Wes Woolbright is Director Pricing at Sam’s Club. He has spent over thirty-five years in the industry. Wes gained diverse experience working in stores and back offices spanning the entire West Coast as well as in Texas. His roles in retail encompass a number of titles and domains from pricing implementation to IT and price systems architecture development.
Below are the highlights of our latest encounter with Wes. Let’s get down to it!
Here are the three major call-outs I’d like to point out:
More so than normal, pricing has shared the pain with the buyers. Short supplies create almost rolling assortments for retailers trying to maintain inventory levels sufficient to satisfy shoppers’ elevated demand. As a result, pricing has had to step up to maintain discipline on price and strategy amid these changes.
I always encourage price professionals to be empiricists. Decisions are grounded in facts, not emotion. Keep the customer at the center and make decisions based on facts, and pricing will be fine.
Experts smarter than me have explained that the best pricing teams leverage tools to enhance their pricing expertise rather than rely on them to substitute the lack of knowledge. In that regard, it will be more critical to be deeply grounded in understanding customers and fundamental pricing concepts.