Fast
Why the Time For Cloud Technologies Is Now – ACCEL Report
Why the Time For Cloud Technologies Is Now – Accel Euroscape Report According to American venture capital firm Accel’s recently published report, 2020 Accel Euroscape: Decacorn Unleashed, software has been “eating the world for 30 years now,” but the acceleration we have seen in the past decade puts us in a new software era that Accel calls “the rise of the giants”. Accel has invested over $5B in more than 250 companies over the years and has increased its investments five-fold in the last five. Their report (written by Philippe Botteri, Varun Purandare and Candice du Freta) was published last week at the SaaStockEMEA and also unveiled the firm’s 2020 Accel Euroscape winners. “It’s been a very special year in many ways for the Cloud ecosystem globally and in Europe.” ...
Fast
COVID-19 and the Pressure of Digital Transformation in Pricing
COVID-19 and the Pressure of Digital Transformation Pre-COVID, most companies were in the early stages of ambitious digital transformation programs, but now they no longer have the luxury of time. In just a matter of months, digital adoption has been thrust forward several years. Digital initiatives that companies have been eternally putting off have become the top priority, albeit adapted through the lens of the “new normal”. Adopting a Through-Cycle Mindset to Change While it might feel counterintuitive to invest against a backdrop of plummeting revenues, missed budget estimates, higher costs, and strained employees, technology and infrastructure, this is precisely the right time to advance your digital agenda. While some CEOs...
Realize
How to Structure Compensation Plans to Drive Sales Performance
Managing Compensation Plans That Drive Sales Performance The companies with the highest employee morale and productivity pay a mix of salary and incentives. Financial incentives beyond base pay include commission, overtime, bonuses, profit sharing, stock options, benefits (insurance, vacation, leave, etc.), but what about the other “softer” forms of compensation that drive sales productivity? There are plenty of ways to restructure your compensation plans to motivate sales teams, maximize productivity, and retain employees and customers. Many can be achieved without spending a penny. These often-ignored methods, explored in detail below, provide real-life solutions for extracting the best performances from each...
Fast
Pricefx Gold Winners – Gold Stevie® Award in Manufacturing
We’re Manufacturing Leaders – Gold Stevie® Award In 2020 International Business Awards® Pricefx has just been awarded the Gold Stevie® Award In 2020 International Business Awards® in the category of manufacturing solution. The award was determined by the average scores of judges comprising of executives from around the world. Out of the over 3800 submissions, we’re proud of the fact that experienced leaders view Pricefx’s solutions as a driver to help manufacturers leverage pricing opportunities within their organization, even in these extraordinary times. “Despite the unprecedented impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on organizations and working people worldwide, the number and quality of nominations we received in this year’s International Business Awards attests to the continued outstanding performance of many organizations. The commitment we’ve seen through these nominations...
Friendly
Doing Good Vs. Making Profit: Do Businesses Have To Choose?
Can You Make a Profit While Doing Good? This article, by Gabe Smith, was originally published on Forbes.com As businesses strategize and execute on creative ways to segment customers and products, price dynamically and increase profit, some cross lines and spark moral and popular outrage. The recent headlines of price gouging of sanitizers, cleaning products and paper goods are good examples. In fact, they arrested a man a few blocks away from my house for selling these items on the street corner. He charged $5 a roll for toilet paper. Though some economists argue that there is no such thing as price...
Realize
How to Measure Success in a Pricing Digital Transformation Project
How You Can Measure Success in a Pricing Digital Transformation Even in the wake of COVID-19, digital transformation continues to surge in popularity across all sectors. It’s forecasted to increase by 10% in 2020 to $1.3 trillion. Still, despite this sustained growth, some 84% of companies’ digital transformation efforts end in failure. It’s an alarming statistic, but one that seems less surprising when you learn that half of CEOs have no metrics whatsoever for digital transformation success! It’s vital to remain alert to successes and failures along your digital transformation journey, staving off problems as they arise. Having clear, carefully tracked KPIs in place lets...
Manage
Applying a Change Management Perspective to Digital Transformation
Change Management Principles to Aid Your Digital Transformation Successful digital transformation requires making fundamental changes to cope with a new, globalized, technology-driven market environment. But employees are instinctively resistant to change. Rosabeth Moss Kanter identifies ten reasons for such reluctance. These include a loss of control, uncertainty, breaking habits and routines, loss of face, concerns about competence, and the false belief that change equals more work! The answer to a smooth rollout of digital transformation technology and processes is adopting a change management perspective. Here’s how you can make change management work within your organization. Working with the Salesforce for Change Management Sales teams are particularly resistant...
Insight
The Real-Life Impact of Digital Transformation on Pricing
What Is the Impact of Digital Transformation on Pricing? The tangible impact of digital transformation on pricing is far more profound than merely the digitization of legacy paper-based systems. Sure, automation plays a vital role, streamlining processes and boosting pricing analysts’ and salespeople’s’ efficiency. But real transformation harnesses the latest technology to redefine pricing strategies, solve customer problems, and identify new and exciting revenue-generating opportunities. Some companies can add 2% to their bottom line in the first quarter after transformation showing that there are real stakes involved. Price optimization, management, and realization software makes pricing your company’s unfair advantage, generating pure...
Manage
How to Reduce Overhead & Risk in the Manufacturing Industry
Reducing Overhead and Risk for the Manufacturing Industry Considerations are vast in the reduction of overhead and risk for the manufacturing industry. Especially when you’re looking at adapting your business to dynamic market shifts. We are here to help simplify the process. What Is Overhead and Risk in the Manufacturing Industry? In simple terms, overhead is the sum of ongoing business expenses not associated with the production process. Manufacturing overhead such as plant costs, salaries Selling and administrative costs Corporate salaries Risk refers to the risks incurred by manual processes, which can be broken down into three key areas. These...
Manage
How to Unlock Pricing Potential Trapped in Minds and Excel Sheets
Release the Pricing Potential Trapped in the Minds and Excel Sheets Of Your Organization Global spending on digital transformation is predicted to grow to $1.3 trillion in 2020. But, a Pricefx survey of pricing professionals found that 54% still relied on Excel as their primary pricing tool, as opposed to cloud-based software that offers far superior performance for reasons discussed in this piece. This startling figure shines a light on the lack of investment that companies are making in their pricing infrastructures, and hints at the masses of powerful pricing discoveries that lie trapped in Excel documents and the minds of...
Fast
The Bain Accelerators
Unlock Bain’s Leading IP Powered by Pricefx Technology A few months ago, Pricefx released its exclusive accelerators designed to supercharge your implementation. We’re now launching three new accelerators with Bain & Company, the first such partner developed accelerators from Pricefx that are unlike any solution in the marketplace today. Companies who lose profit and often struggle with pricing can leverage pricing best practices taken from a wide variety of industries. These standardized, prepackaged solutions remove the friction and delay in getting started and seeing value fast. The Bain Accelerators help companies improve their pricing disciplines to identify key sources of margin leakage, optimized promotion management, and gain control of frontline discounting. Clients gain the benefit of world-class software in combination with Bain & Company’s pricing...
Fast
Pricefx – Proud Winner of the 2020 SaaS Awards
Pricefx Named Winner of the 2020 SaaS Awards in the Category Sales and Marketing The SaaS Awards has named Pricefx as the winner of the category Sales and Marketing. Pricefx was the only pricing software in any finalist category making us the only pricing software to win in any category. As Patrick Moorhead, Chief Marketing Officer of Pricefx, explains, “The sales and marketing software category is highly diverse, extremely crowded and includes large, established market leaders – which makes this win so incredible for our company. We are seeing pricing software become increasingly important in the current economic climate, as a strategic way...
Manage
How to Eliminate Margin Leakage in the Manufacturing Industry
Eliminating Margin Leakage in the Manufacturing Industry Margin leakage can have a devastating effect on your profits, leaving your “pocket price” – the amount of money you receive after all discounts and incentives have been accounted for – way below the value stated on your price list. Margin leaks range in threat level from drips to torrents, but as anyone who’s ever experienced a weeping pipe will attest, a drip can be every bit as damaging as a flood! In this article, we identify the critical sources of margin leakage in the manufacturing industry. And explore how the manufacturing...
Flexible
Ready for Anything: Improving Business Agility Through Pricing in the Manufacturing Industry
How to Improve Business Agility in the Manufacturing Industry The discrete manufacturing industry belongs to an increasingly volatile and uncertain environment, where rapid and frequent change is becoming the norm. So, it’s time for companies to seriously investigate how to improve business agility. Business agility is the ability of a company to rapidly respond to changes in the market. It’s a company’s ability to pivot and adapt, and determines whether it weathers the storm – be it changes in the market, demand, competition, supply chain, regulations, technological breakthroughs or global pandemics. But how do you improve business agility when your...
FYI | Fast
Pricefx Raises $65 Million in Series C Funding Led By Apax Digital
Dear valued Customers, Partners, Friends and Pricefx Family, It is with great excitement and humble gratitude that I’m announcing the latest milestone in the growth of our incredible company, a $65m Series C investment from our new partners at APAX Digital, supported by our existing investors Digital+ Partners. Given what I remember thinking and feeling in the early days of starting the company, it’s hard to believe where we are today and that we were able to raise $130m of venture capital to date. Founding Pricefx just shy of 10 years ago, I perhaps dreamed that one day our great company would grow to become large and strong enough to achieve a moment such as this,...
Realize
Ventana Names Pricefx a Finalist in 13th Digital Innovation Awards
Innovation in the Sales Department with Pricefx Pricefx has just been named a finalist in Ventana’s 13th Annual Digital Innovation Awards in the category of Office of Sales. In order to be a finalist in this category, candidates must, “exemplif[y] innovation in the application or technologies that support the sales organization”. We believe that our dedication to innovation and providing the very best in cutting edge solutions to the market are just some of the reasons we have received this honor. Here are just three of the most recent innovations that we have invested in to make pricing faster and simpler. ...
Fast
Collins Brings Pricefx’s Best Features to Unity and Takes Email to New Heights
Collins Brings Pricefx’s Best Features to Unity and Takes Email to New Heights Pricefx is already the industry-leading price optimization, management and realization software. Still, it’s about to get a whole lot better with the release of Collins, the latest version of the cloud-native pricing platform. With “about 80% of the improvements in Collins directly resulting from customer feedback”, according to Lukas Sirucek, the Product and Software Manager behind this landmark release, we take a close look at what Collins has instore for users of Pricefx, both new and old. Collins, the latest release from Pricefx, sees all of the awesome functionality from earlier versions of the pricing software, as...
FYI | Friendly
Optimized Dynamic Pricing by Pricefx Now an SAP Endorsed App
Optimized Dynamic B2B and B2C Pricing by Pricefx, Now a SAP Endorsed App This solution – offering a fast, flexible way to optimize pricing and increase revenue – is now available on SAP® App Center Pricefx, the global leader in native cloud pricing software, today announced that its Optimized Dynamic Pricing (ODP) solution is now an SAP endorsed app, available for online purchase on SAP® App Center. SAP Endorsed Apps are a new category of solutions from SAP’s partner ecosystem to help customers become best-run, intelligent enterprises. Endorsed apps are meant to deliver value with desired outcomes. “In the current...
Fast
Get Running At Lightning Speed
Get Running at Lightning Speed Pricefx Lightning is your fast track to pricing excellence. Designed to supercharge your implementation, Lightning delivers a full suite of standard pricing analytics, management, and CPQ tools through our exclusive Accelerators. It’s all pre-configured to get you live in just six weeks. Introducing Accelerators Many companies want to leverage pricing best practices that will help them to reach their goals with speed. To provide even more value to our customers and enable faster time-to-value, we have developed standard, out-of-the-box pricing capabilities for our customers – we call these Accelerators. Accelerators encapsulate years of expertise and learnings condensed into a flexible, robust set of standard pre-configurations that allow companies to leapfrog overpricing basics so that they can focus on enabling their pricing competitive advantage in Pricefx. We’re not saying this is the...
FYI | Friendly
Pricefx Extends Its AI Capabilities with Brennus Analytics
How Pricefx Will Extend Its AI Capabilities with Brennus Analytics I’m quite sure that if you’d ask founders what drove them to start a new business, you’d get many different answers. The same would apply to the question about the rewards, which made it worthwhile. For me, the biggest rewards are the experiences made during the process and the beauty of walking the new path, making bold strategic decisions in collaboration with the most professional and amazing team imaginable. This announcement is one of those moments, which I surely will remember and often reflect on. Today we’re announcing our acquisition of Brennus Analytics, an...
FYI
Pricefx Recognized for its Exceptional Contribution and Commitment to the SAP Ecosystem
Pricefx, the global leader in cloud pricing software, today announced it was named a 2020 SAP® Pinnacle Award finalist for SAP App Center Partner of the Year. The annual SAP Pinnacle Awards acknowledge the contributions of leading SAP partners that have excelled in developing and growing their partnership with SAP and helping customers meet their goals. Finalists and winners in 34 categories were chosen based on recommendations from the SAP field, customer feedback and performance indicators. Pricefx applications Optimized Dynamic Pricing, Optimized Promotions & Rebates and Optimized Algorithmic Pricing are available on SAP App Center, the digital marketplace for SAP...
Friendly
A Round of Applause for Simon Business School Case Competition Winners
The Winners of the Pricing Case Competition Pricing is so important is the possible consequences of a poor pricing strategy. Companies lose significant amounts of profit by pricing too low. Conversely, they could miss out on leagues of customers by pricing too high compared to their competition. In either case, the results can be disastrous. For this reason and to support dedicated students, Pricefx’s Next Gen sponsored the 2020 Simon School of Business Pricing Case Competition at the University of Rochester. Throughout the event, students had access to Pricefx’s state–of–the–art cloud–native pricing software and the opportunity to learn pricing and its importance from industry professionals. The Event The event took place on April...
Insight
How COVID-19 is Affecting Life Sciences and Medical Devices Industries
How COVID-19 is Affecting Life Sciences and Medical Devices Industries Even those of us living under rocks couldn’t have slept through the global health crisis that is taking over our lives. A mere four months ago, it was nothing more than a handful of people in China having somehow contracted pneumonia after visiting a seafood market in Wuhan. But testing showed similarities to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. A new CoV virus was on the scene –coronavirus-2019 (COVID-19). Today, Coronavirus has become a global health emergency calling for united worldwide action. We’ve seen heavy restrictions on travel, constraints on trade, an almost complete shutdown of the hospitality industry, companies frantically scaling their work-from-home policies to the entire workforce, schools closing...
Flexible
How to Still Close Deals Even When Working Remotely
Working from Home Might Be Nothing New but Companies That Embrace It Profit In the light of the current global health crisis, big tech companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Amazon have asked their employees to work from home (as have Ford, General Motors, and Unilever). According to the Financial Times, some companies are testing their ability to go fully remote – KPMG have had all 8,000 London staff working from home since Friday last week. Classes and lectures are being delivered via the Internet, online shopping and food delivery are booming, even religious services are happening via a live feed. And as companies of all sizes try to prevent spreading the virus among employees and those they come into face-to-face contact with, their “working...
Friendly
Pepsi Philippines Sparks Deadly “Number Fever”
The Disastrous Consequences of the “Number Fever” It’s 1992, and Pepsi Philippines has launched a groundbreaking marketing campaign that’s taken the nation by storm. It’s a lottery-style competition that involves matching a ‘unique’ three-digit code, printed on the underside of Pepsi bottle caps, to the numbers announced every night on the Channel 2 News program in Manila. The campaign was designed as a way to wrestle a chunk of market share from the dominant soft drinks force at the time, Coca Cola, but it ended in riots, homemade bombs, and death. All because of a software blunder that should have been avoided. ...
Manage
Addressing the Impact of the Coronavirus on the Chemical and Process Industries
What is the Impact of COVID-19 on Chemicals and Process Industries? We’ve now conducted business for several months under the shadow of COVID-19, and it’s likely dramatically impacted our businesses and goals for 2020. Some sectors have seen significant decreases in demand for products, which may be starting to rebound as economies reopen and employment increases. Some sectors more closely tied to medical, hygiene, and food packaging have seen unprecedented demand and challenges in maintaining supply to customers. A high degree of uncertainty remains on business conditions for the months ahead, as economies restabilize and the potential for a second wave of COVID-19...
Friendly
What We Can Learn From Grace Hopper and the First Reported Bug
Software Engineering Debacles of History: Grace Hopper and the First Reported Bug If a moth flaps its wing but no one is there to see it, can it still crash a Harvard Mark II computer? It was September 9, 1947. Computer scientist and U.S. Navy Rear Admiral, Grace Hopper, was hard at work on the Harvard Mark II computer when she suddenly encountered a problem – the machine was returning consistent errors. The 25-ton Harvard Mark II, also known as the Aiken Relay Calculator, was the first computer built using high-speed electromagnetic relays instead of electro-mechanical counters. As such, it...
Realize
The Difference Between Rebate Processes and Ship & Debit Processes
The Difference Between Rebate Processes and Ship & Debit Processes The smartest businesses practice value-based discounting. This means structuring incentives in such a way as to sculpt customer behavior towards meeting specific business goals and objectives. Different discounts are applied to different customers, channels or segments, in a highly bespoke and carefully considered way, taking into account past performance and current market conditions. Rebates, whereby a customer is re-paid some of their spend in return for hitting certain pre-determined targets, are very effective at eliciting behavioral change. Ship & debits, whereby distributors debit suppliers for goods shipped below list prices, are special pricing agreements that...
Friendly
RIP Clayton: Disruptive Innovation in Enterprise Software
Remembering the Legacy of Clayton Christensen and Disruptive Innovation in Enterprise Software The passing of Clayton Christensen was a blow to the business world, but his legacy of disruptive innovation lives on. If you have not, I recommend reading Innovator’s Dilemma. It is one of the most influential business theories of our day and changed the thinking of many business leaders, including Steve Jobs, Andy Grove from Intel, and Marc Andreesen, which he discusses with Christensen in this Startup Grind video here. For those that are not familiar with the concept of disruptive innovation, it is defined by Christensen...
FYI
How Pricefx Can Enhance Growth Opportunities in the Manufacturing Industry
CMO, Patrick Moorhead sat down with Lewis Weiss and Tim Grady of Manufacturing Talk Radio. Mfg. Talk Radio is a weekly talk show where guests ranging from government officials to leaders in a wide range of topics are invited to speak on significant areas of interest affecting the manufacturing industry today. You can listen to Patrick’s conversation with hosts, Weiss and Grady, as they discuss how to unlock the value of PriceOptimizer, PriceManager, & QuoteConfigurator in the manufacturing industry. Then, Patrick outlines how we helped John Crane, a leading provider in engineered technology, to achieve a 163,000% gain in efficiency....