B2B Pricing: Negotiation, Calculation, Strategy - (E-M)

Stream I: Price Negotiation

• Advanced Bargaining Techniques (includes negotiation role play)
• Tough Bargaining (includes negotiation role play)
• Strategy & Tactics of Professional Buyers
• Multi-Item Negotiation (includes negotiation role play)
• Price Negotiation Meets Price Calculation (includes negotiation role play)

Stream II: Price Calculation

• Advanced Price-Quantity-Cost Trade-Offs
• Cost Calculation Traps and Activity-Based Costing (includes cost calculation case)
• Price vs. Working Capital Trade-Offs
• Advanced Value-Based Pricing (includes value calculation case)
• Best Practices and Limits of Data-Driven B2B Pricing (includes guest speech)

Stream III: Price Strategy

• Pricing Services
• "As a Service" Pricing
• Advanced Channel Pricing (includes guest speech)

The course consciously minimizes overlaps with my Foundations of Sales course in WHU's Bachelor program. Thus, it is valuable to students who had a class with me before and those who haven't. To bring everyone to the same level before the course, students with a Bachelor's degree from other schools than WHU receive the Foundations of Pricing material from my BSc course as a complimentary self-study.

Today's B2B salespeople face professionally trained buyers who put enormous pressure on prices, cost-to-serve, and working capital. In pricing negotiations, salespeople need not only to master communication techniques and tactics but calculate price concessions and package deals. Before the negotiation, they need to sell the solution's value to the customer and justify a higher price by overall savings. They require negotiation skills and proficiency in cost accounting.

This course uniquely links cost accounting, price negotiation, and marketing strategy. You will benefit from participating even if you have taken a negotiation course previously. The course goes beyond pricing theory. It dives into pricing practice and embeds price management in sales force management. You will learn that pricing is far more than techniques and analytics. Pricing success critically depends on aligning people. If you have not had a negotiation class before, this course offers a good introduction you don't want to miss. Negotiation is a crucial social skill both inside and outside business. We negotiate all the time - with business partners, with our spouse, and with others. Some say that, in life, we don't get what we deserve but what we negotiate.

The course conduces to a wide range of career tracks: Entrepreneurs need to know pricing as it is the No. 1 profit driver. General management careers benefit from implementing pricing excellence in a large sales force. Sales careers benefit from price negotiation techniques. Like chess, negotiating is fun if you know the crucial moves – but it can be a painful experience if you don't. Marketing careers benefit from the content on value-based pricing strategy and the interface between sales and operations. Finance students learn how day-to-day sales activities determine financial concepts such as working capital. Consulting careers benefit from quantifying how managerial decisions affect profit and cash flow.

The course intends to enhance five categories of competencies:

• Factual knowledge, for example, applying negotiation jargon to discussing the status of negotiation (such as BATNA, ZOPA, walk-away price, logrolling, non-offer offer, good cop – bad cop, and other idioms) and defining pricing performance indicators,
• conceptual knowledge, for example, analyzing negotiation interests and positions, analyzing economic value to the customer, calculating price-trade-offs against other profit drivers, and calculating activity-based costs of products and services,
• pricing-specific procedural knowledge, for example, applying a structured negotiation blueprint and dealing with negotiation tactics and price objections,
• general business-relevant procedural knowledge, for example, preparing for business meetings, making the best out of a limited preparation time budget, making concise contributions to discussions, constructively building on arguments by other participants, and
• metacognitive knowledge, for example, evaluating one's negotiation behavior and creating a skill profile for price managers.

The learning method mix includes role-play sessions between students with joint debriefings, case-based discussions with concluding mini-lectures, interactive concept lectures, and managerial guest presentations. Watch this video showing the style of case-based sessions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbNNsq1fC0A. Problem-based learning requires significant energy from both the student and the teacher.

• 50%: negotiation preparation quizzes and case preparation notes (pdf, bullet points are enough)
• 50%: 60-minute final exam (closed book, formula sheets provided). The final exam is a laptop-based Moodle quiz, regardless of whether you write on-campus or off-campus. It is composed of quantitative calculation questions and qualitative multiple-choice questions.