Archives posted in: Pricing

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Five Pricing Best Practices for Organizations

By Kyle T. Westra December 10, 2016

Dedication to understanding its customers makes a company more knowledgeable about the competitive landscape and better equipped to anticipate changing conditions. The entire company feels less insular and more connected to its existential purpose: serving customer needs profitably.

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Price Transparency VS Pricing Transparency

By Kyle T. Westra October 5, 2016

For Amazon Web Services (AWS), on the other hand, while your final price depends on your usage, the pricing is transparent down to the hour. While you may not know the amount due ahead of time, you know exactly how they will arrive at that number.

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What Exactly Is Target Transaction Pricing?

By Tim J. Smith, PhD September 1, 2016

Notice the deal specificity. Target prices are deal dependent. That means it can vary between customers and between selling opportunities with the same customer. Target prices may be customer dependent, product mix dependent, quantity dependent, promotional timing dependent, competitive situation dependent, or even cost dependent.

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Pricing Done Right

By Tim J. Smith, PhD August 3, 2016

Pricing Done Right provides a roadmap for improving pricing practices within any market-oriented firm. It provides a framework for managing pricing decisions in any organization. It clarifies the best practices for defining the organizational culture, architectural hierarchy, and routines for getting pricing done right.

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Will Culling Low Margin Items Actually Destroy Profits? An Exploration into Economies of Scope

By Tim J. Smith, PhD July 3, 2016

Firms often sell low margin items because customers seek the low margin items and, when buying, buy higher margin items as well. These low margin items can make sense through their enablement of the firm to profit from economies of scope. Killing low margin items can make sense in some cases, but other cases doing so will kill the firm.

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Hearsay When Proof is Illegal: A Legal and Ethical Pricing Challenge in Business Markets

By Tim J. Smith, PhD April 4, 2016

Agreed, the signal may not be exact when using publically available information to benchmark competitive prices. It may not be exactly precise even when found from market research. But it will generally suffice for most pricing questions. In many cases, it must suffice.

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Why is Gas Priced by Fractions of a Cent?

By Kyle T. Westra April 4, 2016

The fact that consumers buy gas on a continuum rather than in discrete gallons (unless you’re a wizard with the gas nozzle handle) likely makes it easier for both sides to live with the current arrangement. The pump price and volume numbers go along until the tank is full or you release the handle, and there perhaps isn’t much analytical thought put into the final ratio that appears.

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Are Drug Companies Ripping Us Off?

By Tim J. Smith, PhD March 4, 2016

Pharmaceutical formularies, like other medical solutions, are best priced according to the value they deliver relative to the alternative treatment for the target disease. If the new solution provides more value, it should have a proportionately higher price. If it provides less value, it should have a proportionately lower price. This is the concept behind value-based price: price to reflect the prices of alternatives adjusted for their differential value for the target customer.

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Maintaining Pricing Excellence During Currency Depreciation

By Kyle T. Westra March 4, 2016

It is preferable to maintain or carefully increase prices in a clear, methodical way, only decreasing cost slowly and with much consideration. Careful analysis is required to take into account different SKUs, product lines, geographies, and customer segments, adjusting prices in the way that fits best each unique category.

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Professional Service Pricing: Beyond the Hourly Rate and into the Deliverable

By Tim J. Smith, PhD February 4, 2016

In deliverable based pricing, prices are tied to deliverables, not effort. In order for that to work in favor of the service provider, that provider has to know, plan, and execute what it takes to achieve the defined deliverable with the client. (Laggard service providers may be afraid of deliverable based pricing precisely because of their project management skill-set deficit – but it is something they can learn.)

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