BusinessSolution: 4 “Dirty Secrets” Hiding In Your Pricing Strategy (And How to Avoid Them)

By Patrick Schneidau | Business Solution

Your pricing strategy plays a critical role in supporting your relationships with your customers. To ensure you’re maximizing every sales opportunity, here are four “dirty secrets” you should be aware of that could potentially be undermining your efforts:

1. Being Clueless: Without a good way to capture and analyze sales data, resellers have neither the visibility to understand the pricing variations for a given product, nor much control over discounting. You should have a system in place to capture and analyze sales data that will give visibility into understanding the pricing variations for a given product or suite.
2. Saying Anything: It may seem like a homerun when you are able to close a deal by offering a bulk order to a customer at a discounted rate. Unfortunately, some customers will say anything just to get a discount. Make sure you have the necessary processes and tools in place to ensure customers buy as much as they said they were going to. To justify giving a volume or bundle discount, you also need visibility into whether customers are meeting their volume commitments.
3. Similar Customer, Same Discount: In some situations, sales reps will extend similar discounts to customers because they perceive the customers as being similar. What works for one should work for the other, right? Not so much. While they may appear to be similar on a surface level, a deeper look into customer analytics might reveal that they are actually in different areas of your customer segmentation, and thus should be treated differently.
4. Slow Lead Turnaround: Slow responses to questions are an easy way a sales rep can lose a promising lead. If the prospect has to wait 10 days to get a response from you on a bid, it’s only natural for the person to expect slow service after the deal. Streamlining your pricing optimization software and processes can eliminate the unkempt sales documents and slow response times that are affecting your sales cycle.

Your pricing strategy can have a major impact on your customer relationships. If these dirty secrets seem familiar to you, see this as your call to action.