Guest Blog: Pricing Roundtables – The Clockwork of Cross-Functional Pricing Excellence

Guest Author: Lior Petek, CPP

As an interdisciplinary and young field, effective pricing requires cross-functional collaboration and company-wide enlightenment. Enter pricing roundtables. Hosting regular ones with key stakeholders provides a great platform from which to orchestrate pricing strategy and foster a culture of profit.

A successful pricing roundtable is characterized by four different features: motivation, alignment, proactivity, and contribution. This framework is inspired by the make-up of clockwork. For just like pricing, watchmaking is both art and science, it involves different trades, and the many components involved need to be assembled in an exact and cohesive manner to perform as an effective unit. Those four pricing-roundtable attributes build on one another and refer to the following:

• Motivation: Stakeholders from other functions must be continuously sold on the fact that pricing is a team sport that both requires their input and supports their function-specific objectives. If that collaborative energy is low, then everything that follows is going to be slow and cumbersome.

  
  

• Alignment: That cultivated excitement for pricing then ought to be directed into sound and strategic decision-making. One needs to establish a clear and shared conviction of how pricing excellence looks like, from the necessary tools to the conducive processes all the way to the desired results. Otherwise, every well-meant pricing action will be ineffective at best and detrimental at worst.

  
  

• Proactivity: To promote the agreed upon vision of pricing excellence, there needs to be a constant push in terms of pricing measures. If there is no conscious management of pricing actions, then pricing will be overrun by initiatives that gained traction elsewhere and that, therefore, tend not to conform to best practice – and the pricing function will be relegated to playing a firefighter role.

  
  

• Contribution: At the end, cross-functional pricing excellence can only be achieved if the different stakeholders are not just passive consumers and reactive executioners, respectively, but instead actively and willingly contribute to the success of pricing with their own distinct perspective and expertise. Should this not be the case, then the count and sophistication of the pricing initiatives will suffer.

If this entices you to find out more, I invite you to join me at the PPS “profitABLE with a Purpose” pricing conference in Barcelona on December 5. There, I will dive deeper into how to implement this framework with different tools, which will equip you with a template for hosting impactful pricing roundtables and thus for advancing cross-functional pricing excellence.