Pricing is the #1 worry for business leaders but companies can have far more control over pricing than they may realize. Many companies have developed solid sales strategies—but without equally good pricing operations, those strategies by themselves will not add anything to the bottom line. The goal of pricing operations is to consistently control price deviations in transactions and contracts over time and across customer segments. We discuss a breakthrough approach to the pricing discipline in our book, Six Sigma Pricing: Improve Pricing Operations to Increase Profits (FT Press), one that can systematically eliminate pricing-related leaks driving new profits straight to the bottom line without alienating customers. Six Sigma Pricing is not simply an application of Six Sigma to pricing operations but rather a way to overcome inter-function issues that make improving pricing processes so challenging.
The book follows the Six Sigma framework with examples of each DMAIC (define-measure-analyze-improve-control) step from a real company doing a major pricing project:
* How to identify pricing “defects”
* How to gather and analyze relevant pricing data and pricing-agreement processes
* How to identify and preempt failures of control; implement modifications that don’t create onerous approval processes
* How to sustain and extend pricing improvements into the future.