What to charge, and what happens when you change it.
A one per cent improvement in realised price drops almost entirely to the bottom line. Most businesses know this and still set price by annual increment, competitor observation and whatever the sales team will tolerate discussing.
The gap between list price and realised price is where the money actually goes, through discounts, rebates, terms and exceptions that no single person sees in total. Nobody owns the difference, so nobody manages it.
The reading covers the whole price structure rather than the headline number: what is listed, what is actually collected, what the customer and product mix does to the average, and how the offer is packaged. Each goes through the four lenses.
Price changes have consequences the finance model rarely carries: what they do to how the brand is understood, what future positions they close off, and whether the business can operationally sustain the new structure. Those are lenses two, three and four, and they are where most pricing exercises come unstuck.
Pricing runs seven instructions. Raise. Lower. Hold. Trial. Bundle. Unbundle. Reframe. Each carries a timeline, a named owner and a check date. The pricing readings sit against a design target of 0.84 drawn from a development cohort of twenty-four engagements between 2019 and 2026. That is a target rather than an observed client result, and it will be replaced by the recorded figure as the register fills.
You provide what the business already holds: the price list as it actually operates, the discount and rebate records behind it, contribution by product or tier where finance can produce it, and any customer research on price. Nothing is built specially for the exercise. Where contribution has never been measured at that level, the reading begins by extracting it.
Each pricing position is then read four ways. What it contributes after the cost of operating it. How customers actually place the price when they compare. Which future moves the position keeps open. What could go wrong: customer reaction, competitor response, regulation, execution. The four readings carry explicit weights and combine into a single view, and where they disagree, the disagreement is recorded rather than smoothed over.
What arrives is one instruction per position, drawn from seven: Raise, Lower, Hold, Trial, Bundle, Unbundle or Reframe. Each carries a stated confidence level, a named owner inside the business, and the date the outcome will be checked against the call. That check is committed to before the reading starts, not once the result is in.
Illustrative composites, drawn from the pattern of engagements rather than from any identifiable client. Figures are indicative.
Pricing sits between an econometric tradition estimating elasticities from history and a behavioural tradition explaining why those elasticities keep being wrong, and the two have coexisted for thirty years without either having to concede anything. Neither produces a decision that survives contact with a sales director who has discretion. Volume VII adds a fourth-lens deliverability test and a check date, which mostly serves to show how often the elegant answer was undeliverable.
And commercially: it finds the money between list price and the bank.
Twelve months after a reading, the instruction is compared against what happened and the result is recorded, whether or not it is flattering.
A pricing reading settles what a price list cannot tell you on its own: which positions should move, which should hold, and which are answering the wrong question. It ends in one instruction per position, each with a confidence level, a named owner and a check date. It starts smaller. You describe the decision in front of you, and Rob reads whether the method fits it before anyone commits to anything. Send one sentence: what is the decision you are trying to make?