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.

The key to pricing is to connect strategy to execution. One of the best ways to do this is to use Roger Martin’s strategic choice cascade. Ibbaka uses this regularly with our clients and it helps build alignment across the organization. This is a template that you can download to guide you in your strategic choices.

Pricing touches strategy on many different levels, from getting alignment on winning aspirations all the way down to how systems are used and configuration is done. It is one of those things that integrates a company. This post explores pricing in the context of organizational strategic choices