ABSTRACT
In the interview “The role of the sales force in pricing strategy implementation” Andreas Hinterhuber and Frank Cespedes explore capabilities and personality traits of sales managers in implementing pricing strategy. Cespedes suggests that buyer expectations influence sales manager capabilities: and indeed, value quantification capabilities at the level of individual sales managers are the result of buyers demanding or, at least, responding positively, to quantified value propositions. Cespedes then suggests that the search for personality traits linked to sales manager effectiveness is inherently flawed: effective traits depend strongly on product type, customer type and price range so that, in the end, all traits can be, under different circumstances, effective. While this is arguably true, current research suggests that a restricted set of personality traits is associated with sales manager effectiveness. In terms of behaviours, this interview sheds light on critical elements of value-based selling – understanding customer needs, customer segmentation, customer selection, value proposition development, value-based pricing, and value quantification – that are critically important also in the context of pricing strategy implementation. A critical aspect of pricing strategy implementation are sales force incentives which should be margin-based and reward price performance. In practice this frequently is not the case: most sales force incentives are based on volume.
