Holden Advisors Blog

I had lunch recently with Mark S., owner of a small manufacturing and distribution firm who announced, “I had to divorce one of my largest customers today.” I wasn’t taken back by his statement, as I have always known Mark to manage his business well. However, I was curious to know, “Why?” His response was simple, “We weren’t making any money, and I don’t have the deep pockets to keep them without compromising other business.” Six months prior to removing this customer off his books, Mark’s service manager came to him, complaining about the account. He let Mark know that the customer’s shipments had dropped outside their negotiated volume rate schedule and that service calls to the customer had doubled.  Mark and his Service, Operations, Finance, and Account Managers committed to a system of internal Quarterly Business Reviews (QBR) for all major accounts. Mark and his team uncovered additional customers who had taken this vendor’s value for granted which sadly, was the result of Mark’s Account Managers giving value away.

Commentary by Richard Harrington

From: “Bursting the CEO Bubble” by Hal Gregersen hbr.org, March/April 2017

Sales enablement is not about sales. “What? That doesn’t make sense,” you might think to yourself. I’ll go a little further. Sales enablement as a concept is flawed at its core. Bold words from someone who loves sales and makes a good living focused on sales enablement. Let me explain…

It was a simple conversation with 40 pricing professionals, part of a "current events" topic in pricing session. Towards the end, one of the pricing directors for a line of machines raised her hand and said, "I'm about to have a special price promotion my product line of machines. What do you think?"

Car Makers Spend More on Discounts than Labor on a Car

If a tree falls in woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?  After listening to a presentation in which the speaker claimed value didn’t exist until the customer recognized it, I thought about this age old question a bit differently. Let me ask it again, but this time insert one key phrase: If a supplier’s product or service impacts a customer’s business, but a customer doesn’t recognize it, does that value exist?

https://www.tesla.com/support/supercharger-idle-fee

In the previous three articles in the series What Gets Measured Gets Done, we discussed some basic reporting that every pricing and/or sales operations team should use to drive improved profits for the business. In this last article of the series, we are going to talk about uncovering the drivers of discounting and the effectiveness of an organization's profit improvement initiatives using a combination of waterfall analysis and Pareto analysis.

In my previous blog post, “Discounting Control Tool of Choice- The Price Plot” we discussed how a price plot, a very simple tool, can help an organization uncover very deep insights.

Last week in my blog post "What Gets Measured Gets Done”, we discussed how important it is to measure pricing data to support insightful decision making. As a continuation of last week’s article, let’s discuss the approach we took for one of our clients -  specifically the price plot. We prepared a price plot to understand the overall discounting culture in the organization.  While this price plot is very simple, it is very powerful in showing the overall discounting habits of the organization.