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 Therefore, prices become outdated and potentially harmful to your business – often overnight.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...

What Is CPQ Software? Did you know that sales reps spend 66% of their day on administrative tasks and that 50% of their time is wasted on unproductive prospecting and error correction. This should be worrying because it’s the sellers who are first to produce a complete, accurate quote that wins the deal at least 60% of the time. Perhaps because suppliers that make buying easy are 62% likelier to win high-quality sales. Configure, price and quote (CPQ) solutions will no doubt have already have crossed your path, but let’s take a deeper look at what they are, where they...

What Is Value-Based Pricing? Value-based pricing is founded on the concept that value and price are not the same. There is a clear distinction between the price that anyone (be it a person or a company) pays for a given product or service and the inherent value that is received as a result. When we talk of value, we must be clear that this has nothing to do with what we think our product offers to our customers, e.g., speed, flexibility, good looks, etc. These are just features that address a specific need for a customer, these needs when satisfied will become benefits and these benefits give way...

What Is the Difference Between CPQ and Pricing Software? You’re looking to update your pricing and you’ve heard that Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solutions can boost sales teams’ proficiency by 45% and that improvements in price, like those achieved with pricing software, can result in three to four times profitability. Very impressive. Just what you’re in need of. But which better aligns with your goals? What exactly is the difference between a CPQ and pricing software? Let’s explore the differences between a pricing solution and a CPQ by focusing on the key capabilities they deliver and benefits they bring. What...

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...

Essential Industry-relevant Benchmarks and Standardized KPIs for Pricing Success   While theories about how price affects the market, response go back to John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s, Pricing as a professional discipline has only really been a topic of conversation since the early 1990s. Since then, pricing professionals have been playing catch up to mature procurement processes and capabilities. The challenges have been both internal and external – few companies have had the data to measure their own performance, and there has been no objective source of truth to help executives really know what good pricing looks like.  Even 30 years later, Pricing is often considered a...

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...