For leaders to foster alignment with sales and pricing people to win profitable business, building salespeople to be price champions can be quite transformational. Sales must team with marketing and pricing to execute pricing and “value” initiatives to yield promised results of increased revenue and profit.

For companies with significant investments in plant and equipment, managing the balance between driving margin vs. securing the volumes needed to maintain favorable operating economics can feel like walking on a knife edge. Too much emphasis on margin over volume can lead to poor plant utilization. This forces tough decisions such as whether to shutter capacity. Too much emphasis on… Read More

Working with a team of top surgeons, you’ve developed an industry-leading medical device. But sales have stalled. Surgeons love the product but can’t get it through their value analysis committees. Economic buyers, who have increasing control over the approval process, say they already have a similar product, and unless you are willing to drop your price significantly, they aren’t interested…. Read More

The process of selling has changed dramatically since the Great Recession. Customers can evaluate amongst several “good enough” solutions these days. So how does a sales person help a customer really weigh the difference in their solution versus a competitor? By understanding the value of that solution and sharing the financial results other clients have received by using the solution…. Read More

The Case ROITM is a proven method for quantifying the financial value a customer gains by using a company’s products and services versus the competition.  This method yields numerous benefits for both buyer and seller: Sales personnel can use the findings of the Case ROI to formulate compelling value propositions and most importantly, to showcase the return on investment (over time)… Read More

Commoditization is accelerating at an alarming rate and increasingly with differentiated high-value products and services.  Commoditization means that while these offerings may be more valuable than competitive offerings, there is a strong tendency for suppliers to compete on price.  Recent work in medical devices, insurance, financial services, IT services, and professional services has shown that most suppliers in these industries… Read More

Price discounting has become the crack cocaine of business. A brief high is followed by devastating effects on both revenue and profits. The addiction starts when managers decide to use price discounts to hit revenue targets. They assume it is only temporary, that price discounting is a quick fix to a small problem. Soon that quick fix becomes a major… Read More

Holden Advisors “Pricing Innovations” article is published in the AMA’s October Marketing Management.Companies can fuel success with a rigorous pricing approach – one that measures customer value, the innovations nature, and the product category life cycle stage.

The market for outsourced services – everything from short-term staffing to complete IT outsourcing programs – is in a state of upheaval. With strong, low-cost competitors and increasingly sophisticated customers who play off one vendor against another, there is enormous pressure on service providers to rethink every element of their cost positions and bid response processes. Knowing how best to… Read More

In the eyes of many business clients, all service firms look alike. These services are viewed by increasingly sophisticated buyers as a series of well-defined commodities that are available from a plethora of companies. Because many service vendors have not updated their offering to meet the evolving needs of their business customers or communicated their unique value to each client,… Read More