Apply Six Sigma to Your #1 Business Challenge: Pricing

“Six Sigma is well known for having helped companies save billions of dollars. This book is the first to show us how to use it on the revenue side of the equation to generate profitable growth. This step-by-step guide will be an instant classic—a seminal book on a topic critical to profitability.”

—Robert Cross, Chairman and CEO, Revenue Analytics Inc. and author of Revenue Management

“Six Sigma Pricing provides companies with a practical toolkit to improve their price management. The authors show executives how to use Six Sigma tools in their pricing processes and instantly improve profits and their bottom-line. This is a truly ‘must-have’ resource for managers everywhere.”

—Eric Mitchell, President, Professional Pricing Society

Many companies have developed solid sales strategies– but without equally good pricing operations, those strategies alone will not add a dime to the bottom line.

The goal of pricing operations is to consistently control price deviations in transactions and contracts over time and across customer segments. This goal of ensuring the prices are not too low or too high in different transactions relative to guidelines lends itself perfectly to Six Sigma. Using the authors’ breakthrough Six Sigma-based approach, you can systematically eliminate pricing-related revenue leaks, driving higher profits without alienating customers. You’ll learn how to define pricing “defects,” gather and analyze relevant pricing data, review pricing-agreement processes, identify and control failures, implement improvements, and then ensure continuous, ongoing improvement in price, profits and customer satisfaction.

The book reflects the authors’ pioneering experience implementing Six Sigma pricing. Whether you’re a business leader, strategist, manager, consultant, or Six Sigma specialist, it will help you or your client recover profits that have been slipping through the cracks in pricing operations.

•Learn why Six Sigma Pricing makes sense

    Why you should target pricing operations, and how to do it 

• Identify profit leaks from inefficient pricing operations

    Why “sloppy pricing” occurs, how to find it, and how to root it out 

• Illuminate your current pricing processes, so you can improve them

    Understand your market-facing and internally focused pricing processes pertaining to product launch and lifecycle price management, price increases due to escalation in costs of raw materials, promotions, and discounting

• Set up your pricing operations for continuous improvement in line with your pricing and sales strategy 

    Use Six Sigma to improve and control processes, ensuring alignment with agreed-upon strategy for pricing and sales

• Create an organization that is successful at pricing

    Align different functions and levels of the company to achieve targeted profits

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 10 Ratings

Should Be Only An Article - 2008-12-16
Reviewer Rating:
"Six Sigma Pricing" began as a Harvard Business Review article and should have stayed as such - most of the material covers very basic Six Sigma, TQM, and pricing material. Nonetheless, the authors central point - an approach to increase profits via improved pricing control, is valuable.

They point out that sales personnel have incentives that typically depend on the sales generated, not on realized prices of profits. Buyers' agents, on the other hand, have incentives that typically depend on the discounts they extract from list prices. Meanwhile, requests by sales personnel to get prices approved within the company may take so long that customers go elsewhere.

There are also problems with buyers and their agents delaying purchases until the end of the month to obtain greater discounts, and failures to end promotions in the sellers' computer system upon date expiration.

The authors tested a method using various levels of authorized discounts, according to position (eg. sales, analyst, and upper management), and found it significantly improved revenues.

Six Sigma Pricing - 2008-03-18
Reviewer Rating:
Pricing, getting it "right" and positioning a company with a cohesive plan to address this critical process is always a challenge. While some may think of Six Sigma as a cold, clinical tool (which it can be), the authors get it right with Six Sigma Pricing. From my perspective, the volatile economic environment in which we find ourselves operating today, with the Euro surging past US$1.55, profit margins can dissipate more quickly than one can imagine if you are not on top of your game. The authors couple Six Sigma processes and good business sense with proven processes to help companies manage this critical process. Very well done.

An intriguing and important perspective on pricing - 2008-02-12
Reviewer Rating:
The authors admit early in the book that they've taken on a very challenging task: to provide readers a way to bring what might be the most unwieldly and convoluted corporate process - the "pricing process" - under some semblance of control. To a large degree, they succeed. They do a wonderful job of using Six Sigma as a means to make this challenge manageable, without letting Six Sigma gain the upper hand. In other words, this is a very useful and practical book about removing defects from your decision-making process on pricing. It's not a book which treats pricing as just more grist for the Six Sigma mill. This book is definitely worth reading if you feel your company's pricing process needs more discipline, rigor, and structure.

For all of you interested in pricing processes - 2009-03-28
Reviewer Rating:
This book will be very valuable to you if you are interested in pricing processes and deviations/lost value that can happen due to the fact that these (pricing processes) are quite often "dirty". How to standardize and control your "actual" prices to match as close as possible your "list" prices is a main thought of this book. I liked it pretty much, it surely put some different light onto my pricing/process thoughts. I recommend it to pricing/marketing and sales professionals working in mid-large organizations and managing complex price lists (more than 100 current prices at all times).

A great consultative tool for Corporate Strategy and strategic dialogue - 2008-07-10
Reviewer Rating:
Six Sigma Pricing: Improving Pricing Operations to Increase Profits (Six Sigma)

I would recommend this book to any executive looking to gain a better understanding of pricing, the pricing process, and the dynamics involved in bringing better pricing precision to your organization.

As a C-suite executive in a $1B food manufacturing company, while I have no pricing/procurement responsibilities, I am directly involved in Strategy and strategic planning for our organization; and in the current marketplace of rising commodity costs with questionable price elasticity, maximizing profits for us requires a thorough understanding of price.

This book helped me better understand and participate in the strategic discussions with my other business partners.

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