Carragee Consulting

The case for Pricers to cross-train in Sales

Over the last year Karan Sood has been sharing pricing frameworks and lots of pragmatic content aimed to help pricing practitioners.

Karan‘s comment on Manuel‘s book review deserves a moment of reflection from anyone is a leadership roles for Pricing, Revenue and Growth.

‘Borrow from” Sales is an understatement regarding what level of understanding pricing needs to have of sales tools and methods to be successful partners with them inside a business.

I keep thinking about software development and how you need to do UAT and consider UX design prior to building it out and releasing it to intended users.

In other types of development roles product managers use focus groups and listening sessions, they develop process maps and dig into the nuances of user experience and frustrations so they can provide tools to help their users do their jobs.

The idea that pricing could come up with effective structures, framing, segmentation and a full GTM approach WITHOUT a deep understanding of how those tools will be used in the hands of the sales team — the execution arm of pricing is absurd, but also commonplace.

Still thinking about Nudge, Thaler and Sunstein discuss how in the 1950s in Samuelsons era, most economists presumed that people act entirely rationally and make trade-offs on the efficient frontier.

Dan Ariely wrote Predictably Irrational and a host of good work has been done to understand how real humans function with imperfect information, limited attention spans and immediate vs long run needs.

I’ve seen a lot of finger-pointing from Sales to Marketing and vice versa and I am certain a bit of rotational experience across disciplines is a good answer.

In 2016 I wrote a presentation for PPS called the Ferris Bueller Approach to Pricing in which I tried to convey that pricing is not just an academic or analytical activity.

Ferris and his friends cut school and have escapades around Chicago for the day which wind up being valuable introspection and lived experience of famous art, a parade and other cultural exposure.

I love reading and I hope to get to read this new one since I respect these two pricers recommendations, but hope to get to do some manufacturing plant tours, listen in on sales calls and continue to be exposed directly to the true user base of the tools I’m responsible for developing.