Holden Advisors Blog

Have you become trapped in your own mindset – convinced you are selling a commodity or that even you yourself have become commoditized? Are you falling prey to confirmation bias when you sell? Well, sellers, it’s time to wake up and start thinking differently.

Hear Travis Umpleby discuss the Poker Playing that happens during a negotiation and the rules of the game.  Many salespeople make the common mistake of taking the first card they are dealt in a negotiation.  This is one of the biggest traps a seller can fall prey to because that card is usually around price and discounting.  Learn to stack the cards in your favor and call the Poker Player's bluff to win the game.

At a recent networking event, I was chatting with a pricing manager from a major company famed for their innovation. She made a comment that really struck me:

At Holden Advisors, we often speak with General Managers (GMs) about commercial transformation. We want to understand not only what is happening in their markets and their businesses, but also the effectiveness of their commercial teams. Recently, we asked GMs a specific question about pricing: “How can Pricing Leaders elevate the impact of their function and better serve their companies in the creation and execution of overall corporate strategy?”

Holden Advisors works with General Managers to improve the commercial performance of their businesses. Throughout the course of our work, we have identified a disconnect between the vision for and the reality of pricing functions within many organizations. Given the dynamics at play in these markets, and how customers are functionally served within them, it is no surprise a clear contradiction has emerged. As a result, we conducted a survey to validate our findings. Over the course of our research, we asked GMs to reflect on the pricing function within their teams and define their wants and needs for the pricing discipline. For the first question, we asked GMs to describe their ideal vision for the pricing function. Then, we asked them to compare and contrast this vision to the current reality. The responses were grouped into the three distinct categories defined below. Here is what we learned:

At a recent partner conference, CEOs and Presidents of value-added resellers discussed how to support their commercial teams and navigate the evolving landscape of selling, training, organizational design, and trust. Listen as Adele shares the Executives' viewpoints on what to start doing now to defend value in the marketplace.

You and your pricing team have been diligent in using your pricing software to monitor price realization and eliminate outliers, reduce unwarranted discounting, and tighten up your price band. Beware—you may be victim to the Price Complacency Trap—that wonderful space where you are confident that you have instilled price integrity for your core products. In reality, you may be trading single-digit improvements by raising transactions to the regression line for double-digit declines in the entire regression line over time.

In a recently published study, there was a claim that nearly three quarters of executives do not understand Buyer Behavior¹. What an interesting statistic. While the area of study around buyer behavior remains a hot topic, there doesn’t seem to be a proportionate amount of interest from those who should seemingly care the most – the C-Suite. Sadly, I wasn’t surprised. Customers are quite possibly the most important aspect of any business, and we simply do not spend enough time or energy understanding what they do and why they do it.  

Recently, I had an interesting conversation with the VP of Pricing for a $15B manufacturing company. The primary topic of our discussion was the implementation of a pricing technology system that would suggest target prices based on benchmark deals within comparable customer segments. A few interesting trends quickly materialized in the dataset:

What is the foremost goal of a successful business? To make a profit. Now, this may seem obvious, but in working across industries, it seems to me that many businesses need a reminder. I see this time and time again, clients getting so mired in details and day-to-day fire drills they lose focus.  The ultimate objective: stop worrying about revenue and volume, and focus on profit.