Typical user: Pricing Manager

Specific needs: the tool that can provide insightful analytics, manage price lists, discounts, support all pricing-related processes in the organization.

Analytics

A typical challenge for business: get useful analytics for better pricing decisions.

As a Pricing Manager, you need a tool that provides insightful analytics, manages price lists, discounts, and supports all pricing-related processes in the organization. You face the challenge of obtaining useful analytics for better pricing decisions, as well as the excessive effort required to develop critical pricing-related analysis and guidance. Additionally, poor or incomplete visibility to valid profit drivers by customer and product, along with rigid views on business performance that no longer fit company needs. You need to quickly identify sources of margin compression and price erosion issues, uncover opportunities for immediate margin improvement, and have flexible tools that can be personalized and customized with ease.

How we solve it in Pricefx:

In Pricefx, we provide valuable insights from sales transactional data, segmented/categorized views per customers, products, regions, etc., identification of low performers, pinpointing causes of margin leakage and taking action, uncovering unwarranted discount variations, comparing performance across periods, identifying sources of change, easy-to-understand dashboards that are fully customizable and personalized with real-time updates. We enable you to display and quickly uncover opportunities for profit, growth, and increased market share.

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To learn more about Pricefx Analytics, check our video tutorials and how-tos.

Price Setting

A typical challenge for business: structured price list management

Structured price list management presents a typical challenge for businesses, involving slow and laborious mass price updates that occupy the pricing team for weeks, slow responses to changes in cost, competition, and demand, and difficulty managing increasingly complex pricing strategy, rules, and guidelines. To address these challenges, a pricing manager needs the ability to execute mass price updates with less workforce while improving accuracy and speed, quickly and confidently respond to market changes, and make it easier for the team to manage complex pricing strategies.

How we solve it in Pricefx:

In Pricefx, these challenges are solved through the creation and management of price lists with set up rules and logics, the use of price grids organized for fast price re-calculation across customer segments, product groups, or regions, the simulation of the business impact of price changes, the maintenance and change of inputs like targets, increase %, competitive positioning, inventory levels, etc., real-time response to changing market conditions like competition, costs, indexes, weather, etc., automated price change approval workflows, real-time connectivity with internal or external systems, the ability to get the output prices into any format or system (ERP, Digital Commerce, etc.), and the embedding of analysis into price-lists.

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Quoting

A typical challenge for business: negotiation of profitable deals

The negotiation of profitable deals poses a typical challenge for businesses, leading to lost deals and money left on the table due to pricing that misses the profitable structure, slow cycle time, and many internal handoffs resulting in low win rates, as well as widely varying price realization across the sales team and inconsistent deal profitability due to rebates, terms & freight. To address these challenges, a pricing manager needs to reduce friction and accelerate quoting and negotiation workflows, empower sales to quote confidently and negotiate effectively, capture cost to serve and off-invoice incentives during quoting, and easily identify segments and set optimized value-based pricing.

How we solve it in Pricefx:

In Pricefx, these challenges are solved by accurately and efficiently configuring products, solutions, and services to reduce errors, providing sales with guidance on optimal pricing powered by AI-based price optimization, embedding analytics to give sales confidence in price and see contribution margin impacts, increasing deal sizes with data-driven recommendations, benchmarking current quotes using historical data, reducing errors and deal cycle times, implementing automated workflow approval processes, customizing predefined quote output templates including contractual documentation and e-signature handling, integrating with leading CRM systems to reduce change management for sales, and enabling the use and approval of quotes on mobile devices

Agreements & Promotions

A typical challenge for business: structured discount management

The challenge of structured discount management presents difficulties in setting promotions at any customer/product levels, customers receiving incentives without meeting commitments, and a lack of understanding of the impact of contractual/promotional discounts by sales and the pricing team, leading to valuable resources being wasted while processing these discounts. To address these challenges, a pricing manager needs the capability to accurately manage incentive performance, enable sales and pricing teams to easily see the impact of pending and active contractual/promotional discounts, and reduce the workforce required to handle these discounts.

How we solve it in Pricefx:

In Pricefx, these challenges are solved by managing discounts at different customer, product, or regional levels, setting and rolling out price promotions and campaigns, setting up customer-specific contracts and executing on them, calculating and setting up all kinds of special price conditions (volume discount, pay-in-advance discount, etc.), analyzing discount and margin-leakage impacts on business KPIs, implementing automated workflow approvals, providing quotes to customers in electronic format with DocuSign, leveraging bidirectional data flows with ERP and CRM systems, correlating POS/Claims with trade promotions, and using and approving on mobile devices.

Rebates

A typical challenge for business: structured rebates management

The challenge of structured rebates management involves customers receiving incentives without meeting commitments, complex calculation, and low transparency of the resulting net net pricing, as well as a lack of understanding of rebate impact by sales and the pricing team, leading to valuable resources being wasted while processing rebates. To address these challenges, a pricing manager needs the capability to accurately manage incentive performance, calculate the net net price/margin in one place, enabling sales and pricing teams to easily see the impact of pending and active rebates, and reducing the workforce required to manage rebates.

How we solve it in Pricefx:

In Pricefx, these challenges are solved by setting rebates at any customer or product level, managing and optimizing trade promotions, creating, tracking, and managing any rebate type, embedding analytics to predict performance, optimizing rebate spend, implementing automated workflow approvals, providing rebate documents to customers in electronic format and with DocuSign, integrating with leading CRM systems to reduce change management for sales, pushing accruals and credits to ERP, correlating POS/Claims with trade promotions, and using and approving on mobile devices.

Channel Management

A typical challenge for business: how to manage ship and debit claims

The challenge of managing ship and debit claims involves inaccurate, manual, off-line claims validation, resulting in prolonged unresolved claims periods, as well as a lack of supporting detail for disputes (proof of sale or invoice) and an inability to forecast and evaluate the success of related programs. To address these challenges, a pricing manager needs systematic, timely, and accurate program claims validation, the ability to forecast accruals on orders or invoices and calculate payouts, and visibility into program eligibility, validity, and exceptions.

How we solve it in Pricefx:

In Pricefx, these challenges are solved by automated handling of ship & debit claims by distributors, integration with the ERP to issue a credit memo and execute pay-outs, validation of claims to existing agreements (e.g., rebates) or quotes, and definable approval workflow rules with steps, conditions, and approvers.

Optimization

A typical challenge for business: how to implement price optimization

The challenge of implementing price optimization involves the limited control over optimization approaches, a lack of transparency in how prices are optimized, and the absence of a straightforward method for implementing optimization results into quotes and price management. To address these challenges, a pricing manager needs clear, accurate, and intelligent deal guidance based on data, flexibility to make necessary overrides or decisions, optimization of list price in parallel with other elements of the price waterfall for various customer/product segments, and the ability to follow multiple business objectives and their priorities.

How we solve it in Pricefx with AI-based Segmentation and Price Optimization:

In Pricefx with AI-based Segmentation and Price Optimization, these challenges are solved by automated price optimization based on defined business goals and relevant user-defined constraints, simultaneous optimization of all pricing elements, accounting for elasticity in predictions, predicting the impact on revenue, volume, and margin, performing breakeven analysis, flexibility to change models as needed, adding priorities, rules, and constraints, overriding and constraining models to conform to rules like margin floor and competitive positioning, and outputting optimized pricing guidance into CPQ, price lists, ERP, and commerce platforms.

Market Simulation

A typical challenge for business: : how to continue price optimization journey

The challenge of continuing the price optimization journey involves standard price optimization based on historical sales transactions, optimizing all prices and discounts without considering individual products, and unknown market prices in B2B. To address these challenges, a pricing manager needs to reach the best response to competitive moves, optimize product assortments and inventory risk, get more from seasonal and markdown prices, and make more successful new product launches.

How we solve it in Pricefx with Market Simulation:

In Pricefx with Market Simulation, these challenges are solved by simulating the real behavior of customers and competitors, simulating the impact of price changes of a product to the surrounding products within the portfolio through cross-price elasticity, simulating market response to price changes and its business impacts, and supporting simultaneous optimization on multiple objectives within the market simulation scenarios. The market response is simulated through various WHAT IF scenarios.

PlatformManager

“Platform” refers to the “inner workings” and administrative functionality underlying the Pricefx Product. It enables Pricefx, and its customers to set up and manage partitions, pull in data from Pricefx and other systems, deploy Pricefx connectors and accelerators, and integrate the Product with third-party systems (e.g., CRM).​

PlatformManager includes:

• Detailed view of the connected partitions (Pricefx instances)

• Data Integration - files upload, FTP, SAP, Salesforce, etc., data mapping and basic transformations​

• Monitoring of integration health/status,​ statistics on messages/records

• Marketplace with accelerators and integration templates

• Account management of company accounts (user groups, asset groups, business roles)​

• View of the log files on system events based on a defined period

• Notifications for system problems or other events significant to a company

• Upgrade scheduling date and time to a newer release​

PlatformManager Marketplace:

• Integration Templates - allow you to efficiently set up the IntegrationManager tool to perform specific actions related to third-party systems

• Accelerators - pre-configured solutions which implement frequently used functions that are typically related to dashboard visualizations and analytics

• Packages - pre-configured solutions designed to solve specific pricing issues. You can quickly set up a partition to a required state and allow for interaction with users (enter inputs, upload data)

Standard KPIs - Pricefx Plasma

Pricefx Plasma is a Big data insights machine

Value it provides for a pricing manager:

• Combines a massive amount of anonymized and aggregated transaction and quoting​

  data into 20+ pricing performance benchmarks, delivered in intuitive visual outputs 

• Provides access to reliable quantitative benchmarks to measure and compare company performance objectively ​

• Identifies market trends to improve decision-making​ on future strategy, ambition, and direction of growth  ​

• Lays the foundation for a data-driven assessment​ of developing opportunities and target setting  ​

Deal Planning

A typical challenge for business: how can a company manage big and long deals in an efficient manner:

The challenge of managing big and long deals in an efficient manner involves the absence of a single source of internal and external information and data related to every deal, a lack of clear view into the deal drivers and objectives, and the need for solid information to support all deals with clear track records.

How we solve it in Pricefx:

In Pricefx, these challenges are solved by understanding the deal objectives and drivers on the customer's side inputs and understanding internal goals and bottom-line, combining both into a well-defined negotiation strategy reflected in all negotiation rounds, facilitating all related internal processes including formulation of responses, internal alignments, and approvals, keeping the history for effective learning and future deals, capturing objectives and drivers in a structured way with a side-by-side comparison of objectives and drivers of both sides to uncover options for possible compromises, and full tracking of deal preparation and negotiation with recordings of all internal communication, alignments, tasks, and negotiation rounds. All relevant information and data are kept in one place, including inquiry details, timelines, objectives, drivers, team members, and history.​