Pricing is hugely influential to your sales volume, so you've got to stay competitive. But pricing mastery, like mastery of any skill, doesn't just happen overnight. It takes a lot of focus and experience to develop in-depth conceptual understanding of fuel pricing. Many analysts never reach it.
There are, fortunately, some things you can do to speed up the process of mastery, and therefore, the practice of pricing optimization.
Becoming a Competitive Pricing Genius
To rise above your competition, try these tips:
- Facilitate speed
Facilitating speed means you've streamlined all of your data, have an option for visualizing that data in real time, and have configured your digital workspaces to better manage your productivity.
The geographic area in which you'd like to implement changes can be broad or highly specific. Either way, you should maintain focus on site characteristics. To sort through sites with given characteristics and thereby better inform your pricing decisions, you'll need a database that allows you to create, save, group and sort complex queries, so you can maintain a targeted analysis approach.
- Train yourself and your team
Becoming a competitive pricing genius requires deep knowledge of your products and industry. Where are you and your team members receiving training on these topics today? If you don't have a learning plan or knowledge library, you likely won't be able to develop the level of conceptualization necessary to truly master the pricing art.
Think Like a Master
Ultimately, competitive pricing requires competitive thinking. And competitive thinking requires a breadth of knowledge about your individual sites, fuel pricing across geographic areas, market trends and your competitors' strategies. With that deep understanding, you'll be able to position your pricing strategy against competitors' in order to reap the most benefit from pricing that drives volumes and margins you want.
Once you're thinking this way, you'll need access to the right metrics that can verify your thinking. In the same vein, you'll need access to tools that allow for immediate execution across geographies. And if you're going to truly contribute to the bottom line, you also need a clear plan for verifying ROI.
In sum, mastering the art of competitive pricing is really about developing a conceptual understanding of fuel pricing — and then integrating that understanding with quality data and tools.
Recommended Next Read: Synergy for Total Site Profitability: Connect Pricing and Planning for Competitive Advantage