[DemandGen Report] Pricing Has Evolved. So Must Your Sales Team.
By Greg Peters
Jul 21, 2021
Read the full article on DemandGen Report.
It’s often assumed that CEOs and CFOs are the head of enterprise finance, but truthfully, financial decisions are made at all levels of a company, whether it’s for better or for worse.
Salespeople, operating on little more than intuition, will sometimes quote prices that benefit their client relationships more than the company’s finances. No amount of thoroughly analyzed pricing reports, massive spreadsheets, business intelligence tools or strategic financial goals can override gut-feel pricing.
This isn’t due to some intrinsic flaw in our sales teams — it’s due to misaligned incentives. Pricing teams can’t provide market-aligned, updated pricing for each unique scenario salespeople face, which causes a lack of contextual rationale as to why prices need to change and, more importantly, why the new prices are justified given a complex set of circumstances. So, salespeople shot from the hip, pricing in their own unique way. I have witnessed this problem grow so profound that pricing was referred to in jest as “sales prevention.”
The growth of E-commerce and the impacts of Covid-19 exacerbated the pricing-sales challenge, as the majority of transactions shifted to digital channels and presented new, difficult-to-tackle pricing considerations. Only by standardizing and digitizing pricing processes will businesses operate at an internet-fast speed and scale. When deployed thoughtfully, these new processes can fix the long-standing misalignment between sales and finance and lay the foundation for future competitive success.