Issue link: https://pros.com/learn/i/1180904
Thought Experiments Are Instructive Imagine for a moment that you're the newly elected leader of a developing country. To move your country forward, one of your top priorities is putting a telecommunications infrastructure in place. What will you do? Will you start by installing telegraph wires all over your country? Will you teach a small army of people Morse Code so that they can operate the telegraph machines? Once you've mastered the telegraph, will you then move to switchboards, party lines, and live operators? And then, will you offer rotary phones in three different colors? Will your plan be to gradually "mature" your capabilities over time, eventually embracing 5G networks and smartphones some years or even decades down the road? No. Of course not. Instead, you would take advantage of the fact that others have already gone through these evolutionary stages, thus rendering them obsolete. You would skip these stages entirely and right from the start, you'd seek to implement the most sophisticated and advanced telecom infrastructure available. For something closer to home, imagine that you've been charged with creating a robust sales operation for a startup company that's experiencing rapid growth. Will you hire a couple dozen sales admins to keep the Rolodex cards updated, type up notes related to each prospect or customer interaction, and make sure the file cabinets are organized and alphabetized? Not if you want to keep your job! With the advent of CRM technology, these sales admin functions of yesteryear have all been rendered obsolete. And by using the latest CRM systems, you can actually start where the older sales teams have eventually ended up after years of painful evolution! We See Similarities in B2B Pricing © Copyright MindBrew • All rights reserved. • May not be used or reproduced without permission. As publishers of the PricingBrew Journal, we interact with hundreds of B2B pricing teams all over the world. Some teams are relatively new and just getting started. Others are well established and have been working for many years (or decades in some cases). As a publication, our mission is to research what's working...and what's not...in the real world. We strive to identify burgeoning best practices and highlight the game changers that no one is talking about publicly. From our unique vantage point, we're able to spot certain dynamics and trends that are affecting a relatively broad swath of pricing teams, from newbies to veterans alike. And while the thought experiments above may seem a bit extreme or tangential on the surface, they do in fact accurately illustrate a common and costly disconnect between the perceived dictates of the conventional "pricing journey" and what's possible with today's data-driven pricing technology.