When a company has a conversation with its customers they will say things and/or withhold information for the sole purpose of convincing the company to detract value from its product or service and to convince the company that it is selling a commodity - and commodities are sold on price alone. Customers’ will do this because they know it works and will lead to the company to lower its price and get a better deal.

Atenga provides an independent view, based on hard data, on what customers are willing to pay, and what drives actual buying decisions. Companies often find it surprising how large the perception gaps are between the internal perceptions (generated by the less than truthful customer) and the perception of the marketplace (generated by hard, statistically significant data).

• Online surveys and phone interviews
• Value attribute positioning
• Van Westendorp price sensitivity meter
• Choice Based Conjoint Analysis
• Adaptive Based Conjoint Analysis
• K-Means clustering
• And other statistical methods

Resulting in

• Decision Drivers
• Value Drivers
• Price elasticity
• Cross price elasticity
• Demand curves
• Revenue maximization curves
• Profits maximization curves
• Behavioral segmentation

Resulting in

• Optimum Marketing Message and positioning
• Value Optimized Pricing Strategy
• Optimum marketing channels
• Optimum sales channels
• Bundles un-bundles
• Policies, Terms, Options
• Optimized Price Strategy

The final deliverable from Atenga is a comprehensive set of information that includes data describing factors that drive willingness to buy, attributes that drive willingness to pay, value drivers, and price drivers, and how our clients are perceived compared with their competitors in terms of those issues. We then provide detailed recommendations on how to optimize your pricing, what marketing messages, what bundles or unbundles, polices, strategies and tactics to achieve the stated objectives. Atenga also provide sales recommendation or conducts price specific sales training; teaching how sales can better defend prices, sell value and generate higher revenues and profits.  Atenga manages the entire pricing lifecycles of a products and services for its clients; however, some clients wish to end the engagement here once armed with the new VOP.

The transactional benefits are the immediate gains from implementing the VOP process and typically see between 5%-15% increase in price realization in the near term, 6 months or less.

Generally speaking, the answer is yes and no.

For those companies that are involved is such environments where pricing is fixed, or where a lot of its business is sealed bid responses to RFPs, they may not benefit from the pricing component of the VOP but they will realize all of the other benefits derived from the research.  With spending cut in all areas of the economy knowing the value perceptions of your buyers, and what drives their willingness to pay, is an imperative.

Large retail organizations are not suited for price optimization services but they are candidates for price optimization software. Those who sell to retailers or directly to consumers are good candidates.

VOP provides the factual basis for your salespeople, marketers and product managers to defend your prices, sell the value of what you are delivering, and justify the prices you are charging.

Without VOP your salespeople will tend to discount more and rely on lowering the price or raising the discount to close deals.

If you are now interested in best practice pricing you are on the right track!  The bad news is that there is little written on the subject and what is out there is fragmented, at best.  They don’t teach best practice pricing in business schools so not much luck there either.

The good news is that Atenga recognizes this deficiency in the market and has launched a Pricing Education Initiative in 2009 that includes a series of webinars, monthly expert thought pieces, weekly pricing tips, and a step by step pricing education curriculum.  These are all meant to give interested parties a single resource for all things pricing.  We offer all of this for free so study up and get to best practice pricing!

For those companies that have a greater sense of urgency and would like in house training we offer an Executive Roundtable as one of our packaged services for a nominal fee.  We are happy to come to you are we can arrange an offsite roundtable, the choice is yours.

The first step is to know where you stand when benchmarked against best practice pricing. We have built and online Assessment that will do just that. It is built to assess your current pricing practice across 8 distinct categories. Once completed, you will be contacted by an Atenga analyst with your quantitative score, interpretation of the results, and detailed recommendations for immediate improvement, presented to you in an online presentation.

Atenga is the leading authority on this subject.  What makes us different is the level of granularity that results from our research.  Our methods are multi-faceted and our analytics are sound and statistically significant.  We welcome prospective clients to talk to past clients to understand those differences and the other value that we bring to the engagement.

Why now?

If you are like most of the companies that we work with, all cost cutting has been done but you still want to grow your business.  You are probably facing downward pricing pressure and increased costs.  You know that you want to maintain shareholder value but you may be out of answers.  We know and we understand!  A sound pricing practice is based on statistically significant research paired with sophisticated analytics AND it has a higher leverage and quicker return on investment than any other business activity.  It is more effective than cost cutting, sales volume increases or business process reengineering activities.  For those reasons, the time is now and pricing is the low hanging fruit for growth and improved profits.

When you lower your prices you lower the perceived and real value of your product or service.  Once the price is lowered, the product risks becoming a commodity.  The short term effect may or may not be an increase in revenue, and a reduction in profit.  In the longer term it may be nearly impossible to recapture that value. Lowering prices often provokes a competitive response, leading to a price war that can destroy the margins for your entire industry. Unless you are certain that your costs are lower than those of your competitors, a price war is nearly always ruinous.

We are happy to speak with anybody about pricing, even if they do not fit the profile of a typical Atenga client.  However, we typically engage with mid-market to larger sized companies e.g. from about $20mm in revenues per year.

Our core two service offerings are designed around launching a new product or optimizing pricing of a current product.  We have two engagement models that we work under.

1. Product Pricing Lifecycle
   This engagement model is an annual agreement with Atenga to manage the pricing throughout the products lifecycle.  Under this model we establish the initial VOP and then monitor the product’s price elasticity and value perceptions through additional studies at pre-determined times.
   
2. VOP project
   
   We will do an initial VOP project with one check up in 90 days to make any tweaks necessary.
3. Additional consulting services are available.  Check our services page for the full portfolio of offerings.

If you would like to speak with us visit our contact page.