Imagine how your professional life would change if you were a more confident writer. My hunch is that you would experience less anxiety before making presentations or hitting “send.” You would face less friction and confusion from your audience and see more acceptance and action. Building your confidence is the objective of my day-long writing workshop at the Professional Pricing Society’s spring conference on April 23rd in Chicago. Writing about pricing is difficult, because the best insights often lie trapped under layers of abstraction, theory, jargon, and advanced mathematics. Pe ..read more

Author: Chuck Davenport It is easy to see the importance of sustainability and to make commitments that align with ESG targets. Execution of intentions is much more difficult. Over 2/3 of Fortune 500 companies have made timeline-based commitments to various ESG goals. However, 40% of those are falling behind in their progress and several high-profile ones have abandoned some of their key objectives altogether, often because there is not a clear path to value for stakeholders.  Many early success stories are consumer-focused ESG offers. In a recent global study of over 23,000 consumers, r ..read more

Author: DeAnn Hammer We often find that we can be an anomaly in the pricing world when we begin to engage our stakeholders in the pricing topic of operational efficiencies and transactional customer ease.  It’s a topic that many in the pricing community may not focus on, however, it’s become the fabric of our being in trying to elevate our company into a world class pricing organization. Why the focus here?  It starts with a turbulent experience in moving to a new operating system and swimming through a riptide of data.  You begin to ask portfolio managers if they understood th ..read more

Author: Steve Peppler Rebates and incentives have evolved to improve sales and profitability, not to put a leaky bucket in the system or strain relationships. By embracing intelligent automated rebate management, businesses can unlock their true value. No discrepancies or disputes and no revenue leakage, as the author explains. Steve Peppler, a founder of Flintfox, has extensive pricing experience honed from senior finance and sales management roles at Kraft, Pepsi, Western Digital and Hewlett Packard. During his 20 years at Flintfox, Steve has worked closely with distributors from all sector ..read more

Author: Avy Punwasee In the ever-evolving world of business, staying competitive and maximizing profitability is a constant endeavor. Pricing, often considered the unsung hero of profit generation, has the potential to play a pivotal role in helping businesses outperform their competitors in 2024. To capitalize on pricing potential, every organization can master a few essentials of pricing: identifying and using the key pricing levers for 2024 and the best practices in budgeting for pricing. The Pricing Process: A Hallmark of High-Performing Companies First, a little motivation to include pri ..read more

Author: Danielle Ray A global strategic plan (GSP) is a document built from an organization's mission, vision, and objectives to achieve its long-term success. Beyond that, it is a powerful tool that will assist in aligning your pricing department with corporate strategy to improve communication and collaboration while gaining a competitive edge and increasing profitability. These are most often used in the context of international expansion or growth because it considers diversity in markets, cultures, competition, and legal or regulatory conditions. Even regional organizations can utilize a ..read more

"90% of the reason I’m successful in my job is because PPS conference experiences, the education, and this networking group. The rest is just executing." Nicole Sepulveda, CPP Pricing Manager at Rogers Corp Attending PPS conferences is not only a chance to leave the office for a few days, but also to gain new knowledge that can change your career perspective and grow your skills. The recent Fall Pricing Workshops and Conference focused on the latest trends, strategies, and best practices for pricing professionals in a variety of industries across the country. The conference provided many popul ..read more

Author: Debra Patek Pricing, at its core, is about capturing value. Through segmentation, we can capture even more value by leveraging differences in willingness to pay (WTP). The idea is simple: set lower prices for those less willing to pay, and higher prices for those who'll pay more. By doing so, we optimize revenue across diverse customer scenarios. Yet, segmentation extends beyond categorizing customers or adjusting prices—it’s about aligning with broader objectives while adapting to business and competitive constraints. The key lies in matching segmentation to these underlying realitie ..read more

A well-designed and properly implemented monetization strategy makes all the difference for companies seeking to accelerate profitable growth. Yet, unfortunately, some treat pricing more tactically, operationally or as an afterthought. If you are looking for a pragmatic approach to quickly and tangibly improve your business impact, then join me on October 13 at the PPS conference where I will be speaking on “Giving Pricing a Seat at the Table”. For over 20 years I’ve been pricing and packaging some of our world's most innovative technologies with the likes of Cisco, Workday, Hitachi, ServiceN ..read more

The best pricing strategy is useless without consistent price enforcement. Discount management is a massively underestimated lever for increasing profits. In fact, many companies do not necessarily have a price problem but a price enforcement problem on an individual level, which leads to a considerable discrepancy between list and transaction prices – or, if list prices do not exist, between customers’ actual price acceptance and the finally negotiated transaction price. This sustainably destroys margins companies need desperately. Strategy and enforcement are the two inseparable sides of pr ..read more