Background
Our client is a $1 billion revenue Products and Solutions provider, offering customized support to customers across many different industries. With a high-value, solutions-based offering the client had a significant degree of pricing power that was underutilized.
The client had already made a significant investment in a segmented pricing strategy to include a target, floor, and stretch value. This guidance was based on “peer” customer pricing history and involved an internal scoring system of green, yellow, and red valuations on varying price points that acted as a visual aid for the sales teams.
The Challenge
While the client’s sales team had been trained on the pricing strategy, they were not using that strategy effectively. Sales members did not understand the value that the client provided to their customers, and could not quantify that value for existing or potential customers. The lack of confidence on the part of the sales team was impacting the profitability of the business, and the client was not seeing the bottom-line growth they anticipated from their new pricing strategy. Instead, sales team leads were busy wasting time approving discounts in the “red” zone.
In this case the pricing process, strategy, and even guidance systems were all perfectly functional. Instead, the Iris Pricing Solutions team was brought in to understand the barriers that were preventing the company from using its pricing guidance system to its full advantage. To do so, the Iris Pricing Solutions team realized it was necessary to understand key customer objections during the sales process and equip the sales team with strategies to address objections.
