Holden Advisors Blog

Today’s customers are savvier and more impatient than ever. Being a Challenger and disrupting the customer’s status quo is just not enough anymore.

I was speaking with the VP of Pricing Transformation for a Fortune 500 company recently and, as disciples of value-based pricing, we debated the subtleties of modern-day pricing theory. We agreed that a shift to value-based pricing within an organization should achieve the following:

Watch as Tim Mullane explains the key to escaping the ever-dangerous discounting cycle. Give-Gets℠ – a valuable tool for any value-centric commercial strategy – follow a simple principle: If I give you something, I get something in return.  What Give-Gets℠ do you have for your team?

Personas are a great tool for the right situation but are often over-used by marketing to communicate with customers and generate leads.  Personas define how a person in a specific role—let’s say the General Manager of a Business or the VP of Sales—thinks about their key challenges, KPIs, or opportunities to drive business improvement.

Has the Relationship Buyer truly vanished from the B2B marketplace? What happens when a Value Buyer chooses to go with a competitive offering? Watch the following video as Erin Cihak explains the different buyer types and how they present themselves in B2B negotiations. Utilizing a recent client engagement, Erin highlights a few tactics which can be employed to defend price in a competitive market, and reveals the one thing to which the Value Buyer is always loyal.

Holden Advisors consulting projects generally focus on the core competency of understanding, communicating, and mutually sharing in created value. Value is the central pillar of all best practices we recommend and implement for our customers.

One of our top goals in any client engagement is uncovering revenue and profit growth opportunities.  Recently, we worked with a global technology manufacturer to answer four key questions:

Last month, I wrote about problems with the phone company that provides service to our home in the woods of Maine. If you don’t remember, the service is terrible and the process to get problems resolved is awful. In any case, we were in Maine recently, and saw a truck for a competitive phone company. I couldn't wait to call them. Though the call was quick and to the point, the customer service representative gave me the options and informed me that it was going to be at least a month before the service became available. When it is available, we will be switching to the new phone provider. Why? Because over time, I have come to absolutely hate dealing with the current telephone provider. 

Recent articles and blog postings are abuzz with the power of price segmentation, driven by the abundance of transaction data and the power of pricing analytics to create highly-tuned segmentations to capture customer willingness-to-pay. Some analytics create hundreds—even thousands—of micro-segments to maximize profitability by exploiting the differences in willingness-to-pay within your installed base. What’s not to like about this? Sounds like easy money to me. However, there are some embedded assumptions about price segmentation that pricing professionals need to consider:

OK, I get it. In rapidly growing markets, it's worth it to discount your products and services, in order to establish and expand your footprint. The high-tech guys have known this for years and use that strategy quite effectively.