Selling to other businesses is a different ball game than selling to consumers, and requires different strategies across the entire gamut of decisions you'll be making.
One of those differences in the pricing strategies that you employ. If you're struggling to decide how your B2B products or services should be priced, this post will help demystify the issue for you.
We'll talk about the differences between B2B and B2C pricing, some common B2B pricing strategies, and give you some tips to get the perfect price for the goods and services you sell.
B2B pricing refers tois a business’sthe strategy for setting prices on goods and services theywith the intendt to sell them to other businesses. This differs B2B from B2C pricing, where the customer base is composedcomprised of consumers and not other businesses. To understand the differences between the two and how to make smarter B2B pricing decisions for improved pricing performance, let's dive deeper into the subject.
Businesses and consumers behave differently in the marketplace, and the pricing strategies employed for each of them must adapt to that differing behavior. There are two major ways that B2B pricing strategies need to be differentiated from B2C pricing strategies if they are going to be as effective as possible:
Sales to consumers are almost always uniform in pricing. There are some exceptions. For example, consumers will often negotiate the price of expensive items such as automobiles. In the business world, prices are negotiated much more frequently than they are in the consumer world. Businesses are likely to be frequently dealing with highly-priced invoices. Whether these higher prices come from a small number of expensive products or bulk purchases of cheaper products, the tendency to negotiate down is ever-present in the B2B world.
Consumer pricing is fairly easy. The consumer decides for themselves whether they would like to purchase a product based on the price it is offered for, which is almost always displayed transparently throughout the process. B2B pricing is more complicated. There are often many people involved in the buying process and a chain of command that must be followed before a purchase decision can be made. This is complicated further by the fact that pricing is very often not as upfront and transparent as B2C pricing is, for the reason mentioned above.
Now that we've discussed how B2B pricing strategies are different from those of B2C, let's discuss the strategies themselves. There are a number of strategies that businesses may employ to price their products when selling to other businesses, but the four listed below are the most common choices. Let's go over each of them and discuss the reasons a business might want to choose, or avoid, a particular pricing strategy.
Also known as markup pricing, cost-plus pricing is one of the more simple pricing strategies out there. With this strategy, the cost to produce a good or service is calculated. This means adding up the materials, labor, and overhead required to produce one unit of the item. After that, a fixed markup percentage is added on top. For example, an item that costs $10 to make and had a 50% markup, would sell for $15. Because this is such a simple pricing model, factors such as competitor pricing are not considered when calculating it.
With cost-plus pricing, it is easy to price your product too high, but also easy to leave money on the table. Value-based pricing seeks to avoid those problems by charging based on what the value to the customer is. More directly, value-based pricing charges what the business thinks the customers would be willing to pay for a product. If the calculation is correct, this makes for a very efficient pricing strategy.
In some cases, you can let your competitors do the hard work of finding the best value-based price for you. Competitor-based pricing works by gathering the prices of all your competitors, averaging them, and then deciding whether you want to go a little higher or a little lower. As long as most of your successful competitors have gotten the pricing strategy right, you'll always be in the ballpark as well.
Dynamic pricing seeks to take into account all the factors that may affect what consumers will pay at any given time. This includes supply and demand, competitor pricing, and any other data you can find to feed the algorithms. With modern machine learning, predicting the optimal price at any given time is much more accurate than it was in the past.
So with all of these choices, how do you know which one is best for your B2B business? Finding the perfect pricing model and then refining that model into the perfect price point, takes a bit of experience and a fair amount of work. Still, there are some tips that you can use to reduce the guesswork and get to the right pricing more quickly.
You can't just assume that the first pricing strategy you pick will be the winner. Experiment with different prices and pricing structures until you find the right one.
Your marketing department is likely already to have a set of buyer personas worked up. These buyer personas can also help you determine what your particular customers will be willing to pay.
Beyond the fictionalized personas, your sales force works directly with your customers. They know them well and can give you insight into what they will be willing to pay.
Even if you don't use dynamic pricing, that doesn't mean you can't take advantage of the same types of analytics and algorithms to help you set your initial prices. Big data is a powerful tool. Use it.
Failure to account for common causes of leakage can result in pricing that makes you less than it should or even pricing that costs you money.
Pricing is perhaps the most important factor in the success or failure of your business, yet for many businesses, it is nothing more than an afterthought. If you take the time to better understand your customers, your market, and your pricing strategy, you'll already be giving yourself a leg up on the competition.
The game is only just beginning once you've got your pricing right. Actually growing your business requires more work and more data. With our free ProfitWell Metrics solution, you'll have all the data you need to make intelligent decisions about your B2B business and identify problem areas that are preventing your growth. Track and improve key performance indicators such as churn, and monitor how good of a job your customer success team is doing at keeping customers happy.
To take things a step further, ProfitWell Retain will help you reduce churn, even more, using state-of-the-art algorithms that help you retain more customers and win back ones you've lost due to a failed payment. Finally, if you still don't feel you've quite got your pricing right, pricing tools like our Price Intelligently service will use a combination of powerful machine learning algorithms and our many years of experience to find you the optimal price point.
Price Intelligently's team of monetization experts work with you to combine strategy and data to solve complex business problems and accelerate your growth.
Talk to us todayThere are multiple B2B pricing strategies, with some of the most popular ones being:
A B2B sale refers to the process of one business selling goods or services to another business. For example, a retailer buying goods from a wholesaler in order to then sell those same goods to consumers. B2B can also refer to services that, for instance, corporate attorneys offering their services to companies.