The Price Is Right - Maybe: New Deloitte Book Demystifies Pricing and Profitability Management

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Jul 13, 2011, 10:00 ET

NEW YORK, July 13, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Pricing is a powerful and proven strategy for improving profitability, yet few organizations know how to do pricing well. "Pricing and Profitability Management: A Practical Guide for Business Leaders," a new book released today by Deloitte, helps organizations to better understand and implement effective pricing management.

Deloitte practitioners and authors Julie Meehan, Mike Simonetto, Larry Montan and Chris Goodin bring decades of experience in pricing and profitability management to support their perspectives on results of pricing decision-making and the need for an integrated approach.

"Despite improvement in recent years most companies still aren't capable of managing price effectively and are leaving real money on the table," said Mike Simonetto, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP and global pricing and profitability management practice leader.

Simonetto added, "Many companies are awakening to the power of pricing and are starting to make the investment to improve their capabilities. Pricing competency is quickly becoming table stakes as organizations without a roadmap for improvement will likely see it reflected negatively in their bottom lines."

Fellow author, Julie Meehan, a leader in Deloitte's pricing and profitability management practice, said, "We give readers insight into how companies can transform their pricing capabilities to dramatically improve their businesses. While many executives focus on price setting with marketing and sales teams, they sometimes neglect the role that finance, information technology, human resources, legal and other teams have in managing price execution and margin erosion in a sustainable, company-wide approach to pricing."

In the book Deloitte outlines the following six core competencies of a holistic, integrated approach to pricing:

Price Execution: Processes and policies a company uses to deliver prices to the marketplace.
Pricing Strategy: Guiding principles to how a company establishes its prices
Advanced Analytics and Price Setting: The use of data and specific analyses to view the business at the transaction level, set prices, and manage margin erosion. This can reveal customer, channel and product profitability patterns across millions of transaction records.
Organizational Alignment and Governance: People and cultural factors that shape pricing behavior including organizational structure, sales effectiveness, training and talent management.
Pricing Technology: Software applications that help companies sustain effective pricing by providing the technical environment required for repeatable price analytics and execution.
Tax and Regulatory Management: A company's ability to proactively manage the tax and regulatory issues related to pricing decisions to ultimately retain the benefits from pricing improvements.

Additional information and an excerpt of the book are available at http://www.deloitte.com/us/pricingbook

As used in this document, "Deloitte" means Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.