Winning Aspirations - What pricing goals are we trying to achieve
Karen Chiang is a Managing Partner at Ibbaka. See her Skill Profile on Ibbaka Talent.
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I'm happy to offer another post on the strategic choice cascade for pricing. The series started with Strategic alignment is critical to pricing outcomes. Getting alignment within your stakeholder community is critical to effectively achieving pricing outcomes. We often say that pricing is a powerful lever but we need to decide what we are looking for pricing to do. The first decision we need to consider as we develop our pricing strategy centers on our winning aspirations. What are the goals we want to achieve? In reading this post, I hope that you will get a clear understanding of …
What we mean by winning aspirations
What are the considerations that feed into our decisions around winning aspirations
How to get to informed decisions around our winning aspirations
By the way, I will be hosting a workshop during #PPSVirtual21 to help senior level executives make the choiceful decisions that will bring their team to alignment as they shape their organization’s pricing strategy. Putting decisions in an organized way, makes it easier to achieve alignment while fostering better execution on goals.
Register for the PPS Workshop
Winning aspirations
A Winning Aspiration defines the purpose of your enterprise, its guiding mission and aspiration, in strategic terms.
~ AG Lafley & Roger Martin, Playing to Win
How Strategy Really Works
The first choice of the strategic choice cascade is winning aspirations. Here we ask, “what is our winning aspiration.” Strategically, our winning aspiration defines our purpose. Aspirations are a view of the future. Qualified with “winning,” it is the ideal future that we strive to achieve.
From a pricing point of view, one way that we can think of framing aspirations is in terms of market, PnL (profit and loss) goals, or unit economic goals.
Another way to frame our winning aspirations is around value drivers. For those who know Ibbaka, we are passionate about providing a way for us to define, discover and quantify value drivers. Winning aspirations can be approached by articulating the economic, emotional, and or community impact we are trying to achieve.
We can think about our economic aspirations in the following way.
For emotional value drivers, we map to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Finally, I’ve been advocating more for the need to also consider how community impact should shape our aspirations as well.
Things to Consider With Winning Aspirations
A key consideration feeding into the winning aspirations is the who. Who are the stakeholders who need to come together and be aligned in the pricing strategy. Pricing touches many people within our organisations. The typical groups include business, finance, sales, marketing, product, operations, customer success, professional services. Naturally, the winning aspirations may not be the same across these groups as they may have competing interests and KPIs that they are striving for. In addition, when we try to understand aspirations, would we look at these differently when it is solely our personal, versus team, versus company wide perspective.
We should also factor in the maturity of our business as we think of our winning aspirations. Depending where we are in terms of the adoption of our offering, our aspirations can be quite different.
How to Get Informed on Winning Aspirations
The best way to get the information to define our winning aspirations is to connect with others and to ask questions. We find that interview and surveying the key stakeholders to understand their perspective is foundational.
Some aspirational questions to ask:
What motivates you to do your role each day
When you envision your the company’s future, what does that look like
What are the top business goals you have identified
Some pricing specific questions to ask include:
What is your role in respect to pricing
How do you use pricing
How does pricing affect what you need to get done
What is the job that pricing is does for you now
Where do you see the opportunity for pricing to shift your key performance indicators
Once we have this information, the next step is to identify key themes that are persistent among the group and to qualify the opportunities. We suggest having a workshop to arrive at a shared understanding of goals, process, and good practices.
Download the Strategic Choice Cascade for Pricing Framing Tool