Sustainability: business, life, environment

Creating a sustainable business involves more than defining a vision, coming up with an innovative product, building a consumer forecast, and bringing a product or service to market. Successful companies address long-term business sustainability as an overarching mindset present in all aspects of the organization.  When it comes to product placement and sales, sustainability concepts can be a key product/price differentiator.

Your sales force is your front line of communication between your clients and your business.  They provide feedback to both the company and client on how a product or service will be presented and how it is received in the market.  This reciprocal communication between client and your sales force enables an ongoing dialog of positive and negative impacts from the company’s products and services. 

Beyond enabling your business spokesmen with sustainable product information, product pricing should reflect the same values. In the book, “Smart Pricing” the authors describe the challenges facing traditional pricing strategies.  Building on the idea of intelligent pricing, companies are incorporating eco awareness and sustainability concepts into this basic business function.  Here we examine three traditional strategies, incorporating a sustainability mindset.

•    Cost-Plus Pricing: A traditional mark-up approach that traditionally receives the least amount of business attention.  Leveraging a sustainability, the key is to create consumer value for the cost, emphasizing the sourcing of sustainable materials and services and looking for energy and process efficiencies to reduce total cost.

•    Competition-Based Pricing: A more reactive strategy seen in fierce/low profit markets.  The key is to create consumer loyalty, leveraging sustainability as a key differentiator.

•    Consumer-Based Pricing: The most aligned strategy with consumer engagement.  The key is to create two-way dialog with your stakeholders to ensure sustainable expectations and offerings are discussed.

Business sustainability is a vehicle to enable your organization to meet profit, growth, and revenue goals, while positively impacting the environment and social realms of your business.  By enabling your sales force with information aligned strategies, you are setting up the organization  to have a much higher rate of success.

Our sustainability consulting practice provides resources and works directly with clients to build long term business sustainability programs targeted at specific added value.  As part of this strategy, we encourage clients to utilize existing small business resources, such as your sales team, to communicate the business commitment and competitive advantage of incorporating sustainability concepts into product development and pricing.