The Pricing Journey

Innovations in pricing can be transformative, but to reach their potential companies must devote equal attention to technical and organizational capabilities. Most firms, however, only pay attention to the technical dimensions of pricing, which severely limits the success of their initiatives. To remedy this, The Pricing Journey provides an integrated guide to the organizational, social, and behavioral aspects of pricing—drawing on principles of socio-technical change. Based on extensive qualitative and quantitative research in an array of firms around the world, Stephan M. Liozu provides a practical roadmap for management teams that aim to reach a new level of pricing power. Liozu introduces the 5 C model of transformation, which relies on change, capabilities, champions, confidence, and center-led organizational design to create effective and lasting pricing strategies. Rooting his recommendations in research and practice, Liozu proposes specific capabilities to develop on the road to pricing excellence. This book prepares pricing and marketing professionals to be true strategic partners, while contributing the study of pricing transformation.

WORLD CLASS PRICING is the indispensable roadmap to take your pricing organization from its' current class to World Class. It is built upon the 5 Levels of World Class Pricing – what has become the industry standard for tackling pricing improvement amongst pricing professionals. The approach to pricing improvement shared in this book has been successfully applied by many of the worlds’ leading companies including Exxon Mobil, GE, Michelin and J&J, among a host of others. It provides a positive vision of each step that needs to be taken on the journey to pricing improvement. Whether stuck firefighting at Level 1, cost-based pricing at Level 2, utilizing value-based pricing at Level 3, applying optimization at Level 4, or on the brink of achieving World Class at Level 5, this book has something for you.

The price of virtually any product or service can reveal intriguing stories. The author looks back at his own decade-long pricing journey and shares some of the most exciting and insightful pricing stories, allowing readers to see the world from a different angle. From pricing a chilled Coke in Tehran, to iPhone, to explaining the fall of MUJI, this book reveals the rationales behind and outcomes of various pricing strategies. The author also presents a number of stories from China, a "price wonderland" in which he, both as a consumer and a pricing consultant, has observed unconventional pricing practices rarely found elsewhere, such as the frequent use of negative prices among tech unicorns, i.e., sellers paying consumers to use their products. Structured as a collection of short stories, the book offers a delightful and eye-opening reading experience for business owners, managers, and anyone interested in understanding what prices are, and how pricing works and interacts with us as customers.

The price of virtually any product or service can reveal intriguing stories. The author looks back at his own decade-long pricing journey and shares some of the most exciting and insightful pricing stories, allowing readers to see the world from a different angle. From pricing a chilled Coke in Tehran, to iPhone, to explaining the fall of MUJI, this book reveals the rationales behind and outcomes of various pricing strategies. The author also presents a number of stories from China, a "price wonderland" in which he, both as a consumer and a pricing consultant, has observed unconventional pricing practices rarely found elsewhere, such as the frequent use of negative prices among tech unicorns, i.e., sellers paying consumers to use their products. Structured as a collection of short stories, the book offers a delightful and eye-opening reading experience for business owners, managers, and anyone interested in understanding what prices are, and how pricing works and interacts with us as customers.

Options have been traded for hundreds of years, but investment decisions were based on gut feelings until the Nobel Prize -- winning discovery of the Black-Scholes options pricing model in 1973 ushered in the era of the "quants." Wall Street would never be the same. In Pricing the Future, financial economist George G. Szpiro tells the fascinating stories of the pioneers of mathematical finance who conducted the search for the elusive options pricing formula. From the broker's assistant who published the first mathematical explanation of financial markets to Albert Einstein and other scientists who looked for a way to explain the movement of atoms and molecules, Pricing the Future retraces the historical and intellectual developments that ultimately led to the widespread use of mathematical models to drive investment strategies on Wall Street.

A comprehensive look at creating pricing strategies that work in both good economic times and bad Written by three preeminent pricing experts at McKinsey & Company, the Second Edition of The Price Advantage is a practical pricing guide for the executive or pricing practitioner who wants to identify, capture, and sustain substantial pricing gains in their business. Pricing is by far the most powerful profit lever that managers can influence. Yet few companies approach pricing in a way that fully capitalizes on its value. This Second Edition, a major revision and extension of the first book, shows you what it takes to achieve the price advantage in today's competitive and complex business environments. Based on in-depth, first-hand experience with thousands of companies, this book provides managers with a pragmatic guide through the maze of pricing issues. It reinforces why pricing excellence is more critical than ever today and then explains state-of-the-art approaches to analyzing and improving your own pricing strategy and execution. Explores the fundamental role of pricing infrastructure in achieving the price advantage Includes new topics such as software and information products pricing, lifecycle pricing, custom-configured products pricing, pricing of high-count product lines, pricing in distributed sales environments, "razor/razor blades" pricing, and tiered products and services pricing Revisits the full range of classic McKinsey pricing tools, including the pocket price waterfall and value maps Engaging and informative, the Second Edition of The Price Advantage will put this essential discipline in perspective.

Practical guidance and a fresh approach for more accurate value-based pricing Pricing Done Right provides a cutting-edge framework for value-based pricing and clear guidance on ideation, implementation, and execution. More action plan than primer, this book introduces a holistic strategy for ensuring on-target pricing by shifting the conversation from 'What is value-based pricing?' to 'How can we ensure that our pricing reflects our goals?' You'll learn to identify the decisions that must be managed, how to manage them, and who should make them, as illustrated by real-world case studies. The key success factor is to build a pricing organization within your organization; this reveals the relationships between pricing decisions, how they affect each other, and what the ultimate effects might be. With this deep-level insight, you are better able to decide where your organization needs to go. Pricing needs to be done right, and pricing decisions have to be made—but are you sure that you're leaving these decisions to the right people? Few managers are confident that their prices accurately reflect the cost and value of their product, and this uncertainty leaves money on the table. This book provides a practical template for better pricing strategies, methods, roles, and decisions, with a concrete roadmap through execution. Identify the right questions for pricing analyses Improve your pricing strategy and decision making process Understand roles, accountability, and value-based pricing Restructure perspectives to help pricing reflect your organization's goals The critical link between pricing and corporate strategy must be reflected in the decision making process. Pricing Done Right provides the blueprint for more accurate pricing, with expert guidance throughout the change process.

Chances are that you are leaving money on the table. Smart pricing can add multiples to your revenue and valuation. Yet, pricing is often considered too complex or just not paid enough attention. Software pricing is not rocket science. But so far, literature on the subject has varied between clickbaity blogs or obtuse research methods. A practical guide to SaaS pricing has been sorely needed. This book aims to fill the void. Written for CEOs, CMOs, Product Marketers, Revenue Leaders, and Product Managers, this book provides a simple soup to nuts approach in deploying winning pricing systems for high growth SaaS startups. In addition to pricing techniques, learn from real-life case studies from pricing leaders drawing on their experiences at companies such as Gainsight, Mixpanel, Nosto, Oracle, Verint, Rubrik and more. The book will help you get to the following four fundamental pricing decisions and guide you on how to operationalize pricing within your organization: 1. Packaging: What will be your product 'offers'/'packages'? ★ Learn why Good-Better-Best packaging is not automatically the best approach and how to use packaging to unlock hidden value from your product's features. 2. Pricing Metric: Which metric or set of metrics will drive your core pricing model? ★ Learn how a Silicon Valley startup unlocked up to 10x revenue/account via smart pricing metric selection 3. Pricing Structure: How will you structure your pricing model? ★ Learn how an eCommerce SaaS company evolved its pricing structure as it grew first to maximize market share and then increase revenue predictability. 4. Price Point: What specific price point will you charge? ★ Learn five different methods to hone in on the right price point for your product. Finally, the book includes nine in-depth case studies from Silicon Valley's top pricing leaders from their past experiences at companies like Gainsight, Mixpanel, Nosto, Oracle, Verint, Rubrik, and more. Case studies include instances of pricing challenges across growth stage and established post-IPO companies and cover a wide gamut of topics, including: Moving from perpetual licensing to subscription pricing Revamping product packaging for maximum growth Switching the key SaaS pricing metric Pricing design in a high cost/unit environment Recommended ways to structure pricing projects