The ever-changing landscape of the chemical industry demands agility. Traditional chemical pricing methods struggle to keep pace with volatile commodity prices and capture the true value of your products. But what if you could leverage data to empower your salespeople to make smarter decisions and optimize your sales strategy?

At Pricefx, after more than a decade, we know the chemical industry inside and out. We help you create agile and data-driven pricing processes that fit your customers and help boost your salespeople and their ongoing performance. We don't just give you tools, we provide you with the solutions that make your business more profitable and ready for the future.

In this article, we will show you how to apply data-driven sales strategies in the chemical industry. Based on our expertise and experience, we will explain how Pricefx pricing software can help you transform your chemical and process industry sales practices across four key areas.

Let's dive in!

Pricefx: A Data-Driven Chemical Industry Sales Weapon

At Pricefx, we are proud to go beyond the basic data visualization tools of business intelligence software. Our software equips your sales team with the power of AI-powered predictive and prescriptive analytics, giving them a clear view of how pricing decisions impact on your chemical company's bottom line.

Here's how Pricefx empowers data-driven sales in the chemical industry:

1. Targeted & Profitable Sales with Pricing Analytics

The Challenge: The chemical industry is complex and dynamic, with multiple factors affecting prices and margins. Conventional data analytics tools can only show you what has happened in the past, not what will happen in the future or what you should do about it. These tools may look nice, but they often miss the deeper insights that drive profitable decisions. These tools are good at descriptive analysis but poor at predictive and prescriptive analysis.

The Solution: Step into the realm of pricing software's Pricing Analytics—a dynamic data science solution designed to bridge the gaps left by traditional tools. Unlike Business Intelligence Software (BIS), Pricing Analytics is not just about style; it is substance. Leveraging the latest in AI, it elevates the analytics game by delving into predictive and prescriptive analysis, offering a comprehensive suite of functionalities.

For instance, a chemical business can use Pricefx to segment customers based on their price sensitivity, willingness to pay, and purchase patterns, and then optimize prices for each segment to maximize revenue and margin.

Pricefx can also help the business simulate different pricing scenarios, test the effects of price changes, and recommend the best actions to take in response to market fluctuations.

Our Pricing Analytics goes beyond the narrow range of BIS tools and analyzes and forecasts how prices affect strategic business objectives. Its wider range, improved data integration features, and expert skillset distinguish it, making it a vital source of in-depth insights into their pricing dynamics for chemical companies.

The Practical Sales Application: Imagine a situation where a chemical company handles a variety of products, each with its own dynamic factors—production costs, profit margins, and regional market differences. Pricefx Pricing Analytics simplifies complexity by smoothly integrating these factors into one pricing rule. The outcome? Automated price calculations on a global level that go beyond data visualization. Pricefx Pricing Analytics enables chemical companies to use advanced analytics for strategic, informed decision-making.

In short, Pricefx Pricing Analytics is more than just a tool; it is a strategic partner for chemical industry professionals who want to improve their sales approach.

By harnessing the power of predictive and prescriptive analysis, Pricefx Pricing Analytics becomes the guide directing focused and profitable sales efforts in the changing environment of the chemical sector by setting the pricing corridors your salespeople need to follow to help your company achieve your precise and unique set of desired business outcomes.

2. Reduce Unnecessary Discounting with Competitive Price Match Requests

The Challenge: Customers in the chemical industry often switch to other suppliers who offer lower prices. When this happens, you need to act fast and match the price or offer a better deal. But this is not easy, because your sales team must check the prices of similar customers and get approval from the pricing team. This can take a lot of time and cause you to lose business. You need a system that can help you respond quickly and effectively to price challenges from competitors.

The Solution: To solve this problem, you need to use the data from a system that lets different departments share information quickly and easily to ask for and get price analyses when competitors lower their prices.

Pricefx is made to deal with these challenges. This system uses pricing data from comparable customers to generate a prompt reaction by getting the attention of the necessary pricing approvers. Learn more about handling price match requests competitively here:

The Practical Sales Application and its Result: When your salespeople use Pricefx, you can keep your existing customers happy and charge them fair and defendable prices that match the market changes. Pricefx helps you to respond to your competitors' prices quickly and accurately, so you don't lose your customers or your profits.

You can also measure how well Pricefx works for you by tracking your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These numbers show you how Pricefx affects your deals and your overall business results. You can see how much volume, revenue, gross margin, or contribution margin you are risking or gaining with each deal.

With Pricefx, you can also monitor your win/loss ratio against your competitors. This provides you with valuable insights into your customer retention and market share. Pricefx enables you to make data-driven decisions - not assumptions - thereby securing your market position and adapting to any industry changes.

3. Navigate Supply Constraints with Data-Driven Insights

The Challenge: In the intricate landscape of the chemical industry, conventional data analytics tools prove insufficient when faced with the complexities of navigating supply constraints arising from limitations in raw materials or production capacity. Even sophisticated options like Tableau or Microsoft Power BI, though visually appealing, often lack the depth required for actionable insights. Their strength lies in descriptive analysis, yet they falter when it comes to predictive and prescriptive functions.

The Problem: The chemical industry is extremely complicated, and normal data tools are not enough to deal with the problems and the complexities of navigating supply constraints arising from not having enough raw materials or production capacity. Some BIS tools look great and have impressive graphs and dashboards that is for sure, but they do not dive deep enough to give you useful advice. They can only tell you what happened, not what will happen or what you should do.

The Solution: As we mentioned previously above when we discussed using data for targeted selling, Pricing Analytics is more than just a technique; it is a precision tool. Pricing Analytics analyzes and forecasts how your chemical prices affect strategic business objectives. It stands out because of its wider range, improved data integration abilities, and specific expertise, making it a vital resource for chemical companies that want to understand their pricing dynamics better, including how to deal with times of limited product or raw material availability.

Navigating Supply Constraints: A Practical Example: Imagine a chemical company that produces both polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) from ethylene and propylene feedstocks. Due to a plant outage, the company faces a shortage of propylene, which affects its ability to produce both PE and PP. The Pricing or Sales Manager needs to quickly evaluate the profitability of supplying PE and PP to different customers, considering the market prices, the production costs, and the contractual obligations.

Using Pricefx’s Pricing Analytics, the manager can compare the margins of each product and customer segment and prioritize the allocation of the limited propylene supply to the most profitable ones.

This enables the sales team to make informed data-driven decisions when quoting that will optimize the revenue for the business. With an intelligent and automated pricing software solution like Pricefx, you will be able to consider these and numerous additional pricing constraints into your pricing simultaneously, such as:

• Demand for product class, product, and brand
• Newness of the product: including its stage in the product life cycle
• Single product vs a complete product line
• Cost of producing and marketing products
• Cost of changing prices and time periods that they apply
• Types of competitive markets
• Your competitors’ prices

4. How KPIs & Benchmarking Supply Your Team with Sales Confidence

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Benchmarking – yes, they are often used buzzwords but often misunderstood. What do they really mean, especially for chemical pricing?

KPIs are ways to measure how well you are doing inside your company - checking if you are improving your processes and margins over time.

Benchmarking, on the other hand, is a way to compare yourself with others outside your company - seeing if you are doing better or worse than other chemical companies.

Use industry benchmarks to see how your KPIs match with other chemical companies, spot market trends, and make quick decisions based on data that help your sales team with insights that are hard to get with manual pricing.

If you do that, you can find areas to improve faster and use them to plan your strategy and enhance your pricing processes over time.

The Challenge: Many companies want to know how they are doing compared to others, especially in pricing. But it is hard to find reliable data to compare, and even harder to compare with different industries. Chemical companies need to learn beyond benchmarking within their own industry; there is a necessity to gauge performance against top performers in various sectors.

The Solution: Pricing Software benchmarking tools like  Pricefx Plasmacan help overcome the persistent difficulties in benchmarking, especially in the pricing domain. Pricefx Plasma is a transformative tool that provides insights not only within the industry but also across different sectors. For those in the chemical industry, this means moving from only knowing performance within their niche to benchmarking against industries that show more flexibility and adaptability.

The Practical Sales Application: A benchmarking tool can help you see how well you are doing with your pricing compared to other companies, even in different industries. This can help you find ways to improve your pricing and sell more value to your customers.

Let's say you sell a chemical product, a fertilizer called ‘X-grow’ that helps farmers grow more crops at bigger yields. You use Pricefx Plasma to see how well you follow the pricing guidance from your pricing software. The pricing guidance tells you the best price range for your product based on the market, your costs, and your goals.

You notice that you have an extremely low percentage of deals that go outside the pricing guidance. This means you are doing a great job of sticking to the best price range for your product. You don't have to give too many discounts to win customers, because you can show them the value of your product and how it helps them grow more crops.

This also means you have a good culture in your company. You work well with other departments, like Purchasing and Finance, to make sure your pricing is aligned with your costs and your strategy. You use the data from the benchmarking tool to make better decisions and collaborate more effectively.

So, a benchmarking tool like Pricefx Plasma can help you do more than just compare your pricing with others. It can help you improve your pricing, your sales, and your culture, and make you more successful in the chemical industry.

Find out more about how Pricefx Plasma works and how you can use it here:

Implementing Your Sales & Pricing Strategy with Pricefx

After learning about these 4 ways above to help your sales teams use data more effectively, you can see a pathway to modernizing the execution of your chemical company’s pricing strategy.

The chemical industry requires sales leaders who can navigate with data-driven insight, who can seize opportunities in challenging situations, and who can pursue new horizons of success.

This article is not just a guide; it is a call to action, an opportunity to join the data-driven revolution.

Do not let your business stagnate in the status quo. Embrace the spirit of innovation, equip yourself with the best pricing software like Pricefx, and start a journey towards a future full of growth and profitability.

Want to learn more about pricing software for sales teams and overcoming common obstacles to user adoption and making the most of the technology for your business? Check out this article from my colleague, Sara-Marie Gansert for great insights:

Meanwhile, happy data-driven chemical sales!