Episode #0030 - The skills for a great pricing manager!

In this episode of Pricing College Joanna and Aidan discuss what sort of skillset a great pricing manager or leader should have. Whilst not saying one needs to have all the skills mentioned - pricing is a very varied discipline. Numerate, driven, smart, good team worker - the list goes on!   Now if you're thinking about a career in pricing and you're wondering what type of people go into pricing,  Am I suitable? Would it be a good fit for me? We're going to just go through all of those and address those questions for you today and talk about a profile of pricing managers today that are successful in businesses and do get the outcomes that businesses want from the pricing. Now to start, we'll go from the basics, pricing by its very nature and even the title you can see it is a numbers-based career but it's not all of the careers, I would say because of the change management aspect of the job, it would sort of be roughly 40% of the job, however, you have to be good at maths and data, good with numbers, figuring out, sorting out the data, manipulating data, analysing data, and then interpreting data. All of those three areas of data analysis are very important to pricing managers, now you don't need to be a mathematician, no you don't, but you do need to understand what you're looking at. Okay, so point two, we've covered the numbers but you also have to have a real sales focus. In many companies, we separate salespeople from financial people but pricing sits between the two, you need to know how to sell, why big customers buy and how to emphasise the value and the pluses. So, yeah, have you sold anything in the past? Number three. So as you listen to us before, there's a lot of psychology involved in pricing, especially in value-based pricing, customer focus pricing and as businesses try to reconnect or connect closer to customers to think about their pricing, you can understand that psychology in pricing is becoming a key skill. So not only do you need to be good with people and data, you need to start to understand people, why they buy from you? And that's another key aspect. Vote for me. Are you a politician? Are you naturally good at stakeholder management? Can you build relationships internally with accounts, with finance, with marketing and with senior executives? Do people trust you and want to work alongside you? Because being a Pricer sits you know, it's everywhere and is nowhere so the real skill is to not be isolated, you have to have that buy-in from the key stakeholders, make them feel that you're working alongside them, and that helping you will help them. Another key skill mindset would be that entrepreneurial mindset, always thinking ahead, what's happening? How do I make more money? Where are the opportunities? Where's that margin opportunity?  Is it where it used to be? Where in the market should I be focusing? Looking at segmentation as a key driver to fulfil that curiosity and entrepreneurial spirit to find those revenue opportunities for the business, but when we say entrepreneurial but do it in a very safe way that is always checked by data and systems peer reviews. So yeah, that would be another skill and I think that's something that senior management respects in the more successful pricing managers, all of those characteristics are quite dominant in successful pricing leaders and I wouldn't say any one of those attributes would be greater than the other, it's a real sense of balance. And I think finally I'd like to just mention that personality that's almost the energy, successful pricing managers have this innate burning energy to just succeed. They're very positive, they're not tired, they look after themselves both physically and mentally, they know it can be tough, there's a lot of objections and questions that they have to address daily as a lot of firefighting happens, and a good pricing manager is always positive up for that discussion, and never closes down conversations and, yeah, always looking for the upside. Sometimes I think the perfect pricing manager is somebody who should be an entrepreneur but doesn't want to set up their own business. They almost drive a business, they look at the business model that hopefully improves it, and they get involved in all the tough parts and places where you can't hide, the customer negotiations, the pushing back on price negotiations, those sorts of things. The place where no one generally wants to go is where you have to go as a pricing manager. So it's somebody who could potentially be a great business owner themselves but just for whatever reason doesn't do it.