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Airline Pricing Strategies: The Best Way to Sell to Corporations in 2022  The airline industry is under constant pressure. The level of competition is at an all-time high. The dependence on costly fossil fuels is forcing some airlines to impose fuel surcharges. Many are working at overcapacity thanks to the steady but strong emergence of low-cost carriers. And many airlines are resorting to steep discounts for corporations in order to retain market share.   And, as if things weren’t bad enough, along came COVID. Industry revenues in 2020 were just 40% of the previous year ($328 billion), taking things back to...

4 Ways Price Optimization and Management Software Benefits You Implementing a radically new business idea, such as adopting pricing software for your firm, can be a painful process. If you can’t get everyone to understand why pricing software is important and dedicate time to the project, then you’re already starting on the back foot. Sure, the executive arm of your business will undoubtedly see how it will assist the company in making more and lasting profit but getting wide-support is key. The harrowing challenge is to overcome the intrinsically human resistance to change and have everyone heading in the same direction.  At Pricefx, helping companies implement pricing software is a huge part of what we...

3 Ways to Integrate Your ERP Systems with Pricing Software  Are you performing repetitive pricing tasks each Monday morning with your Excel pricing spreadsheets before you even get to make your first coffee of the working week because your price list needs a manual update after the weekend? Yep, we’ve heard that story more times than we care to admit. One solution to prioritizing your Monday morning caffeine intake is to have that manual price list update job set as an automated task. Not only will it make your work easier, but a bi-product will be getting home earlier and in a better...

What Roles and Responsibilities Does My Team Take in a Pricing Software Project?  The last thing you want to be doing is spending months building a pricing solution only to find that the people you need to be its users are resistant to change and are unwilling to use it. Something that your management team would certainly be displeased to discover.  At Pricefx, we’ve spent the last decade advising project leaders on the key internal resources they need to successfully complete a pricing implementation project. The roles and groups of people highlighted below are a necessity in any implementation project....

How Long Does It Take to Implement New Pricing Software?  If you were to go to any pricing software vendor and ask, “how long does it take to implement pricing software?”, you would get as many answers as there are vendors. That’s because the length of an implementation project depends on a variety of factors, including what you want to achieve, the complexity of your business process, the number of people involved, your dedication to meeting milestones, and supplying feedback.  But generally speaking, we’ve seen it take as little as 6 weeks to as long at 7 months to implement...

4 Reasons Why Our Software Implementation Projects Fail You’re probably here because you’re ready to implement new pricing software but have heard many horror stories about software projects that went horribly wrong. You know, the implementation projects where there was a lack of dedicated internal resources, so the project went over budget and took double or triple the time to be implemented. And after all of that, the final result was a tool that no one used or worse didn’t do what was intended.   We’ve helped several companies to implement software that’s so well received, it gets rolled out...

8 Pricing Essentials to Help Mitigate Cost and Risk   A common struggle many businesses are familiar with is mitigating costs and controlling risks to reach margin targets. Cost-plus pricing methods (where price execution is determined from static rules rather than real-time changes) are unable to respond to fluctuating market dynamics. Therefore, prices become outdated and potentially harmful to your business – often overnight.   Another problem is inconsistent pricing deviations, meaning prices do not reflect a customer’s willingness to pay.   Basically, in the absence of pricing and quoting processes standardization, contract pricing and customer agreements are inconsistent, and because of habitual over...

Choosing Pricing Software: What Questions Should You Be Asking? Choosing a pricing solution is an important decision and a major commitment – one that has the potential to make or break your pricing efficiency and success.  If you’re at the software vendor evaluation phase of your pricing digital transformation journey, you’ll have got past all the buzzwords and sales hype, and will be getting down to the nitty gritty of what each company can offer you and whether it will help you get where you want to go.  You’ll have whittled down your potential vendor list to include only those...

What Is Value-based Pricing?    When it comes to sales and profit scalability, pricing is the real fulcrum. Developing a strategy for pricing helps brands maximize profits and market demand, among other factors. Simply put, a pricing strategy is an approach you can use to determine the best price for a product.   Pricing is hugely influenced by various market indices, such as production, competitors’ pricing, and target customers. More often than not, sales executives need to account for the pricing strategy due to factors such as business objectives, revenue goals and product positioning. Researching your current market can help provide...

Pricing in Excel: Your Very Own Black Box of Despair  I know, I know. Everyone these days is harping on about why you should be promoting your pricing out of Excel into some new fancy bells-and-whistles solution.   But to those of us passionate about pricing and helping retailers achieve pricing excellence, it just happens to be a fact: pricing in Excel is holding you back in ways you may not even be aware of. Not because it is bad software – it’s excellent at doing what it was designed to do – but because no one could ever have imagined...

Pricing in Alignment with Key Business Objectives Using Market Simulation  Traditional price optimization helps you maximize profit on your products based on price elasticity derived from historical sales transactions. The problem is that it calculates the optimum price for individual products without considering the wider impacts of a price change.  Let’s say that your traditional price optimization software recommends a change of price to product A, showing a potential uplift of 10%, and another on product B, showing an uplift of 15%. It’s fair to assume, therefore, that if you applied the suggested changes to both products, you’d see a combined increase in profit of 25%.  Alas, the fact is that applying price changes to two products at the same time could actually result in no change or even...