A couple of weeks ago I published an article called Pricing Professional – The time has come . The piece outlined the need for distributors to consider how they run their business and develop a new position. We hit on why the person who typically handled ‘pricing tasks’ was likely more of an administrator responsible for loading the prices of income purchases rather than a margin building professional. We pushed for distributors to consider the impact of a true pricing process and the qualities of the person best equipped to make the pricing process work. Somewhere along the way, we touched a nerve. Building a pricing process is a viewed as a top secret strategy. While a number of our readers commented, it seems no one wants to go on record with their plans. Here is a sample of the way the emails began: “Hope things are going well. While you'd probably prefer I comment directly on the post I really don't want our competitors to know we're doing this. So feel ...

A quick review of the Profit Reports generated by several knowledge-based distributor associations reveals a few undeniable facts: • Distributors sell thousands of SKUs • Distributors sell to thousands of customers • This equates to millions of customer/product combinations Another point dwells just below the surface. While it is harder to spot without lining up the reports over long period of time, our research indicates the typical distributor discounts more when times are good than when they are bad. You would think that margins would go down in tough times and up in good times, but the preliminary results indicate just the opposite. Perhaps times of economic growth cause us to loosen up our grip on pricing mechanisms. Maybe we get just a little sloppy. Or, perhaps our customers rev-up their negotiating strategies. Still, we find ourselves discounting. As we say here in Iowa, " let’s put some lipstick on this pig ."  Our customers don’t think poorly of us b...