Holden Advisors Blog

When facing low-priced competition, think twice before "sticking it to the competition" by going in with a low, low price. Watch the video to learn why:

Hear Pete Morelli talk about what we can learn from the price increase that Netflix rolled out last week.

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum how lovely are your branches.

Dynamic pricing is a hot topic right now. With the advent of big data and IT quoting systems, many businesses are excited at the prospect of charging each customer at their willingness to pay for their product, rather than a flat or segmented price. As Bob Crandall, former CEO of American Airlines once put it “If I have 2,000 customers on a given route and 400 prices, I’m obviously short 1,600 prices." Think of all that money you’ve been leaving on the table with regular segmentation; if you could grab that, your profits would go through the roof!

Are you planning a price increase? Learn from Travis Umpleby via his video below on how to use one simple tool to conduct a stakeholder assessment and help your increase stick.

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:

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:

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: