While it can lead to significant increases in top-line results, the bottom-line effect is even greater. Getting pricing right is one of the most critical commercial decisions for any business, and the most powerful lever for profitability in saturated markets.
At the same time, promotions often introduce management complexity and fail to deliver the planned incremental profit. Managers often have insufficient customer insight, competitive information, and understanding of customers’ willingness to pay. To make systematically better pricing decisions, both an overall pricing policy and a product-specific price optimisation approach are needed.
There’s no single pricing strategy which works for every company. We identify the right strategy, from launching a new product to penetrating a new market, which will create the greatest impact.
We work with clients across consumer sectors to address a wide range of pricing topics, including the price re-positioning of a business line or category, product and service pricing, price image, promotional effectiveness, net price and rebates, core and ancillary product pricing, price list, and target setting.
Meanwhile in B2B environments, we have helped deliver step-change profit improvements in large-scale contract pricing as well as pricing and contract management for small and medium-sized businesses.
We take a structured approach, identifying what needs to be done and then working with the client to build out the tools, people, and processes to do it.
We work collaboratively with our clients on a broad range of pricing-related commercial projects, across a range of sectors, B2C and B2B, and help them find and realise pricing opportunities.
Pricing review: assessment of existing pricing capabilities and identification of areas for improvement, with recommendations and priorities based on the associated financial returns, method and ease of capture.
Sales performance: analysis of sales by segment, distribution channel, market, and season.
Pricing strategy: market analysis to understand the competitive landscape and develop pricing strategies, covering who customers are, who pays, when and how they are charged, and what is charged for.
International pricing strategies: consistency between countries, currency challenges.
Pricing models: based on customer segmentation, markets, products, and channels.
Bundling strategy: covering portfolio and offer range, versioning, value-based bundling, and pricing and discounting decisions.
Targeted pricing: understanding differences in customer profiles to enable appropriate price variations to improve sales and profitability.
Scenario planning: forecasting market share based on your proposition and price positioning, taking competitor responses to pricing decisions into consideration.
Process improvement: definition or re-design of processes and interaction with other departments (sales, marketing, IT, among others).
Capabilities: development of the right structure, skills, processes or tools in order to capture latent pricing opportunities.
Organisation: organisation and governance of the pricing function, including roles and responsibilities and authority levels.
Competitor tracking: competitor price tracking and integration into the pricing system.
Price setting: calibrating price levels to achieve company objectives around volumes, margins, product choice and customer perception.
Market testing: redefining pricing strategy using historic analysis, market research and price testing to construct new price frameworks according to customer price sensitivity, quality of service, and local market conditions.
Promotions: designing promotional campaigns which encourage desired customer behaviour and achieve commercial objectives.
Discounting: designing discount and special offer policies and practices, aligning value and brand objectives to increase effectiveness while reducing cannibalisation risk.
Communications: constructing pricing communications to better support business objectives, emphasise value, and differentiate from the competition.
If you would like to learn more about our capabilities and experience, please contact our practice team.
Please contact us for more information on our past projects.
Trained 200 executives on how to deliver pricing impact, size opportunities, and use metrics to capture an 11 percent return on sales across the business.
Helped an industrial supplier standardize discount terms and conditions, and increase price on low-volume products, leading to a 5 to 7 percent return on sales.
Created $400+ million of incremental operating income by developing tailored price targets across brands, geographies, channels, and packages for a consumer-goods company.
Increased a retail bank’s product revenues by 14 percent by adjusting its approach to fees and waivers.
Worked with a consumer-goods manufacturer to increase frontline management of the price “pocketed” from each transaction, leading to an 8 percent increase in return on sales over 3 years.
Helped a railroad establish a new competitor-price intelligence system that provided a more rigorous, market-by-market analysis of each transaction. These insights allowed the client to increase average price per transaction, leading to a $600 million increase in return on sales.
Dynamic pricing: Sia Partners implemented a specific pricing solution for a tourism company: it allowed to change prices on a daily/hourly basis, based on supply and demand. This new technology is a key contributor to the commercial strategy which aims to offer a more flexible pricing approach. The implementation of this dynamic pricing solution offers a wider range of products choice to the end customer.
Market testing for new pricing strategies: To keep up with market transformations and disruptive competitors, companies must regularly innovate and create new offers. Because they can have radical consequences, large-scale pricing evolutions must rely on rigorous multifactor market analysis to accurately predict customer engagement.
Revenue management: An administration department decided to increase its revenue streams to make up for the decrease in public funding. We analysed its sales data, segmented its client base, studied the price elasticity price and delivered a new revenue management model.
Events and conferences: A client with an extensive range of services offered to large and small B2B customers lacked enough structure in how to group and position product components to reflect customer needs and realise full value. In addition, sales conversations were often too complex due to the wide range of services offered. We took a methodical approach to categorise and price each component and establish discount levels and agreed on a new pricing and discount strategy. Then, we worked with sales teams to develop a pricing methodology enabling the build and negotiation of bundles with quality client ready outputs. New solutions were created to drive margins and volume performance. The new bundle price increases created a 7.3% impact at some of the business arms.
Convenience store retail: Our client was looking to develop its internal pricing capabilities through price testing and price optimisation techniques. We conducted market research to understand customer price and value perception of our client and key competitors. We then conducted a 3-month price test to understand price elasticities in each product category and subsequent analysis revealed significant opportunities for margin improvement. Scenario modelling and threshold analysis using inputs from the price test was used to deliver a price optimisation plan which defined how item-level prices should be set. Price changes implemented resulted in a normal margin improvement of 6.3%*. *Using results from 3 months into the price change
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