Pricing Strategy
The fastest lever on profit is not selling more. It is the number you have been calculating the same way since the company was founded.
Book your Diagnostic ↗Your price is a habit, not a decision.
Pricing work at Sell with Marketing means finding out what a product actually costs you once everything is allocated, what your discount structure is really doing to margin, which lines are subsidising which, how price should differ by segment and market, and how to move a price without losing the account.
In most industrial companies the price is cost plus a percentage that was set years ago by someone who has since retired. Nobody has re-tested it, and the reason is understandable: it is the most frightening number in the business, because a wrong move is felt in weeks.
It is also the fastest lever there is. A price increase goes almost entirely to profit, while the same profit through volume needs the whole machine to work harder. Which is precisely why it should be moved with evidence rather than with nerve.
What it costs, what it is worth, what to charge.
- The real cost, fully allocated: Not just material and labour: setup, scrap, financing on the receivable, the cost of servicing a demanding account. Products that looked profitable stop looking that way, and that is usually the most valuable page in the report.
- What the discount structure is doing: Discounts by volume, by customer and by rep authority, mapped against actual margin. There is nearly always a customer whose negotiated price has drifted below cost, and nearly always nobody knows which one.
- Value-based pricing where it applies: When your product saves the customer downtime, scrap or labour, that saving is the reference point, not your cost sheet. This is where the margin is, and it needs the evidence to defend it.
- Segmentation by customer and by market: The same product justifiably carries different prices by volume, by service level and by country. Pricing everything the same is leaving money with whoever would have paid more.
- The plan for actually moving the price: Which accounts first, with how much notice, with what justification and what to do when the biggest one pushes back. A correct price nobody dares to implement changes nothing.
- What to say when the customer objects: The argument, the evidence and the concession structure, written for the sales team. This is where price increases fail: not in the analysis, in the conversation.
When margin falls and nobody can point at the reason.
- Manufacturers whose price has been cost plus the same percentage for a decade
- Companies whose margin is falling while sales are flat or growing
- Businesses where each rep negotiates discounts with no visible floor
- Exporters using one price structure across markets that pay differently
- Companies that raised prices once, lost an account, and never tried again
- Teams that suspect some products are losing money and cannot prove which
This is an advisory project with a defined scope and an end. What is delivered is the analysis, the structure and the implementation plan. Executing it is your decision and your relationship with your customers, and we do not charge a percentage on the margin recovered.
Before you sign.
Will we lose customers if we raise prices?
Some, and the work is deciding which ones you can afford to lose and preparing for it rather than being surprised by it. The analysis identifies which accounts are below cost, which are carrying the rest and which have room. Sometimes losing a customer who has been below cost for two years is the single most profitable thing a company does that year, and the numbers say so before the decision is made.
Is this not what our accountant does?
Accounting tells you what happened; this decides what to charge next. They are different jobs and they need each other. Your accountant knows the numbers, and this brings the market view: what your customer would pay, what your competitor charges, what your product is worth to the person buying it. We work from your accounting and we do not replace it.
How do we know the analysis is right?
Because it uses your own data and shows its work: which costs were allocated how, which assumptions were made and where they came from. It gets handed to you as a document that your finance team can audit line by line. A pricing recommendation you cannot check is a pricing recommendation you should not implement.
Our market sets the price. Does this apply to us?
It applies more, not less. When the price is set by the market the lever moves to knowing exactly which products and which customers are making money at that price, and which are quietly funded by the rest. That is often the finding that changes what a commodity business chooses to chase.
How long does it take?
It is a project with a defined end, and the length depends on how many products and customers are in scope and how accessible your cost data is. Where the cost information itself is unreliable, cleaning it is data work with its own scope, and we say so and quote it separately rather than absorbing it silently.
THE FASTEST LEVER
YOU ARE NOT PULLING.
It starts with the Diagnostic: what standing still is costing you, what fixing it costs, and what gets fixed first — in your own data. Paid work, credited 100% against the fix if you move within 90 days.
Book your Diagnostic ↗