Pricing professionals getting higher salaries, survey says
With retail analysts saying that more strategic pricing is one of the best places to go for retailers seeking to boost margins, retailers are starting to pay a premium for pricing professional who can get them there, according to a salary survey just released by the Professional Pricing Society, a professional organization for managers and executives charged with making pricing decisions and policies.
About 15% of the society’s membership is retail pricing professionals, and they constituted 18% of survey respondents. The average salary of retail pricing professionals was $79,000, significantly higher than the $73,000 average salary of the aggregate of pricing professionals, a group that covers several sectors beyond retail including technology, industrial services and others.
Across all industry sectors including retail, the survey showed that pricing professionals are more experienced, average slightly higher salaries overall, and hold higher rankings or report to higher levels than they did just two years ago. The average entry-level salary is up 11% to $59,000 from $53,300 two years ago, while that of senior pricing executives rose approximately 8% to $119,000 from $110,00 two years ago. And 19% of pricing professionals now report to senior corporate management, more than doubling the 9% who did so two years ago.
The change is being driven by that fact that there are more technology-based retail price optimization and markdown optimization tools available now, says Eric Mitchell, president of the society. “There is an expectation on the part of companies that pricing professionals will have an understanding of the sophisticated pricing platforms that are emerging,” he says.
With the exception of online auctions, retailers have so far been cautions about pushing the envelope with widespread price flexibility on web sites based on rapidly changing supply and demand. But if retailers are investing more in staff to develop more strategic pricing, those strategies will likely play out on the web in some form as well.
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