All the best planning and hard work that go into a major corporate pricing project or initiative can be wasted if you don’t manage the change process for your users—especially your sales force.  At PROS, we’ve talked to a number of frustrated companies that have been stymied in their pricing efforts because their sales force didn’t have the confidence in their numbers or their systems.

That’s why PROS sponsored a recent online Professional Pricing Society (PPS) webinar from one of the top pricing professionals in the country, Kristin Daniels, of Cardinal Health.  Kristin shares her experience and lessons learned for successful pricing project adoption in this presentation.   If you’re a PPS member you can check it out here.

Kristin and I have also coauthored a new white paper called, “Change Management in Pricing Projects” that gives you an overview of four key steps every pricing project needs to secure user adoption.  It’s designed to help you get your users to not only adopt but to embrace your pricing project goals and processes. 

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that different audiences in your company need to have pricing messages and examples tailored to issues or problems that are meaningful to them.  That includes your finance department as well as marketing types and sales people. 

Your sales people, in particular, want specific examples of how new pricing methods and technologies are going to make their life easier and more productive.  When introducing new pricing software, for example, Kristin has some great suggestions.

Go for a quick win with fast answers from using the pricing software and then have the ability to dig into more complex analysis.  Break up the sales team into small teams, ideally of 3-4 people.  Give each team a unique problem to solve in the software and 15 minutes to solve it.  Then have a representative from each team come to the front of the room and demonstrate in 5 minutes or less how they found their answer in the software.  Then repeat with at least one more 30 minute round.  This is particularly effective with sales representatives because it forces teamwork, drives competition, ensures participation, and enables three different problems to be shown to the entire group within each 30 minute round.

This paper is filled with these kinds of practical tips you can use in implementing your own pricing project.  I suggest you take a few minutes and download it free.

The concept of variant, or component, pricing is familiar to a lot of manufacturers these days, thanks to Dell.  That’s because Dell introduced the concept of variant pricing through its model for customizing the purchase of a personal computer — a big innovation at the time.  When ordering a PC from Dell, for example, the customer selects a base option and then chooses  variations on the base configuration by adding hardware and software components.  By setting a new standard for how consumers purchase a PC—using variant pricing for adding components — Dell rapidly became a market leader in its industry. 

Despite the success of variant pricing among manufacturers, distribution companies have rarely followed suit… and therefore have often missed opportunities to increase customer perceptions of value and capture added profits that variant pricing offers. 

Gaining the ability to set distributor prices by component and associated services, and breaking out different costs for internal reporting and customer communication, are essential to reaping the benefits of variant pricing.  Only when distributor pricing teams and sales forces have the right information at the right time will they be able to make informed decisions, communicate properly with customers, and maximize revenue and profitability. 

It’s not rocket science.  But it does involve scientific analytics and computer software technology to make it possible. You can download a free whitepaper that describes how variant pricing can be applied to the distributor business model.  Plus, it shows you how innovators in distribution are already using variant pricing to increase their competitive position and enhance their profitability.

If you aren’t using Variant Pricing right now, you’re probably leaving money on the table in every deal.

Download the white paper