You may have heard the saying, “Good judgment is the result of experience, and experience is the result of bad judgments.” We see this idea play out all the time in B2B pricing.
And we’re not alone. If you’ve worked in pricing for any amount of time at all, you’ve almost certainly seen some bad judgment. Underpricing, overpricing, poor segmentation, mismatched value communication — they all show up regularly in B2B organizations. As the quote suggests, these mistakes are superb learning opportunities for pricing teams.
Unfortunately, these errors also lead to some negative consequences, like missed revenue, lost customers, eroded margins, and damaged reputations.
But what if you could learn those lessons without paying the full price?
You see, every mistake has two prices:
- Direct cost: lost deals, decreased margins, and other financial consequences
- Indirect cost: opportunity loss from not learning the lesson
But we at PricingBrew know a loophole that reduces both of these costs.
The power of learning from others’ mistakes
A long, long time ago, some unfortunate unknown human was the first person to try to touch a rattlesnake. It didn’t end well for that person, but everyone else who saw what happened knew better than to make the same mistake themselves. And if they were smart, they passed those learnings on to their children for generations so that they didn’t get bit.
Pricing teams can learn the same way. By analyzing other team’s failures, we can gain the benefits of their experience without going through the negative financial consequences.
But there’s a complication.
Pricing teams don’t like to share their experience with outsiders. For very good reasons, companies don’t want customers or competitors — or anyone, really — to know about their pricing strategies. As a result, pricing teams often feel pretty isolated. They don’t have the opportunity to learn from other people’s mistakes. And they end up making the same mistakes that other teams have already made a million times before. It’s like we’re all trying to pet the rattlesnake — and regretting it immediately.
Breaking the cycle of secrecy
We created PricingBrew specifically to break this pattern. Through our research, we capture lessons, best practices, and case studies across industries. Then we’re able to share that information with you, while keeping the company names anonymous. You get access to insights that would otherwise remain hidden, without the negative consequences.
The resources at PricingBrew let you skip straight to smarter decisions without learning the hard way. For example, check out our webinars on The Top ‘Lessons Learned’ by Pricing Leaders, Tales from the Trenches in B2B Pricing, and Avoiding the Top 10 Pricing Mistakes. These three resources all explicitly call out actual scenarios that other organizations have lived through. But the truth is, nearly every resource in the Journal — whether they are tutorials, diagnostics, case studies, or webinars — are rooted in lessons learned from real-world pricing challenges.
There is no teacher like experience. But smart pricing teams learn from other people’s bad experiences rather than making those mistakes themselves.
The Top "Lessons Learned" by Pricing Leaders
How have pricing leaders become leaders? What can their 20/20 hindsight teach us to streamline our own path? In this on-demand webinar, learn the top lessons gleaned through our research.
Tales from the Trenches in B2B Pricing
Pricing improvement in B2B can be a messy affair. In this on-demand webinar, glean insights from ten cautionary case studies so you don't repeat the same mistakes and miscalculations.
Avoiding the Top 10 Pricing Mistakes
You're going to make mistakes. But if you can avoid the biggest mistakes, you're definitely rigging the game in your favor. In this on-demand webinar, learn about the top 10 mistakes that other pricing groups have made along the way.
