At its core, achieving pricing excellence centers around the concept of value. PROS recently interviewed three pricing and sales experts to get their insights into three top value-driven pricing topics: value selling, value creation, and value capture.
Value Selling
In the first Q&A, Partners in Execellence CEO Dave Brock shares his insights on selling value and the changing dynamics between pricing and sales teams in an increasingly margin focused sales environment.
According to Brock, “Even with the largest and ‘perceived’ highest performing sales teams, too often sales does it to themselves on pricing/discounting, by making price the issue before the customer has a price concern.”
Value Creation
In the second Q&A, Pragmatic Marketing’s Mark Stiving, Ph.D. (former pricing director at Maxim and National Semiconductor), offers his insights on the importance of price strategy and segmentation in creating value.
Stiving states: “…the hardest thing [about deploying willingness-to-pay tactics in pricing strategy] is sticking to your guns and being willing to lose a few deals. However, if you never lose, your price is too low.” Value Capture
In the final Q&A installment, Beanstalk Revenue Management founder and former 3M Chief Pricing Officer Diana Zuzek explores the critical but sometimes misunderstood topic of value capture, using Netflix and Amazon to illustrate some value capture successes and pitfalls.
According to Zuzek: “Value capture is about discipline, execution, and follow-through. Not just on price, but on all elements of the waterfall, from list price all the way to pocket price. There’s a lot more to value capture than first impressions might suggest, and it’s not only about leakage management.”
To learn more about value selling, creation, and capture, download the entire PROS Pricing Insights Q&A series.
