One of the background conversations at the Professional Pricing Society’s Fall Conference was ‘what do we mean when we say '“pricing optimization”?’ There are several ways to interpret this common term. What do pricing professionals mean?

The Professional Pricing Society had its Fall Conference in San Francisco October 20 and 21. Here are some of the key themes and some memorable quotes.

In early May 2021 Karen Chiang and Steven Forth gave a two day workshop on applications of the strategic choice cascade to pricing. The case study featured a choice on data monetization for a precision agriculture company. Different winning aspirations led to very different pricing strategies.

The final choice in the strategic choice cascade is the systems you will need around the value cycle. As you design the systems that support your pricing strategy, take a holistic approach to the systems you will need to enable success.

The fourth choice in the strategic choice cascades is capabilities is capabilities. In order to manage value and capture value back into pricing you need to understand the skills needed to create, communicate, deliver, document and capture (price) value and make sure these are available at each touchpoint along the customer journey. It is not enough to do this internally. Customers may need new skills to understand and participate in the value your offer.

The third choice in the strategic choice cascade is how to win. In pricing, how to win choices are where you align your pricing and portfolio with your target market. This is product market fit, with fit including your pricing model and market including your competitive positioning. Connecting the value metric and pricing metric is an important part of this work.

The second choice in the strategic choice cascade is where to play. In pricing, where to play choices are based on a value-based market segmentation. A good segment is one where potential customers get value in the same way and buy in the same way. The segmentation helps one to target the most attractive customers.

The first choice in the strategic choice cascade is your winning aspirations. Pricing is a powerful lever and it can do many things, but it cannot do everything at the same time. Building alignment on what your pricing strategy is meant to achieve is the first step to a winning pricing strategy.

Roger Martin’s Strategic Choice Cascade is a powerful way to frame strategy. Ibbaka has developed a version of this specific to pricing choices. Karen Chiang and Steven Forth will be giving a workshop on how to apply this framework at the Spring 2021 Professional Pricing Society Virtual Conferece.

Pricing is a critical capability where the skills required are changing rapidly. TeamFit is partnering with Ibbaka to explore. Professional Pricing Society.