Our Pricing Strategy practice helps clients address the spectrum of commercial pricing strategies, processes and capabilities, aligning them with the organisation's business, marketing, customer segmentation and channel strategies. Starting with the drivers of customer value and layering on transaction-level analysis and insight, we help companies disaggregate their business so they can see its many parts, identify the economic value of each product and customer and devise ways to communicate and deliver that value to customers at prices that meet profit objectives.

Our Pricing Strategy team is part of one of the largest finance management consulting practice in the world, spanning North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. Our team includes recognised thought leaders and authors on the topic, specialists in advanced data modelling and a collective experience base built from the delivery of more than 600 pricing projects to date in a wide range of industry settings.

Our client impact is measured in billions of dollars in revenue and margin improvement. These organisations have developed pricing strategy as a sustained source of competitive advantage and are using pricing to outperform peers and achieve significant improvements in their market values.

So clients can actively manage, change, and define the way they deliver value to their customers, we help them build five interrelated capabilities:

• Transactional management that provides guardrails to guide proper execution of the intended strategy.
• Price and discount policies so prices correspond with the value delivered and so discounts and provision of services are properly governed.
• Value communications and framing to influence the customer and present the value story in the most compelling manner.
• Segmented price and offer structure so prices are based on customer willingness to pay or perceived value and so offers effectively meet the requirements of each segment.
• Profitable growth strategy where the previous four capabilities culminate in an overarching ability to redefine the business model so it is adaptable to changing market conditions and new customer needs.

We use a suite of more than 20 diagnostic tools to quickly assess the size and nature of the pricing opportunities available to the organisation to allow for an informed dialogue on where and how to invest. An initial assessment can often be completed in just six weeks and serves as the foundation for designing a broader set of activities to improve a firm’s competitive position.

The enduring effectiveness of our clients’ pricing capabilities is also advanced through our work with other specialty strategy services, with human capital and technology consulting services of Deloitte Consulting LLP and with risk management and tax services provided through the subsidiaries of Deloitte LLP.

• Achieve return on investment within three to six months by identifying and pursuing “low-hanging fruit” and generate margin improvements, typically equivalent to 1 to 3 per cent of revenues.
  
• Implement processes, policies, procedures and organisational designs that align with revenue and profit growth objectives.
  
• Increase transaction profitability through active management of pricing execution and improved controls.
  
• Assess the linkage between cost-to-serve and pricing levels in order to build new offer designs that lead to profitable deals.
  
• Develop the sales-ready content and selling tools that enable a sales force to have effective,value-based conversations.
  
• Redesign the business model to better address the needs of a rapidly changing marketplace.

Understand how value is created and delivered. Clearly link offerings with the benefits that are delivered to customers—and set prices to capture a share of that value.

Improve analytical capabilities. Develop a “pricing dashboard” to detect margin leakages, respond more quickly to pricing opportunities, and execute the pricing strategy more consistently. Develop a clear perspective on which products, customers, salespeople, or channel partners create the most value and which customers and products erode value.

Build pricing optimisation capabilities. Assess price and promotional changes in a structured manner, bringing rigour to determine “what needs to be true” for a price move to succeed.

Create structured, repeatable and supported pricing processes. Focus on processes that will create sustained performance.

Prepare to invest for the long haul. Building pricing into a strategic capability is a major source of competitive advantage but requires new skills, data and tools, as well as a sustained organisational focus on margin management. Elevate pricing within the organisation and make margin management a visible part of the executive agenda.

Pricing that unlocks smart value creation

Many organisations find they spend more time accumulating data than they do analysing it or putting it to use. Polaris, our analytics solution available either on-site or by online subscription, can connect the dots in real time so pricing decisions don’t make sense only on paper—they actually make a difference.

Every implementation of Polaris is built from a template specific to the client’s industry sector, so there is no need to translate the models, workflows, or views from a generic standard into a usable form. Moreover, Polaris is preconfigured for users at multiple levels of the organisation. Executives and managers have specific dashboards customised to the decisions they make every day. Across the business, users can use Polaris to keep their individual pricing actions aligned with each other and with a coherent company-wide strategy.

With command like this, pricing decision-makers can aim higher than merely avoiding lost revenue opportunities. They can use pricing as a source of innovation to create many new sources of value.