PricingBrew

Insights & Tips

Already a subscriber? Login

Become a subscriber and unlock an information arsenal focused on making your pricing efforts more effective.

Do you have this price negotiation problem?

As pricing professionals, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to influence the pricing decisions being made by our prospects and customers, right? And of course, we absolutely hate it when we leave money on the table through unnecessary discounts, inaccurate prices, or gamesmanship in negotiations.

But have you ever wondered just how much margin you lose negotiating with yourself?

In researching a new guide for the PricingBrew Journal, Influencing Internal Pricing Negotiations: Ten Strategies for Negotiating Better Pricing Outcomes with Other Decision-Makers Inside Your Company, we learned that the problem could be even worse than we suspected and internal pricing negotiations could actually be responsible for a fairly sizable chunk of the margin erosion we’re all fighting so hard to avoid.

In other words, the discussions, negotiations, and all-out battles that are occurring between different people and groups within our own organizations could be eroding our margins before our customers and competitors even have a chance to weigh in!

As we were soliciting the most effective internal negotiation strategies from leading practitioners, we heard a number of anecdotes that underscore the magnitude of issue, including this head-shaker:

We’ve spent days working up a solid, value-based quote on a piece of new business…only to have the sales rep and her manager drop the price another 15% on the drive over to the prospect’s site…because the sales rep convinced her manager the prospect would never go for the quote we developed. That’s 15% right off the top…just talking amongst ourselves…without the prospect ever saying a word…or even seeing the original quote.

Sound familiar? Likely so, because this sort of thing is apparently happening a lot. And not just with the sales groups—people also reported having some pretty tough negotiations with their product management and finance groups, too.

Fortunately, we were able to identify ten effective strategies and practices to deal with the issue. Unfortunately, customers and competitors aren’t the only ones you need to be thinking about. But you already knew that, right?

Get Immediate Access To Everything In The PricingBrew Journal

Related Resources

  • Influencing Internal Pricing Negotiations

    In B2B, the most costly pricing negotiations often take place within the confines of our own organizations. In this guide, you'll learn the top 10 strategies for negotiating better pricing outcomes with others inside your company.

    View This Guide
  • Two Paths Toward Pricing Improvement

    More B2B companies than ever before are taking steps to improve their pricing. But they aren't all going about it in the same ways...or achieving the same results. In this special report, we characterize the two primary paths that are being taken and expose the critical differences.

    View This Research
  • The Pros & Cons of B2B Pricing Strategies

    The conventional wisdom around pricing strategy often fails to make clear that some of the "standard" options are extremely dangerous in B2B environments! In this on-demand webinar, learn which pricing strategies actually work...and which ones will destroy your margins.

    View This Webinar
  • How to Crater a Market with Cost-Plus Pricing

    For one large manufacturer, cost-plus pricing was tantamount to malpractice. In this case study, learn how the lack of strategic pricing capability reduced the value of an entire market by over $1 billion.

    View This Case Study