A big thank you to the team at the Professional Pricing Society, to all of the speakers and to everyone that attended. There was real energy at this spring's event as B2B companies are realizing that they need to get better at pricing if the are going to wring shareholder value from the economic recovery. This is a recovery where companies are being squeezed by the twin pressures of commoditization and rising commodity prices. We all need to create and capture value in order to show real growth.
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At the conference one might have thought that Apple was one of the sponsors. There were eleven iPads being given away as booth prizes! LeveragePoint not only gave away an iPad, our software also runs on an iPad, and we have built mobile access to value-based pricing tools for sales into our approach.
Three themes that we noted:
- Value-based pricing is the hot theme and was at the heart of keynotes by Charlie Peters from Emerson and Stephan Liozu Ardex Americas and the talk by Chris Provices of Siemens Healthcare. All of these speakers emphasized that value-based pricing requires cultural change and that this is a five-to-seven year process. At LeveragePoint, we feel that with a focused effort and the right tools (tools help to support and shape behavior) one can make faster progress and see an impact on business results in months, not years!
. - Procurement is still seen as the opposition, and an opposition that is often better trained on negotiation, equipped with better software platforms and with access to better data. B2B pricing and sales teams are still scrambling to catch up. Does procurement have to be the opposition or are there ways for pricing to help procurement to do its job better? The LeveragePoint platform for value-based pricing helps equip the sales team with the value messages that business buyers need as they manage their own procurement organizations.
. - There is an ongoing conversation, see the Professional Pricing Society's LinkedIn Group, on whether the focus needs to be pricing, revenue management, or value. You can guess LeveragePoint's position on this - winning premium prices requires the creation, communication and capture of your differentiated value!
