I am not very good at poker. My friends say I have more “tells” than they can count. A tell in poker, is a facial expression or body position that gives away what kind of hand you have – a bad one, a good one and sometimes a really good one. The best poker players in the world don’t have a tell, but read others like an open book. Take a look at the embedded videos and watch Daniel Negreanu show off his amazing skills at reading his competitors and accurately guessing their hands – it’s downright freakish.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbp_i8dOUvU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhQjwdeViGk&feature=related
There is one aspect of poker I do understand well – calculating the probability of a winning hand. Without a doubt, the best poker players in the world can easily calculate the odds of winning a hand. They don’t have perfect information, but they know, right out of the gate, what their approximate chances of winning are. In Texas Hold ‘em, some cards are eventually exposed to give more information about your chances of winning and then betting continues. With each exposure, good players recalculate their odds and play accordingly. Mathematics and statistics play such a vital role in poker, you can’t even come close to competing at the highest level without it.
B2B negotiations aren’t that different from poker. The best sales people are like Daniel Negreanu in the video – they are able to read the customer. They negotiate better pricing, giving the company more profits and themselves fatter commission checks.
But even the best negotiators don’t know the probabilities. The top sales people use their vast experience to determine pricing danger zones and winning strategies. What if you could give them, and other sales people with far less experience, a window into the probability that they will actually win the deal? This is the heart of B2B pricing science – giving real-time analytics to sales people and negotiators to expose the pricing that wins while maximizing margin dollars. In poker, there are many different hands – straights, flushes, pairs, full-houses, etc. Depending on what you could put together, your strategy changes. In B2B, different types of customers, products and transactional environments change as well. Pricing science can tell you the “sweet spot” for every different scenario you can think of – often changing drastically (e.g. A large customer renewing a contract versus a small customer with a one-time rush order).
Did you notice the “probability of win” in the video? That’s really powerful information. Pricing science does exactly that – it helps calculate the probability of winning a deal or contract acceptance. Our goal is to have B2B companies negotiate closer to the price that achieves the best probability of winning as well as getting the most margin dollars. This is where poker and pricing differ. Poker is about winning. Pricing is about winning and maximizing profits.
Are your sales people armed with the right analytics to help them win? Are your competitor’s sales people armed?
