Accelerator Categories
- Mike Deskis
This article provides an overview of the Accelerator Categories in the Pricefx conceptual architecture, focusing on the Insights, Price Management, and Quoting Accelerator categories.
Key Insights of Accelerator Categories
The Insights Accelerator category provides advanced analytics and business intelligence capabilities to help users gain deeper insights into pricing and sales performance, including sales insights, customer insights, and actionable insights.
The Price Management Accelerator category focuses on providing capabilities to effectively manage pricing across the organization, including price setting, price flexibility, price waterfall optimization, and price list impact simulation.
The Quoting Accelerator category streamlines the quote-to-order process by enabling guided selling workflows, product configuration, negotiation guidance, product recommendations, and approval workflows.
Insights Category
The Insights Accelerator category in the Pricefx conceptual architecture provides advanced analytics and business intelligence capabilities to help users gain deeper insights into their pricing and sales performance.
Key insights about the Insights Accelerator category:
Sales Insights
Provides a set of pre-built dashboards and analytics views to analyze product and customer profitability, identify margin leakages, and uncover high and low performers. Enables users to drill down into the drivers of revenue and margin changes over time.
Customer Insights
Offers advanced analytics on customer performance, including identifying customers at risk, understanding reasons behind results, and identifying pricing and selling opportunities. Provides detailed views of customer trends, revenue/margin projections, and product portfolio insights.
Actionable Insights
Allows users to set up proactive "watchers" that continuously monitor for gaps and opportunities based on dashboard insights, analytical charts, and data. Enables the creation of follow-up actions and assignments to address the identified issues or capitalize on opportunities.
PricefxPlasma
Provides reliable industry benchmarks to measure and compare pricing and sales performance against relevant competitors. Offers over 20 KPIs and metrics covering areas like price waterfall, deal approval process, price setting, and sales effectiveness.
KEY INSIGHT: Insights Accelerator category empowers users with advanced analytics, benchmarking, and proactive opportunity detection to drive more informed pricing and sales decisions.
Price Management
The Price Management Accelerator category in the Pricefx conceptual architecture focuses on providing capabilities to effectively manage pricing across the organization.
Key insights about the Price Management Accelerator category:
Price Setting
Enables the creation and management of complex price list hierarchies, including standalone and dependent price lists. Provides a visual Price Strategy Designer to combine product attributes, parameters, data lookups, and calculation logic to define custom pricing strategies. Supports the ability to assign different price strategies for various product groups and set priority rules.
Price Flexibility
Allows for dynamic pricing by automatically triggering price recalculations based on defined attributes, such as new product additions or updates to costs and competitive prices. Handles the approval workflow for new prices before deployment to price lists.
Price Waterfall Optimization
Simultaneously optimizes list prices, discounts, and invoice prices to reach the ultimate consistency in the price waterfall. Utilizes historical sales data and segmentation to increase the relevancy of the optimization results. Provides granular control over optimization boundaries and goals.
Price List Impact Simulation
Enables the assessment of the business impact of price list updates before they are applied to the market.
Calculates the impact on key business metrics and provides visual comparisons between the simulated scenario and the status quo.
KEY INSIGHT: Overall, the Price Management Accelerator category empowers users to effectively manage pricing strategies, maintain pricing flexibility, optimize the price waterfall, and simulate the impact of pricing changes - all with the goal of maximizing profitability.
Quoting (CPQ)
The Quoting Accelerator category in the Pricefx conceptual architecture focuses on providing capabilities to streamline the quote-to-order process.
Key insights about the Quoting Accelerator category:
CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)
Enables the creation of guided selling workflows to capture customer requirements and automatically configure the appropriate products and services. Provides a visual product configuration interface to define complex product rules, constraints, and pricing logic. Generates accurate, personalized quotes based on the configured products and customer-specific pricing.
Negotiation Guidance
Leverages advanced analytics and machine learning to provide real-time recommendations on optimal discounting and negotiation strategies. Considers factors like customer segmentation, deal history, and competitive landscape to suggest the most profitable negotiation approach. Allows sales teams to quickly evaluate the impact of different discount scenarios on overall profitability.
Product Recommendations
Analyzes customer needs, purchase history, and market trends to suggest the most relevant products and services to include in the quote. Provides intelligent cross-sell and upsell recommendations to maximize the value of each quote. Integrates with the CPQ functionality to seamlessly incorporate the recommended products into the configured quote.
Approval Workflow
Automates the review and approval process for quotes that exceed predefined thresholds or require special consideration. Ensures quotes are aligned with organizational pricing policies and profitability targets before they are presented to the customer. Provides visibility into the approval status and enables efficient collaboration between sales and pricing teams.
KEY INSIGHT: Quoting Accelerator category streamlines the quote-to-order process, empowers sales teams with intelligent guidance, and ensures pricing and profitability alignment throughout the quoting lifecycle.