TIME-STAMPED NOTES: [00:00] Introduction [01:12] The Challenge of Rising Costs [02:39] The Problem of Ownership [03:53] Case Study: Finance and Product Portfolios [05:47] Case Study: Sales and Customer Relationships [09:03] Case Study: Pricing Teams and Internal Views of Value [11:59] Operational Systems and Data Challenges [14:05] Conclusion: Improving Pricing Capability Most executives I speak to think that taking a price rise should be fairly straightforward. Costs go up, prices go up, simple, right?. But inside most organisations, things don't work as smoothly when it comes to price rises. So, here's a simple question: When your organisation takes a price rise, who actually manages it, and what's the process?. Is it Finance, Sales, Marketing, or does it depend on a particular person or a certain situation?. In many organisations, that question really doesn't have a clear answer. Hello, I'm Joanna Wells, I'm the founder of Taylor Wells Advisory, and we focus specifically on improving margins through pricing strategy. In this podcast, I'd like to share some of my experiences of working with companies on pricing strategy. What tends to work with a price rise, and what often makes them far more difficult than they need to be. The Challenge of Rising Costs Now, over the past few years, we've all seen a lot of cost pressure and disruption. There've been supply chain issues, commodity price increases, fluctuations, lots and lots of inflation, global instability, wars, and political tensions, you name it. For many companies, that's meant you've got to move quickly with costs to cover your margin. And that's usually when organisations realise how difficult pricing actually can be. From the outside looking in, pricing looks simple. I've actually had someone say to me, "How difficult can it be? You just add, you know, 5 to 10% on costs". Right, give that a go!. But inside the organisation, when you're actually doing it, and you want to do it well, you realise calculating prices, planning a price rise, changing prices in a system, it really does affect almost everything in an organisation and almost every team, from Finance, Sales, Marketing, Operations, and IT. And if these teams aren't aligned, things really start to become complicated. The Problem of Ownership And often, from my experience, the problem really starts with something quite simple, really basic, and it's about ownership. Inside most companies, no one really owns pricing. Yes, people might put their hand up and say, "I'll do a bit of pricing, I'll help you out, I'll change those prices in the system," but no one really is accountable for pricing. I've even seen pricing teams that say, "I'm not accountable for pricing". So, if you've got that dynamic happening and you've got a lot of opinions around pricing, that's for sure, but no one will actually go, "Yeah, hand up, I did that. This is my decision, I own that decision". So, when a price rise is necessary, when it's needed, when you've got your executives that said, "We really need to take a price rise, we need to cover our costs." People have to come together and coordinate and start making decisions quickly, and that requires ownership and accountability, and her, that's where the weakness in the process, even if there is a process, starts to show. Case Study: Finance and Product Portfolios Let me think of an example for you here. In Finance, the Finance manager might calculate the cost increase at price rise time. But allocating those costs and increases across a large portfolio, I'm thinking here of a large, complex B2B business from manufacturing and distribution right through to the end consumer and retail, often means dealing with a very large product portfolio. So, allocating those cost increases really isn't easy. I've worked with many of these types of businesses. I'm thinking of one in particular, a B2B complex manufacturing business where the Finance manager had to apply cost increases across a huge range, it was about 350,000 SKUs. But when we reviewed and looked at the data and the COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) movements, we saw that some products had increases three to four times the underlying COGS movement, while others had barely changed at all. Now, no one in particular, he wasn't wrong, he didn't do anything wrong when he did that, it was simply a very, very difficult task to allocate costs, even if you don't have that many SKUs. But if you could just imagine, correctly and accurately allocating costs across thousands, hundreds of thousands of products. It's almost impossible. And this is what we see time and time again, and a lot of Finance people are wasting a lot of time trying to do that. It's a great effort, but it's not getting the outcome that many businesses need when they're taking a price rise. Case Study: Sales and Customer Relationships Okay, so if it's not Finance, then who should it be?. Well, often when there are some issues in the price rise process, and ...
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2026/03/2611 分
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16 分