Face the ugly truth: Most people don’t get very excited by numbers
I have a good friend named Alex who, like me, is very much into numbers and very much into football. In fact, he is a passionate professional football coach. Alex recently learnt about a rather new discipline called people analytics and how professional sports teams are using this data-driven approach to improve their performance.
Excited by the idea of combining both of his passions, he went to conferences, read loads of books and learnt what there was to learn about analysing player data. He started collecting data and built a player database. Slicing and dicing the data, he was able to identify several things that he was convinced could be improved and would have a positive impact on the team’s success. Energised by his findings, he went back, showed his analysis in detail to the team and told them which capabilities they needed to work on to become more successful. How do you think the team reacted?
Not only didn’t they understand what he was saying. They started questioning his abilities to coach a football team. In fact, he was threatened by the club management to lose his position. But Alex was confident that his insights would benefit the team, and luckily, he was stubborn enough to give it another try; only this time by pursuing a different approach. When he changed the conversations that he had with his players, the situation began to improve. As an example, he started to talk to the strikers about the importance for them to score more goals and how becoming faster on the first 10 metres could help them to succeed with that. If you are wondering what this has to do with pricing, you should read on.
If we keep nurturing our role as “number nerds”, we will not succeed in engaging the commercial organisation
Many business leaders find themselves in a similar situation as Alex. Research shows that only 33% of all change projects deliver the impact intended, and the main reason for that is employee resistance to change. From our many years of experience with commercial transformation projects, we know that this is particularly true for pricing initiatives.