CHAPTER 35
Step Eight: Pricing After Action Reviews
You always learn by doing, but you also learn by learning, if you know what I mean.
—Yogi Berra, When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!, 2001
Recall the discussion of After Action Reviews (AAR) from Chapter 25, which focused on the technical knowledge that firms can convert from human to structural capital by utilizing the AAR.
The value council also needs to conduct AARs on the pricing of each major engagement. Again, follow the Pareto Principle: Only perform AARs on that 20 percent of customers who generate 80 percent of the revenue. One of the major problems with pricing is we can only see what we priced, yet what we really want to know is what we could have priced. My VeraSage colleague Michelle Golden summed it up nicely when she said, “This is how we refine the art of pricing—one word: Regret.” AARs will add enormously to your firm’s pricing competency and intellectual capital.
The following are questions the value council—along with the team members who worked on the customer engagement—should answer after the job is done. As always with the checklists contained in this book, it is not meant to be exhaustive but rather a beginning for you to modify to fit your firm’s needs and that of your customers.
Sample Value Council After Action Review
- Did we add value for this customer?
- How could we have added more value?
- Did we capture a fair portion of that value?
- Could we have captured more value through a higher price?
- How ...
