We contend that the right pricing strategy can change the entire trajectory of a business, a market, and even society. Judging from trends in the job market, it seems that companies also believe it.
The fastest growing professional role in the United States over the last five years is Chief Growth Officer, according to LinkedIn’s analysis of changes in job titles on its vast networking platform. The people in this new role “develop and execute an organization’s strategies for driving revenue, expanding market presence and ensuring sustainable growth.” According to LinkedIn’s research, they advance from roles such as chief operating officer, VP of sales, or VP of business development.
The executive search firm Stanton Chase offers a more detailed description of the role, which encompasses market analysis and strategy development, customer acquisition and retention, product innovation and management, and data-driven decision making.
The Washington Post announced last week that it has appointed its first-ever Chief Growth Officer. Industry veteran Karl Wells will “oversee the next stage of cross-functional business growth, including subscription strategy, partnerships, licensing, and data and analytics.”
Granted, the word “pricing” doesn’t appear in Wells’s job description, nor does it appear in either explanation of the role of Chief Growth Officer. But a company’s growth depends directly on its pricing. The two are inseparable. The role of Chief Growth Officer puts pricing on the C-suite agenda, even if the word doesn’t appear explicitly in anyone’s title or job description at the moment.
In other words, it is impossible for anyone to succeed in that new role without taking pricing into account. The link between pricing decisions and growth is fundamental, because your pricing strategy expresses how and by how much you want your company to grow. That’s why it anchors our own definition of pricing strategy: “a business leader’s conscious decisions on how to shape their market by determining the amount of money available, how that money flows, and to whom. It reflects the company’s philosophy on how to acquire, retain, and satisfy customers by sharing value with them fairly.”
Chief Growth Officer wasn’t the only fast-growing job that depends on pricing. Director of Revenue Operations came in at #4 on LinkedIn’s Top 25 list. The people in this role “help oversee businesses’ revenue generation practices, working closely with sales and marketing teams to optimize business growth and ensure overall efficiency.” The recommended skills include “go-to-market strategy” and “revenue forecasting”, and the people advancing to these roles tend to come from sales, marketing, or customer success.
While these two roles are on the rise, one role is experiencing a slight decline, at least in the world’s largest companies. Fortune ran an article last week under the headline “Fortune 500 companies are eliminating chief marketing officer roles as the position loses C-suite clout.” The article stresses that marketing itself is not losing its importance or relevance. Instead, according to a practice leader at the executive search firm Spencer Stuart, marketing is “as necessary as ever, arguably more so, as evidenced by the absorption of the job’s tasks into operational and growth-focused roles.”
What do these changes mean for pricing?
One way to answer that question is to frame it differently, as we did in our introduction this week: is pricing a task, a role, or a skill?
It is tempting to dodge the question by answering “yes,” implying that it is all three. In its simplest form, pricing is indeed a task, because no commercial exchange takes place without a price. It is also a role, because someone needs to make those decisions. In the early 2000’s, some companies even established the role of Chief Pricing Officer. A 2010 article in Industry Week laid out the case for that role, noting that pricing “is so intricately tied to all levels of the organization that the pricing team has to work well across business silos and must have real expertise and knowledge of market conditions, the competitive landscape and pricing software.”
But the recent and ongoing elevation of growth to a C-level role in organizations leads us to focus more on pricing – and especially pricing strategy – as a skill. Having pricing as a critical skill is also beneficial because companies are increasingly adopting a “skills-first mindset” when they look for talent. There is also an argument, as the Game Changer book implies, that strategic pricing is a more of a soft skill than a hard skill. We stress that business leaders need to look beyond the numbers when they develop and implement a pricing strategy.
What do you think? Do you view pricing more as a task, a role, or a skill? And is it a hard or soft skill?
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