Pricing and Profitability Management: A Practical Guide for Business Leaders

Using the Best-Practice Pricing Process Framework

Effective pricing management is founded on clearly defined and documented processes. The simple act of documentation often reveals inefficiencies, poor handoffs (when the owner of one activity completes that activity and the owner of the next activity in the process flow starts his or her activity), lack of ownership, and other process problems. Careful process mapping can help:

• Improve standardization across locations
• Identify gaps between existing and best practice processes
• Better define roles and responsibilities
• Identify training needs
• Define performance metrics
• Pinpoint IT development needs
• Establish refined policies
• Identify necessary sales tools.

When designing new pricing processes, organizations must be prepared to do the following.

• Standardize, then deviate when necessary to strike the right balance between supporting the uniformity of processes an organization should strive for and meeting the unique needs of different business units and regions.
• Specify roles and responsibilities. Determining which personnel need to be assigned to what roles is a separate step, but should be driven by process documentation.
• Incorporate feedback mechanisms into the process design from the start.
• Conduct periodic reviews. to update processes to reflect changes in customer expectations, competitor behavior, and market conditions.
• Align different organizational calendars with internal processes so that pricing gives and receives the ...