pricing Workshops and Conference in Singapore keynote session From Shadows to Reality: Facilitation with Numbers Across Sales, Finance and Marketing, YongHyun Kim, CPP will ensure attendees leave this session with tools and examples of success from simple and powerful analytics to reshaping commercial polices instinctively.  Pulling from his 13 years of strategic pricing management experience and capabilities, Mr. Kim will help attendees learn how to avoid functional silos to achieve pricing excellence.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Enhance Your Pricing with a Multi-Year Business Strategy

As customers demand more transparency around pricing, businesses incorporate a plethora of sales and marketing strategies to remain profitable. Creating strategies and marketing/sales actions that are understood at the highest level and executed throughout all levels of the company have potential to positively impact your company’s ability to increase prices in the short, mid and long-term.

Which business and marketing strategies optimize future pricing dynamics and performance?

What is the best approach to market and competitor analysis?

Outstanding price performance is the result of pricing organizations that raise the pricing competence of the marketing /sales organization, influence leadership behaviors to support pricing excellence, run pricing projects across diverse industries and implement pricing processes/systems.

Create the potential for improved market dynamics over a multi-year time frame by refining your business and marketing strategies.

Joanne Smith, former DuPont Corporate Head of Marketing, Pricing and Customer loyalty,  will discuss the importance of strategic pricing and behaviors for specialty and commodity businesses in her workshop Advanced Strategic Pricing: Setting a Multi-Year Business Strategy to Enhance Pricing

During the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Workshops and Conference in Chicago workshop participants will also review the behaviors and actions of marketing and sales, as it relates to price execution, that enhances your ability to positively impact pricing.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Pricing Professionals as Agents of Change

One of the most critical elements in an organization’s journey towards pricing excellence is its capacity to change.  Price setting and implementation has implications throughout an organization; requiring pricing professionals do more than analyze data – they must become agents of change.

What’s the most difficult part of a pricing professional’s job?


According to a recent poll conducted by Pricing Solutions in Asia, the answer is change management. In fact 94% of those polled put change management at the top of the list, which makes it one of the few issues that unifies pricing professionals across industries, geographies and levels of experience.

Learn how to recognise the common symptoms associated with inadequate change management.

During the PPS 2nd Annual Asia-Pacific Pricing Workshops and Conference in Singapore keynote session How Can One Beat the Odds and Lead Change in Pricing Organisations, Dominic James will explore the challenges surrounding both operational and strategic change for pricing today. 

Pulling from his 10 years of experience leading large-scale transformations for some of the biggest companies in the world Mr. James will help attendees learn how to take practical actions to gain organisational support.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Understand the Science behind Pricing Software

Today, a number of software solutions are available to aid in the process of pricing decisions. These “black box” solutions range from simple rules-based price planning offerings to highly sophisticated price optimization models.

What should you consider when selecting a price planning and price optimization solution?

How do you take the guesswork out of forecasting?

Can a solution truly be customized to your specific business needs?

Take a step behind the curtains of the pricing analytics software solutions and examine the fundamental modeling concepts that make them work.  Modeling results and insights help to forecast demand, develop pricing and promotion strategies, control inventory levels and improve customer satisfaction.

During the PPS 25th Annual Spring Pricing Workshops and Conference in Chicago, you can attend a full-day workshop entitled An Introduction to the Science of Forecasting with Price and Substitution Effects, Dr. Mark Ferguson will walk you through the basics of forecasting historical sales data and measuring price effects.
Workshop participants will have “hands-on” practice using some of most common forecasting and price-optimization models .

Monday, March 3, 2014

Unlock Profit Potential in South-East-Asia

Price pressure from competitors, rising raw material costs and inflation rates worry company managers, despite steady economic growth in South-East-Asia. Instead of focusing solely on cost cutting, companies have to look at professional price management in order to stop losing money.

What pricing challenges and opportunities exist in South-East-Asia?


How can you get out of the cost dilemma?

Understanding purchasing criteria and the factors that influence customers’ buying behaviours in these markets allows for a segment-specific offer structure, taking imbalances in purchasing power and the growing middle-income consumers into consideration.

Unlock your company’s profit potential in South-East-Asia through insights and best practices tailored to the region’s unique challenges and opportunities.


During the PPS 2nd Annual Asia-Pacific Pricing Workshops and Conference in Singapore keynote session Unlock Profit Potential in South-East-Asia, Jochen Krauss will discuss developing market entry and pricing strategies, optimising pricing processes and designing innovative price and product structures.

Jochen Krauss, Managing Partner - Singapore, Simon-Kucher & Partners