Tuesday, April 15, 2014

How Do You Grow Profits by Designing Offers for Target Markets?


Exceptional companies, in both revenues and profits, are not purely “customer-driven”. They instead target markets, and design offers for those markets, where they can leverage operational differences to compete from a position of strength.

How can companies stop losing money due to excessive price competition?

When many companies all pursue that same strategy simultaneously, most lose money due to excessive price competition. Convincing purchasing departments to help find win-win ways to serve customers more efficiently enables firms to grow more profitably.

Discover an alternative to the old “customer-driven” paradigm

During the Advantage-Based Marketing for Profitable Growth Keynote Presentation at the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Conference in Chicago, Lisa Thompson will teach attendees how to build price and discount structures that attract more profitable customers, and drive the high costs ones to competitors. Utilizing two decades of experience helping clients with their organic growth goals as well as increasing gross profits through better pricing, Lisa will discuss how to target the customers you can serve with competitive advantage.

How Do You Harness the Power of Social Technology to Create Better Pricing Strategies?

Social tools like Facebook and Twitter are changing how companies interact with their customers, and there are far-reaching impacts on pricing as Social Listening technologies bring new access to real-time information about customer attitudes, emotions, desires, and actions.

How can pricers leverage Social?

Companies are harnessing the power of Social technology to forge closer ties (and updated pricing strategies) with their customer bases.  Social provides an amazing opportunity for pricers to become even more instrumental to their organization’s customer relationships. It is a catalyst for building a bridge to marketing teams who need help pulling insights out of mountains of data. 

Learn how to harness the power of Social technology


During the Getting Social with Pricing Keynote Presentation at the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Conference in Chicago, Laura Preslan will help participants learn how to get the most out of Social. Utilizing her experience managing a global team of over 50 pricers who set all prices for Microsoft’s Online Advertising business, Laura will discuss what Social means for pricers in the B2B and B2C spaces while giving examples of how Social technology changes customer interactions. 

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

How Do You Develop a Pricing Strategy for Long-term Profitable Growth?

Every organization wants to achieve profitable growth over the long term and become sustainable. However the tendency is to focus on improving current operations and meet short-term expectations. The organization that does not allocate the resources required to build future-growth platforms is short-sited. Developing world class pricing strategies and capabilities better positions organizations for long-term profitable growth, but developing a pricing strategy is very difficult. 

How do you build an effective pricing strategy?

In order for a pricing strategy to be effective, an organization must build value-based pricing strategies, establish new product offer structures and pricing, and create win-win strategies to support major account negotiations. In addition, organizations must incorporate value into their product development processes and build value-based pricing and selling capabilities, tools and training.

Learn how to effectively institutionalize a pricing strategy process that is robust and enduring

During the Building an Effective Pricing Strategy workshop at the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Conference in Chicago, Kirk Jackish will help participants create more effective and enduring pricing strategies by focusing on experiential exercises that allow pricers to test world class tools and processes that generate high impact pricing strategies. Utilizing his 20 years of strategic pricing and consulting experience, Kirk will explore best in class tools, frameworks and processes for developing pricing strategy.  Workshop participants will have ample opportunity to ask questions and share experiences that will heighten the learning for the entire class.

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

What Are the Best Practices in Pricing Organization Design?

With more companies valuing pricing’s strategic importance, they increasingly look for insights on how to best organize their pricing function and resources. Pricing has been elevated from an informally managed, fragmented function to a rigorous business discipline with an acknowledged need for an organizational infrastructure to manage it.

How should your company’s pricing function be structured and organized?

The design of the pricing function has to be accomplished in light of the right decision authority, reporting relationships, centralization vs. decentralization, skill requirements, governance and key performance metrics. Understanding the role that culture plays in structuring a pricing function is vital, as is establishing the right types of roles and responsibilities.

Learn to identify the core competencies and skills required for a successful pricing organization

During the Beyond the Organization Chart: How to Structure and Organize Your Company’s Pricing Function workshop at the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Conference in Chicago, Larry Montan (pictured top left) and Maggie Laird (pictured bottom left) will explore how to diagnose common issues and barriers to pricing function performance. Workshop attendees will also learn how to manage pricing talent and future trends in pricing organization structure.