3 steps to sell and communicate price increases

In today's fast-changing business environment, excelling in Revenue Growth Management (RGM) is essential for Commercial Leaders aiming to boost revenue and profit, both now and in the future.

Unlike traditional methods that confine RGM to pricing actions, forward-looking Commercial Leaders recognize that activating a holistic, end-to-end RGM strategy that is consumer/shopper focused and customer-back, leads to more significant growth and allows leaders and teams to not only anticipate, but actively influence consumer demand and customer needs.

Historically, Revenue Growth Management (RGM) has been approached as a temporary and reactionary project, which was typically led by external experts in response to inflationary markets. This limited approach confined the benefits to a small part of the business and focused on short-term results, rather than embedding RGM as an ongoing, fundamental aspect of business strategy that could deliver sustained, long-term growth.

Today, mature RGM organizations treat RGM strategy and execution much differently, positioning the actions at the center of their strategic operations, embedding capabilities deeply within their organizational processes and ways of working. This transformation is not just procedural but is a shift that forces RGM strategy, tactics, and mindset into every action and function of the business.‍

Strategic integration of RGM at scale: A roadmap for success

1. Build strong in-house expertise: To see the scaled benefits of RGM, develop strong capabilities within your commercial teams and intermediate understanding of your cross-functional teams. When your leaders and teams fully grasp RGM tactics and mindsets, it creates scaled-impact that can be sustained without external reliance.
2. Encourage cross-functional collaboration: The effectiveness of RGM strategy and execution is only fully realized when it involves a fully cross-functional team. Promoting collaboration between sales, marketing, finance, R&D, and the supply chain enriches insights, strategy and execution feasibility, and organizational success.
3. Integrate RGM strategy into key business processes: By connecting RGM directly to critical operations such as budgeting and strategic planning, you ensure that RGM principles are woven into the fabric of annual planning instead of being treated as a one-time project. This integration influences everyday decisions and guides long-term business strategies.
4. Overcome implementation challenges with effective change management: Embracing a robust RGM approach involves substantial change and a shift in traditional revenue growth mindsets. Address these challenges through strong change management practices, aligning team incentives with new strategies and providing clear, successful examples of RGM in action to inspire and motivate your teams.

The competitive edge of building RGM capability across the organization:

1. Encouraging innovation from Consumer-Back: It’s no surprise that RGM should be activated starting with consumer and shopper insights. When truly building a strategy from the consumer-back, you build a mindset and process that is ripe for innovation. This helps your company stay competitive and lead industry trends and demands, instead of reacting.
2. Aligned decision-making for the short and long-term: A thorough RGM strategy speeds up and improves the day-to-day decision-making process of consumer and customer facing commercial teams. It helps ensure that decisions—like setting pricing strategies, choosing promotional activities, or allocating resources—are aligned with the market’s immediate needs and long-term goals for the category.
3. Boosting market responsiveness: In today’s volatile business climate, the ability to swiftly adapt to market changes is invaluable. Decentralizing RGM capabilities enables cross-functional local teams to be agile to market shifts in strategic ways, turning potential challenges into opportunities, while still staying aligned to the longer-term market objectives.
4. Cultivate a results-driven culture: Building RGM roles across the organization allows for greater ownership and accountability to improve revenue and ultimately grow market share. This means a greater population has a direct role to play in driving business performance and are responsible for keeping an external pulse on consumers, shoppers, and customers.

Implementing a cohesive RGM strategy, instilling the right mindsets, and providing the leaders and teams with the tools and processes needed to be successful, is no small feat. However, the revenue, profit, and market share impact can be substantial when an aligned RGM strategy is deployed at scale. This strategic commitment positions your company for enduring success and a powerful competitive advantage in today’s dynamic consumer, shopper, and customer landscape.

While small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a vital role in driving economic growth and innovation, they often face unique challenges when dealing with banks. This makes relationship banking crucial to their success. By strengthening their relationship banking models, banks can differentiate themselves from competitors by improving the support they provide to SMEs, helping these businesses overcome challenges and thrive in the marketplace. In discussions with owners of SMEs about their experiences with banks, four common concerns emerge:

1. Access to credit. Obtaining financing for purposes such as working capital, expansion, or equipment purchase is a significant challenge for SMEs. Banks often perceive them as riskier borrowers due to their limited credit history, lack of collateral, or volatile revenue streams, which can make it difficult to secure loans.
2. High interest rates and fees. SMEs may face higher interest rates and fees compared to larger, more established businesses due to banks' perception of greater default risk, as well as limited financial transaction volumes.
3. Complex application processes. SMEs often face time-consuming and complex loan application processes, requiring extensive documentation such as financial statements, tax returns, and business plans.
4. Inflexible lending terms. SMEs may struggle with inflexible lending terms, including strict collateral requirements, short repayment periods, or covenants that restrict operational flexibility. These terms can make it difficult for SMEs to manage cash flow and invest in growth.

By adopting the following approach, relationship managers can help businesses overcome these challenges:

• Advocate for clients within the bank, helping them secure financing for business expansion, capital investments, working capital growth, and asset accumulation.
• Offer guidance on optimizing cash resources within the constraint of limited capital resources.
• Provide advice on managing personal wealth accumulated through business ownership.

This approach requires a set of knowledge and capabilities:

• Business acumen—an understanding of SMEs’ unique needs and business challenges.
• Recognition of the essential role cash flow plays in small business success and an understanding of how to optimize it.
• Familiarity with the financial impact of bank products on SMEs' finances.
• Understanding of small business funding models, including the roles of owners, banks, and investors.
• Insight into the migration of SMEs to medium-sized enterprises.

Equipped with these capabilities and this knowledge, bankers can employ critical relationship management skills at four key stages:

• Planning. Gain local market knowledge and industry/sector expertise before engaging with clients.
• Discovery. Approach SMEs with a focus on their unique needs, recognizing the distinct characteristics of owner-managed and owner-financed businesses.
• Engagement. Position offerings from a client-impact perspective, rather than a bank- product perspective, addressing the specific needs and challenges of SMEs.
• Closing. Adopt a partnering approach and act as an advocate for SME clients within the bank, particularly when dealing with credit functions and decision-makers.

By focusing on these areas, banks can enhance their relationship banking model for SME customers, providing personalized support and tailored financial solutions to help small businesses succeed in a competitive landscape.

In today's rapidly evolving consumer landscape, marked by disruptive innovations and increasing competition, retail banks are facing a pivotal moment. Digital banking is here to stay – but shockingly, so too is its predecessor - branch banking. The traditional role of the branch is evolving, however, and leaders in the industry need to stay relevant in this dynamic environment by embracing key changes.

Why are branches alive and well in the digital age?

Despite the proliferation of digital channels, brick and mortar branches continue to play a vital role in retail banking. Research shows that while routine transactions are moving online, branches still remain critical to:

• Customer acquisition and retention: Branches remain the primary channel for opening new accounts and acquiring customers, particularly high-value segments.
• Personalized advice and sales: Complex and high-value products such as mortgages, loans, and investments require personalized interactions. Branches excel at providing tailored advice and converting sales opportunities.
• Trust and loyalty: Human interactions are essential to building trust and loyalty, especially when addressing financial concerns and needs.

The future of branch-level sales management

To stay competitive and relevant, sales leaders in retail banking must pivot from traditional methodologies and adopt a future-forward approach. This means:

1. Adapting to customer preferences: Sales leaders must understand and respond to changing customer behavior and preferences, thus offering a customer experience that seamlessly integrates digital and physical channels.

2. Leveraging data and analytics: Sales leaders must be able to harness the power of data to gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs. This enables leaders to take a targeted and personalized approach to engaging customers.

3. Empowering sales teams: Sales leaders need to invest in the development of their sales teams, enhancing their skills and knowledge and equipping them with the right tools to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

4. Optimizing branch functionality: Sales leaders must rethink the branch model, focusing on smaller, more versatile formats that cater to specific customer needs all within the same branch footprint.

5. Innovation and collaboration: Sales leaders must foster a culture of innovation and collaboration, encouraging their teams to experiment, learn, and share best practices. Organizations should consider collaborating with fintech companies to take advantage of emerging technologies and deliver innovative solutions that better meet customer’s needs.

A call to action

Digital banking may be the future, but branch baking is here to stay. Sales leaders in retail banking who want to thrive in the future need to embrace this transformation, the integration of old and new, and reimagine how they manage their customer experience and how they meet customer needs. By adopting a forward-thinking approach, leveraging technology, and nurturing talent, retail banks can unlock new opportunities, drive growth, and stay relevant amid increased competition. Are you ready to take on the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead?

Technology choices are often made under pressure - pressure to modernize, to respond to shifting client expectations, to demonstrate progress, or to keep pace with rapid advances in AI. In those moments, even experienced leadership teams can fall into familiar traps: over-estimating how differentiated a capability will remain, under-estimating the organizational cost of sustaining it, and committing earlier than the strategy or operating model can realistically support.

After decades of working with leaders through digital and technology-enabled transformations, I’ve seen these dynamics play out again and again. The issue is rarely the quality of the technology itself. It’s the timing of commitment, and how quickly an early decision hardens into something far harder to unwind than anyone intended.

What has changed in today’s AI-accelerated environment is not the nature of these traps, but the margin for error. It has narrowed dramatically.

For small and mid-sized organizations, the consequences are immediate. You don't have specialist teams running parallel experiments or long runways to course correct. A single bad platform decision can absorb scarce capital, distort operating models, and take years to unwind just as the market shifts again.

AI intensified this tension. It is wildly over-hyped as a silver bullet and quietly under-estimated as a structural disruptor. Both positions are dangerous. AI won’t magically fix broken processes or weak strategy, but it will change the economics of how work gets done and where value accrues.

When leaders ask how to approach digital platforms, AI adoption, or operating model design, four questions consistently matter more than the technology itself.

• What specific market problem does this solve, and what is it worth?
• Is this capability genuinely unique, or is it rapidly becoming commoditized?
• What is the true total cost - not just to build, but to run and evolve over time?
• What is the current pace of innovation for this niche?

For many leadership teams, answering these questions leads to the same strategic posture. Move quickly today while preserving options for tomorrow. Not as doctrine, but as a way of staying adaptive without mistaking early commitment for strategic clarity.

Why build versus buy is the wrong starting point

One of the most common traps organizations fall into is treating digital strategy as a series of isolated build-vs-buy decisions. That framing is too narrow, and it usually arrives too late.

A more powerful question is this. How do we preserve optionality as the landscape continues to evolve? Technology decisions often become a proxy for deeper organizational challenges. Following acquisitions or periods of rapid change, pressure frequently surfaces at the front line. Sales teams respond to client feedback. Delivery teams push for speed. Leaders look for visible progress.

In these moments, technology becomes the focal point for action. Not because it is the root problem, but because it is tangible.

The real risk emerges operationally. Poorly sequenced transitions, disruption to the core business, and value that proves smaller or shorter-lived than anticipated. Teams become locked into delivery paths that no longer make commercial sense, while underlying system assumptions remain unchanged.

The issue is rarely technical. It is temporal.

Optimizing for short-term optics, particularly client-facing signals of progress, often comes at the expense of longer-term adaptability. A cleaner interface over an ageing platform may buy temporary parity, but it can also delay the more important work of rethinking what is possible in the near and medium term.

Conservatism often shows up quietly here. Not as risk aversion, but as a preference for extending the familiar rather than exploring what could fundamentally change.

Licensing as a way to buy time and insight

In fast-moving areas such as AI orchestration, many organizations are choosing to license capability rather than build it internally. This is not because licensing is perfect. It rarely is. It introduces constraints and trade-offs. But it was fast. And more importantly, it acknowledged reality.

The pace of change in this space is such that what looks like a good architectural decision today may be actively unhelpful in twelve months. Licensing allowed us to operate right at the edge of what we actually understood at the time - without pretending we knew where the market would land six or twelve months later.

Licensing should not be seen as a lack of ambition. It is often a way of buying time, learning cheaply, and avoiding premature commitment. Building too early doesn’t make you visionary, often it just makes you rigid.

AI is neither a silver bullet nor a feature

Coaching is a useful microcosm of the broader AI debate.

Great AI coaching that is designed with intent and grounded in real coaching methodology can genuinely augment the experience and extend impact. The market is saturated with AI-enabled coaching tools and what is especially disappointing is that many are thin layers of prompts wrapped around a large language model. They are responsive, polite, and superficially impressive - and they largely miss the point.

Effective coaching isn’t about constant responsiveness. It’s about clarity. It’s about bringing experience, structure, credibility, and connection to moments where someone is stuck.

At the other extreme, coaches themselves are often deeply traditional. A heavy pen, a leather-bound notebook, and a Royal Copenhagen mug of coffee are far more likely to be sitting on the desk than the latest GPT or Gemini model.

That conservatism is understandable - coaching is built on trust, presence, and human connection - but it’s increasingly misaligned with how scale and impact are actually created.

The real opportunity for AI is not to replace human work with a chat interface. It is to codify what actually works. The decision points, frameworks, insights, and moments that drive behavior change. AI can then be used to augment and extend that value at scale.

A polished interface over generic capability is not enough. If AI does not strengthen the core value of the work, it is theatre, not transformation.

What this means for leaders

Across all of these examples, the same pattern shows up.

The hardest decisions are rarely about capability, they are about timing, alignment, and conviction.

Building from scratch only makes sense when you can clearly articulate:

• What you believe that the market does not
• Why that belief creates defensible value
• Why you’re willing to concentrate risk behind it

Clear vision scales extraordinarily well when it’s tightly held. The success of narrow, focused Silicon Valley start-ups is testament to that.

Larger organizations often carry a broader set of commitments. That complexity increases when depth of expertise is spread across functions, and even more so when sales teams have significant autonomy at the point of sale. Alignment becomes harder not because people are wrong, but because too many partial truths are competing at once.

In these environments, strategic clarity, not headcount or spend, creates advantage.

This is why many leadership teams choose to license early. Not because building is wrong, but because most organizations have not yet earned the right to build.

This article was originally publish on Rotman Management

IN OUR CONSULTING WORK with teams at all levels—especially senior leadership—my colleagues and I have noticed teams grappling with an insidious challenge: a lack of effective prioritization. When everything is labeled a priority, nothing truly is. Employees feel crushed under the weight of competing demands and the relentless urgency to deliver on multiple fronts. Requests for prioritization stem from both a lack of focused direction and the challenge of efficiently fulfilling an overwhelming volume of work. Over time, this creates a toxic cycle of burnout, inefficiency and dissatisfaction.

The instinctive response to this issue is to streamline, reduce the number of initiatives, and focus. While this is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t fully address the problem. Prioritization isn’t just about whittling down a to-do list or ranking activities by importance and urgency on an Eisenhower Decision Matrix; it also requires reshaping how we approach work more productively.

In our work, we have found that three critical factors lie at the heart of solving prioritization challenges: tasks, tracking and trust. Addressing these dimensions holistically can start to address the root causes of feeling overwhelmed and lay the foundation for sustainable productivity. Let’s take a closer look at each.

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You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”

Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.

‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’

A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.

Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:

• Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
• Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
• Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
• Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
• Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
• Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
• Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
• Merger integration.

Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.

The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs

Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context?  When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.

10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations

With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:

1. Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
2. Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
3. Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
4. Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
5. Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
6. Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
7. User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
8. Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
9. Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
10. Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.

Better Results, Faster

Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.

Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination

Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.

Putting Business Simulations to Work

Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.

Learn more about business simulations

Learn how BTS Business Simulations can help with your initiatives.

Fill out the form below to have a BTS representative contact you.

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