Remember when your company first invested in pricing analytics software? Those unwieldy spreadsheets were getting out of hand, margins were slipping through the cracks, and you needed visibility. You had to track and visualize your pricing results and KPIs in a single source of truth. Consolidating data into insights from a big-picture perspective to every detail was essential to gain a profitable pricing strategy and find improvements and new opportunities. So, you made the leap, implemented a solid analytics platform, and got a handle on your pricing data.

Fast forward to today: Your sales team is drowning in quote requests. The poor souls are manually building quotes using a patchwork of spreadsheets, email approvals, and late-night panic calls. What was once a manageable process has become a bottleneck as your business scales.

Sound familiar? You're not alone.

As companies grow, the systems that once served them well begin to creak under increasing pressure. That basic analytics module that revolutionized your visibility now feels like just the first chapter in an evolving pricing story.

At Pricefx  over the last decade, we have assisted companies across a range of industries to dramatically improve profitability and market share by defining optimal prices and pricing strategies with our advanced pricing software. What’s more, we help organizations identify gaps in their pricing infrastructure as they scale, ensuring they adapt their pricing solutions and expand the functionalities needed to maintain a profitable and efficient business throughout the inevitable growth phases.

So, let's dive straight into an exploration of the Top 10 reasons of why your business may need to enhance your B2B organization’s pricing software functions (and how).

1. The Quote-to-Cash Process Has Become a Bottleneck

Back when your organization was handling 30 quotes a week, manual processes got the job done efficiently and effectively. Now, with 300+ piling up each and every week, it’s chaos. Your Sales Teams are bogged down with spreadsheets instead of selling, approvals vanish into email limbo and deals stall.

Adding CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) functionality to your pricing platform can turn this mess into a well-oiled machine. CPQ automates quote generation, boosting speed and accuracy. Learn here how one Pricefx user cut their quotes times by 50%  with our Quoting capability.

2. Pricing Inconsistency Is Eroding Your Margins

When pricing lives in spreadsheets, consistency becomes mythology. Without system-enforced guardrails, each sales rep becomes their own pricing strategist—with predictably, equally unpredictable results.

A comprehensive pricing system with built-in automated approval workflows and pricing governance ensures your carefully crafted strategies translate into actual market execution.

Leaving margin on the table through inconsistent discount practices before implementing consistent rules-based pricing controls is unacceptable for businesses looking to maximize their returns.

Remember, margins play a pivotal role in determining the profitability of a business. They represent the difference between the cost of producing or acquiring a product or service and the price at which it is sold. Maintaining healthy margins is crucial as it directly impacts on the bottom line. By preventing margin leakage, businesses can ensure that all their hard-earned profit remains in-house.

Even a small percentage of margin leakage can have a significant impact on the overall profitability of a company. Consider the power of 1% – a mere 1% increase in prices can lead to an impressive 11% improvement in operating margins.

3. Your Sales Team Is Selling Products, Not Value

In today's competitive landscape, selling on features alone is a race to the bottom. Your sales team needs to articulate and quantify the value your solutions deliver.

For most B2B organizations, salespeople generate new income by closing deals and increasing profitability. Your large-scale B2B company should ensure your sales team is fairly compensated for their efforts. A clear and fair sales compensation plan motivates the team to use your pricing software solution effectively.

Pricefx Sales Compensation provides transparent guidance on performance and earnings expectations for salespeople and account managers, and in doing so, encourage with data-driven support in selling for value:

• Salespeople consistently sell within optimized price guidelines.
• Salespeople sell larger deals and are encouraged to cross-sell or switch-sell.
• Salespeople close more deals aligned with your business strategy and incentives.

With Pricefx’s Sales Compensation, you can repurpose a tool originally designed to bring clarity to salespeople and account managers on how the team are performing on their sales targets, into a forecast projection tool for the outcomes of your pricing. Use Sales Compensation to also provide notification flags of the likelihood of achieving your quarterly or annual growth targets.

The sales forecasting functionality enables an organization to check overall performance against individual sales targets. The results can assist in deciding whether to push products more aggressively when necessary or to identify additional profit opportunities that the organization might not have previously considered.

4. Competitors Are Making Faster, Smarter Price Adjustments

While your team is still debating whether a price change is warranted, your competitors have already adjusted theirs - twice.

Modern pricing systems can incorporate competitive intelligence, market signals, and automated price recommendations that enable you to respond swiftly to market changes.

For example, A large enterprise chemical company that upgrades their pricing capabilities can reduce their price adjustment cycle from weekly to daily, capturing an additional 2-10% in margin during volatile market periods. By utilizing strategic pricing, the company can swiftly adjust prices based on market signals and competitive intelligence.

What’s more, implementing robust cost recovery mechanisms through pricing software ensures that all costs associated with production and delivery are accounted for in the final price charged to customers. This practice has been shown to  improve margins by approximately 5%.

5. Analytics Without Action Is Just Expensive Reporting

Your basic analytics module delivers beautiful visualizations of your pricing performance. But what happens next? Insights without execution capabilities create frustration, not value.

Expanding your pricing platform to include execution modules creates a closed-loop system where insights drive actions and actions generate new insights. A global tire manufacturer found that closing this loop reduced the time from analysis to price list alignment from weeks to hours, allowing them to capitalize on opportunities before they evaporated.

6. Your Customer-Specific Pricing Agreements Have Become Unmanageable

As your business grows, so does the complexity of your customer agreements. Special pricing, rebates, volume commitments, and contract terms multiply exponentially.

Robust pricing systems can manage these complex agreements automatically, ensuring every quote reflects the right price for each customer's unique terms. Many companies often miss enforcing volume commitment requirements on a significant portion of their agreement-based customers. By enhancing their pricing capabilities, they can effectively address and rectify such issues.

7. Your Sales Team Is Spending More Time on Administration Than Selling

According to research by Salesforce, sales reps spend 28% to 34% of their time actually selling. The rest goes to quote generation, approval chasing, data entry, and other administrative tasks.

Comprehensive pricing platforms with CPQ functionality, mobile approval workflows, and integration with CRM systems can dramatically reduce this administrative burden.

When the sales team spends less time on administration and tying up loose ends, they can put more time into strategizing, making the best possible deals and with pricing software, uncovering pockets of value they never knew they had.

8. Cross-Selling and Up-selling Opportunities Are Being Missed

Your company offers complementary products and services that would benefit your customers - if only your sales team could easily identify and present these opportunities.

Advanced pricing systems can include guided selling functionality that automatically suggests relevant add-ons and upgrades based on what similar customers have purchased.

Learn more in the article below about the benefits of CPQ software empowering B2B companies to become cross-selling and up-selling champions.

9. Market Volatility Demands Dynamic Pricing Intelligence

Climate change, pandemics, tariffs and trade wars, regional conflicts, supply chain disruptions - today's business environment is defined by unprecedented volatility. Your basic pricing system wasn't built for this roller coaster.

Advanced pricing platforms can incorporate real-time cost monitoring, automated pass-through thresholds, scenario planning, and dynamic price corridors that protect your margins during turbulent times.

For example, chemical manufacturers  can implement cost-monitoring triggers that automatically flag products where raw material increases threatening to erode margins below acceptable thresholds, to preserve those margins during periods of extreme commodity volatility.

10. Integration Gaps Are Creating Data Silos and Inefficiencies

Your pricing analytics may exist in splendid isolation, requiring manual data transfers to and from your ERP, CRM, and e-commerce systems.

Modern pricing platforms offer robust integration capabilities that create a seamless flow of information across your technology ecosystem.

Making the Case for Enhanced Pricing Capabilities

The decision to expand your pricing capabilitiesisn't just about addressing pain points - it is about creating competitive advantage. Companies with mature pricing capabilities typically outperform their peers by 3-5% in terms of ROS (Return on Sales).

When building your business case for enhanced pricing functionality, consider both the quantitative impact (increased margins, faster quote cycles, reduced administrative costs) and the qualitative benefits (improved customer experience, enhanced strategic capabilities, better governance).

Remember that pricing is a journey, not a destination. The basic analytics module you implemented was a critical first step, not the final one. As your business evolves, so should your pricing capabilities.

The most successful companies view pricing technology as a strategic platform that grows with them - expanding in capabilities as their pricing maturity and business complexity increase.

Is your company ready for the next step in that journey? To get started with Pricefx as your organization’s pricing technology, talk to one of our friendly experts now, or to learn more about how much it could be costing your company by NOT using pricing software, check out this great article below from my Pricefx colleague, Gabe Smith:

Meanwhile, Happy Pricing!