The Six Steps to Higher Profits™ is a complete audit and overhaul of your pricing process and strategy. It eliminates profit leaks, processes breakdowns and inefficiencies. It recommends a holistic pricing strategy that enables substantial increases in business results: your growth, profits and revenues.

Step 1 - Opportunity Review
We benchmark your company’s resources, capabilities and pricing strategies. We compare your company’s pricing processes and performance against the best practices. We assess whether a new pricing strategy will improve your business performance, and determine the likely results. The Assessment delivers a list of improvement areas.

Step 2 - Profitably Audit
Using your internal sales and cost data, we examine your internal process and eliminate profit leaks and process deficiencies. We identify, with excruciating detail, where your profits come from and more importantly, areas of your business where profits can improve. We develop a number of recommendations and tactics that you can implement immediately, as to enjoy increased profitably while the rest of the project is completed.

The Profitability Audit needs to be an ongoing activity, so we develop for your company a Profit Process and turn that process over to your staff, so you can continue to improve.

Step 3 - Research

Internal Research
The perceptions of your key staff underlie most of the important decisions your company makes. Their views of the price drivers, values, attributes, strengths, weaknesses, competitors, and value perceptions of your customers drive your product development, marketing, sales and pricing decisions. We document and correlate these internal perceptions. We give you a window onto your company’s consistency and thus ability to execute your business strategy. We also create an information base that can be compared with external perceptions in the Analysis step.

External Research
Your marketplace consists of customers, prospects, lost business contacts, former customers and (possibly) channel partners. We build a customized research design that elicits information about each groups’ perceptions of value, and its decision drivers. We determine their willingness to pay for your products or services and we assess what drives their purchase and payment decisions. We use a variety of methods such as personal interviews, conjoint analysis and web panels to gather data on how the company is perceived in the marketplace

Step 4 - Analysis
We compare the perceptions of internal and external groups to see how they differ and what impact that will have on your sales and marketing effectiveness. We document how the market segments differ in their valuation of the willingness to pay, and price drivers, their preference in terms of messaging, packaging, delivery, options, bundles, and usage patterns. We relate these preferences to valuation and pricing.

Using data from our research, and proprietary data models and statistical analysis, we are able to determine, with a high degree of accuracy, the perceived value of a service, product or a product line.

The Perception Audit™ combines the internal and external data to document how your company is perceived in the marketplace. Far superior to the anecdotes and hearsay that most companies use, the Perception Audit™ is scientifically designed to provide hard, quantifiable, actionable data that will serve as a sound basis for marketing, sales processes, and price realization strategies. It tells you how well your marketing is working and how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing, service policies, and price realization strategies.

The Perception Audit also tells you how well the entire enterprise is coordinated. It tells you whether your sales, marketing and product development teams are all focusing on the same issues in the same way. If a company is not coordinated well, you can substantially alter your marketing processes to enhance the way it presents itself and how it sells it products – all the while setting and meeting your customers’ expectations and perceptions – thus further increasing its business prospects and improving business results.

Step 5 - Optimized Price Strategy
The Price Strategy is a comprehensive document that summarizes all the research and analysis. Not only does it provide a detailed overall recommendation on your price strategy, but it also includes individual prices, discount guidelines, and price realization tactics as well as the marketing messages, bundles, un-bundles and policies you should use to gain the upper hand in your marketplace.

Step 6 - Price Training for Sales
Training the company’s sales force is critical to the successful implementation of the new pricing strategy. When the sales staff understands the perceived value of a product or service, what drives their marketplace’ decisions, and when they are trained on the tactics of the sales call, they can better defend the price -- and reduce or eliminate discounting while increasing your sales volume!

Deliverables :
The Six Step to Higher Profits arms your company with a comprehensive pricing strategy and understanding of the values customers attach to your products and services, and recommendations that enable you to maximize your growth and profitability. We document the analysis by providing:

Summary C-level Presentation
The on-site, in-person presentation is aimed at C-level executives, and summarizes the findings, results, observations, and price realization actions that can be taken as well as establishing an overall revised pricing strategy.

Comprehensive Analysis and Recommendation.
We generate a substantial report that includes the price strategy and all the findings, analysis, conclusions and recommendations on the project. It shows clearly how your company and products are perceived by your customers, prospects and channel partners in comparison to your competition. It shows the decision-behavior of your marketplace’s naturally occurring segments. It also helps you confirm that your marketing messages are being correctly received by your customers. If they are not, you can make adjustments in your marketing processes and/or message delivery methods.

Process change recommendations
Often, the findings of the Six Steps to Higher Profits suggest changes to processes other than pricing. In this event, should the client wish, we may recommend changes to products, packaging, sales processes, billing procedures, reseller relations or other processes that are not directly part of the pricing process.

Profit Processes
We leave you with the processes of the Profit Audit, and with staff trained on the process, so you can continue to report, highlight, analyze and eliminate further profit leaks, to continuously improve your profitability.

Sales Training
Upon direction of the client, we will create and deliver sales tools and training modules for the sales force, to make sure they understand the perceptions of the customers. Sales people will be given our guidelines for bidding and discounting, and competitive points to use in specific sales situations, based on the findings of the research.

Accountability Review
We conduct a follow-up meeting approximately 90-120 days after the Presentation to Executives. At this time, we review our findings and recommended action and examine the company's experience.

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