We started hosting guests on If Prices Could Talk at the beginning of this year. It’s been a great journey, with lots of learnings for me through in-depth conversations with our clients, partners, and network. We’ve talked with executives and industry veterans across the Fortune 500, private equity, and pricing software companies.
Mostly, we discussed ways they are improving their differentiation and go-to-market execution. That includes trials and tribulations in value based pricing and ensuring sales teams aren’t getting steamrolled in tough negotiations with behemoth enterprises. Even though strategies and nuance for each industry vary drastically, I still wanted to see if there were standout themes across the episodes.
Since this data is already public, I dropped the transcripts into GPT to help me with an analysis. I asked for themes from the conversations around the challenges, goals, and lessons learned.
Here are my main takeaways:
- Focus on value-based pricing where possible. Prioritizing tangible value can help challenge companies to be more effective and impactful. This also can increase revenue by capturing a fair share of the value created for customers and reinforces customer satisfaction and loyalty. Think about how your products and services provide distinct value to increase revenue, decrease costs, or mitigate some kind of risk for the customers you serve.
- Align pricing and sales to drive pricing power. Pricing and sales alignment is an extreme sport – and both functions are feeling the heat. Price point is heavy in the spotlight across most industries, and it’s no longer acceptable to execute blanket price increases and blame costs for the change. To genuinely build pricing power, companies need to consistently grow their differential value over time and align prices to that value. Executives are working hard to elevate their commercial functions to divorce from old discounting habits and short-term thinking to improve value creation for their customers.
- Learn when to call the bluff. Most sellers are up against uneven power dynamics with highly-trained procurement teams of huge companies. However, there are tell-tale signs when you’re being played to get a discount, and ways to shift dynamics back in your favor to avoid unnecessary price concessions. In the long term, commercial teams can learn to have value-based conversations throughout the customer lifecycle to help alleviate pressure in high-stakes negotiations and shift the focus from price to value.
- Understand your changing value drivers. Customers, competitors, and markets are always evolving – but it’s not easy to stay on top of what that means for your differentiation and your pricing. Many B2B teams are still in the Wild Wild West of AI trial and error, but we’re making progress towards personalization. Companies are in the pursuit of structures and systems to react to industry and competitor changes in more dynamic ways. These systems can help improve pricing precision, efficiency, and speed up deal cycles.
- Pull inspo from B2C innovation. Subscription-based models, personalized pricing, and seamless digital experiences have become the norm in consumer markets. For B2B companies, these trends can help rethink traditional approaches to pricing and value in ways that resonate with increasingly sophisticated buyers. The question is: are you serving the right product/service, in the right way, at the right time? If a company the size of Emerson can transition to subscription pricing, anything is possible here.
Thank you to all who joined for these discussions and pushed our thinking on tough scenarios and important topics. Looking forward to moving the conversation forward in 2025!
If Prices Could Talk episodes are all live on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
