I read Seth Godin’s blog every day. Many days, what he says relates directly to pricing. Today’s blog—Is There a Marketing Person Leading the IT Team—is just one of those blogs.
He provides a few horrendous examples of companies interacting with their customers. In these cases, they are all the result of IT making decisions on what is easy for them to do, not what the customers really want.
This is a great reminder that everyone in your company can create or destroy value. Every customer touchpoint creates or destroys value. You may have a great product and market it well, but if your company is hard to do business with, many people will choose to not do business with you.
As a pricing person, I think about it this way: “How much lower would I have to price my product to entice someone who doesn’t want to do business with us to change their mind?” All pricing does is capture value. If your company destroys it through horrendous IT decisions, there’s less to capture, meaning we have to charge lower prices to win an affected customer.
