How do you make an internal business case for product marketing to own pricing?

The transition to PMM leading pricing occured before I joined, and led to my hire (yay!) At Intercom, pricing had been a shared responsibility without a clear owner for quite a while. It was a collaboration between product, finance, bizops, and sales. While the collaboration model remains, having PMM lead the effort (and having a clear driver and DACI) has been hugely beneficial.

The biggest reason is that PMM sits at the intersection of Product and GTM (Sales and Marketing) and is thus ideally positioned to incorporate perspectives from across the organization. When you examine other parts of the business, there are strong arguments against each:

• Sales is incentivized to hit quarterly quotas, which is short-term and volatile, and is not always aligned with the higher level company strategy
• Product is typically focused on existing customers and care about adoption, which can lead to inefficient monetization
• Finance is disconnected from both prospects and customers, and will struggle to create P&P that's aligned with value. 

What's left? PMM! Am I biased? Probably :-)

I’ve worked in orgs where product marketing owned pricing and in others where it was owned by product management. Both models work and it really depends on the DNA of the org - product-led or sales-led. In any situation or setup, product marketing plays a critical role in:

1. Defining and quantifying the business problem and pain points
2. Building the marketecture and the packaging that goes with it - what we sell and how it all works together. Especially in situations where you have more than one product.
3. Capturing the voice of the customer including why, when, and how they buy and the value they expect to get including the definition of the ICP
4. Monitoring the competitive landscape
5. Driving alignment between product, sales, and customer success - all key stakeholders in any pricing process

So 1-5 above can be used to build the case

1. Not to get too philosophical but I find there’s often too much focus on who is the “decider” on pricing and often not enough alignment across product, finance, data, product marketing, and sales around how we all work together on pricing. At this point, I don’t feel strongly that my team needs to own pricing, so long as my team is part of the core pricing working group and leadership team that weighs in on pricing. I’ll also say that in much of my experience, whether PM or PMM “owned” pricing, the ultimate decider was the leadership team and, more often than not, went up to the CEO for big decisions so “owning it” gets amorphous pretty quickly in my experience.
2. That said, I am sure you’ve done the thinking about why you want to own it and if you land on PMM leading, I’d go about in two ways:
1. Show how your ideal pricing leadership group and process works: Rather than just focusing on PMM leading, show what the cross-functional group looks like and how you propose decision making. Map out who is responsible for what and how each team collaborates to ensure success over pricing as a whole rather than the piece they’re responsible for. Show what problems this solves when compared to the current system to help folks understand why this works. Basically, show a vision for the future that works for the whole org with PMM at the center, rather than pointing out why PMM has to be at the center.
2. Show a vision for the pricing program as a whole: A leader I worked for once said “the person who best describes the pain earns the right to solve it”. While he was talking about messaging, the same holds true in my experience for internal alignment which is 80% of being a great PMM. So, in this case I think one of the most important ways to earn the right to solve pricing is to present a clear vision for where pricing is at and should be going at your company. In pricing work, folks usually follow the person in the room who has the most experience and has a vision for pricing that everyone can rally behind. So really showing why you’re right to lead based on the work rather than based on the internal politics or justification goes a long way.
3. Sometimes, just start leading: I don’t mean come in and declare you’re in charge. Instead, I mean often pricing work gets messy and stressful and PMMs can show up as a leader in how we point out work that needs to be done and start leading it. I’ve had many folks not really understand why PMM should lead until they went through a pricing change with me. Probably the best time to make this case is when folks are able to see what PMM leadership looks like in action.

If Product Marketing doesn't own pricing in your organization today, here are some things you can include in a proposal to get it moved:

• Competitor knowledge - PMM is often closest to the competitors and can bring this knowledge into the pricing conversation. While you should never price a certain way just because a competitor does, the fact that PMM knows the competitors the best is often key to making the case to own pricing.
• Industry analyst access - you've usually got the ear of analysts like Gartner, Forrester etc and can bring that into the research pool for pricing decisions.
• Your cross-functional capabilities - this is key, who else in the organization is as close to all the key parties for pricing - Sales, Product Mgmt, Professional Services, customers themselves, etc. You may not have the connections to Finance yet but you have the ear of everyone else and you know how to bring them together. 
• Speaking of customers, make sure you are talking with them often and also getting on prospect calls even if it is in listen only mode. The more you connect with customers and prospects, the stronger your case will be to own pricing and packaging.
• Your neutrality - because you are not in sales or finance or building the product, you are uniquely positioned to be a neutral party. Again your cross-functional stance will validate your position for owning pricing.

It may take a few attempts but don't give up. Perhaps you can find some current products that aren't doing as well pricing-wise as they could and do some research on the side to come up with a proposal to fix them. Or get into the trenches on some deals and be helpful with well-researched knowledge. Then use those deals as evidence that PMM can contribute meaningfully. Either way, keep making yourself useful and bring up the above list to continue the push to own pricing. Eventually you'll succeed!