Pricing and Profitability Management: A Practical Guide for Business Leaders

Implementing Change Management and Adoption Processes

Many business leaders report that managing the change associated with improvement initiatives and technology implementations presents them with their biggest challenges. When the change relates to pricing, the obstacles can be even greater as the effort can be emotionally charged. Practices that are deeply rooted in a company's history may be challenged, and individual compensation may be affected. All of these factors can inspire organizational resistance. Some of the obstacles that must be overcome follow.

• Convincing stakeholders about the value of pricing and its validity as a discipline. As a relatively new corporate function, pricing's importance tends to be undervalued by established business disciplines such as finance, marketing, and research and development (R&D), which discourages cooperation at many levels.
• Implementing data-driven pricing techniques in the field. Calculating profitability and other metrics in real time often requires changes to unify technology, business processes, and culture. Yet sales professionals are notoriously reluctant to change how they are compensated, adopt new tools, and accept additional oversight and guidance.
• Fostering cross-functional collaboration. Pricing activities are typically scattered throughout an organization, and most businesses struggle to find a way to get loosely connected employees with pricing responsibilities to realize their shared mission and work together to realize ...