How to Capitalize on Speed to Improve Pricing Processes

Key Takeaways:

• If you want to be competitive in pricing, you will need to move faster.
• There are three key ways you can start using speed and efficiency to determine your pricing

At the Davos World Economic Forum Digital Transformation of Industries Panel, several panelists remarked on the role that speed plays in shaping the future of business. We could not agree with them more. In fact, when it comes to pricing strategies, speed might play a bigger role in shaping the outcome of the strategy. It’s not always enough to have a good product. Setting the right price at an opportune time could be the difference between a sale or a sale lost to your competitor.

Furthermore, lacking speed and consistency could lead to unforeseen disruptions. Take Amazon, for instance, they were able to displace Google as the first point of contact for shopping-related searches because they provided customers with fast pricing, strong availability and excellent delivery times. Amazon’s consistency in delivering on what consumers value the most made it possible for them to become the first stop in product searches over Google.

So, you may not be Amazon or Google, but you can still implement your pricing strategy in a way that is efficient, fast and consistent. Here are three tips to help you get started:

1: Pre-emptively Assess and Eliminate Obstacles

There’s nothing worse than starting out on a pricing journey only to make repeated stops because of roadblocks. Things like push back from your customers, push back from crucial departments, isolated internal systems and sudden input can disrupt the entire process. If you’ve noticed, most of the issues listed above have to do with the people in your organization.

That’s why from the very onset it’s imperative to get buy-in from all the relevant departments. This means working with sales to develop better negotiation skills to combat pressure that large customers can sometimes put on vendors. It means having a real understanding of your customer base and finding their willingness to pay with research methods. Now, I’m not saying that you won’t face some issues, but the best way to avoid roadblocks is to identify them early and start working actively to mitigate them.

2: Integrate Agility into Your Process:

At Pricefx, we take an agile approach to developing our software and delivering solutions to customers. This agile approach means that we can find solutions, implement them and make rapid adjustments before moving on to the next stages. The same can be done when taking on a pricing project or executing a strategy. At every iteration or stage, you can test, analyze and optimize to make sure you get the best results.

3: Automate with Dynamic Pricing:

Another way to start actively implementing speed into your pricing processes is by using dynamic pricing. With dynamic pricing, you can adjust prices based on key attributes of your choosing. You want to be able to quickly change prices with ease and that’s why you will need a pricing tool that can make these changes without errors. For the right decisions to be made, the data that is captured will need to be of high quality – complete, consistent and accurate. Our Live Price Grid enables customers to automatically set prices dynamically.

Machine learning has helped several industries (retail, for one) to become more efficient and, therefore, more profitable. The pricing industry should not be left behind. Use the simple tips above to start thinking about how you can start building speed into every aspect of your pricing system.