Pricing Professional Resolutions for New Year 2022   You may not have been able to meet many of the goals you set for yourself as a pricing industry business professional in 2021, a tumultuous year that brought many of the same challenges as 2020. However, many of the incredible changes that occurred in 2021 such as rampant inflation, supply chain delays and breakdowns and shortages of raw materials used in production were unforeseen and impossible to forecast. Regardless, there are still several ways to get back on track and prepare for a better 2022 in your pricing career.  Given the incredible...

Key IT Roles You Need On A Pricing Management Software Project You are well aware that pricing is one of your key levers to increased sales and margins.  That’s why you’re investing in pricing software. You have a good idea of the scope of the software project, the processes you want to improve, the problems you are trying to solve, and the goals you want to achieve. You may even have chosen a pricing management software vendor and are getting ready to implement it.  So now what?   How involved will your company be during the implementation phase of your new...

What Return on Investment (ROI) Can I Expect on Pricing Optimization Software?  If you’re considering investing in price optimization and management and/or CPQ software, you might be wondering what sort of return on investment (ROI) you can expect. Without a clear answer it’s hard to get budget, buy-in from executives and you might as well kiss the solution to your revenue and margin issues good-bye. We’ve had a lot of experience helping our customers to understand the payback they can get from pricing software so that they can track the success of their investment and go forward to get support...

How to Choose Pricing Software That Is Right for You  Pricing your products effectively can be a challenging battle. First up, congratulations on identifying that pricing software will assist you in streamlining your pricing strategy, but how to choose pricing software that is right for you? We get it. There is so much choice in pricing solutions out there that all work in similar, but slightly diverse ways. Not all options may be exactly customized to your business model, nor suit what you are trying to achieve.  At Pricefx, we’ve spent a decade analyzing the requirements of each individual client...

Retail Industry Pricing in 2022: Strategies, Trends, & Tips With shifting buying patterns affecting the way consumers purchase retail products, fewer things can have a bigger impact on your businesses’ bottom line for the year ahead than your retail pricing strategies for 2022.   For example, in the last 18-to-24 months, more-and-more sales have been made online due to shifting market forces created by CoVid-19, logistics and supply chain issues. You may have potentially seen your percentage of sales for products for free shipping rise from 10% of your total sales volume to as much as 50%. Shoppers are not visiting your stores, but they are buying online and taking advantage of your attractive free shipping offer. But now, the extra costs involved are eating...

The Best Manufacturing Industry Trends & Pricing Strategies for 2022 Right now, manufacturing industries are reporting price increases in everything from steel to produce, wooden pallets and everything in between. Manufacturers have watched on while increasing prices in raw materials have eaten into their margins. Manufacturing industry trends are also reeling from the impact of work shortages and increased labor expenses. Additionally, supply-chain woes are placing pressure on manufacturers to raise product prices as demand for many goods rebound with the reopening of the economy. Many of these price-related manufacturing pain points result from tariffs while others are an outcome of the Covid-19 shut-downs. However,...

2022’s Top Distribution Industry Trends in Pricing Strategies  As a member of the Distribution Industry, you are intrinsically compelled to adopt the riskiest pricing strategies, let alone keep up with the latest industry trends. You are the middle link in the currently disturbed traditional supply chain between manufacturers and retailers. As a distributor right now, you need to account for customer demand, out of control inflation in addition to wildly fluctuating production costs. Other overheads like transportation and labor costs also steadily rose in 2020-21, while worldwide staff shortages in manufacturing were all challenging factors.  Furthermore, there are pricing strategies to consider in distribution that some other industries don’t need to.   For example, most automotive spare parts distributors out there will all have a similar painful story to this one. Recently, we heard from a potential client on their 2005 Audi TT replacement mufflers being...

Airlines: Why A One-Size-Fits-All Commission Pricing Strategy Will Fail You in 2022 According to The International Air Transport Association (IATA), 2020 was worst year on record for the airline industry due to the COVID-19 crisis. There were 60% fewer passengers last year (1.8 billion) than in 2019 (4.5 billion) and total industry passenger revenues fell by 69% with total net losses of $126.4 billion.   Then the widespread vaccination campaigns of summer 2021 gave airlines hope that leisure air traffic might recover to 2019 levels by year end. And things, especially regional bookings worldwide, looked optimistic.  Airlines scrambled to update their processes to absorb the big changes in travel requirements and consumer behavior—factoring in...

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...

How Much Does Pricing Software Cost? Discussions around the budget for new software can be stressful. Before you go with your hands outstretched, you’ll want to know exactly what to look out for, how to set expectations for how the software will be priced and perhaps most importantly, what questions to ask so that you’re not holding an invoice with a surprising number at the end.  We’ve helped hundreds of companies implement pricing software and worked with customers to find the right solutions based on their needs.  So, how much does pricing software cost? At Pricefx, the total cost of...

How to Manage Price Fluctuations and Supply Chain Problems  Before the pandemic, manufacturers and distributors like you faced price fluctuations but nothing like what you’re up against in this post-pandemic world.   You’re struggling with shortages, bottlenecks, transportation, weather, and labor woes, all of which have caused wild price swings across the board in any number of industries. What’s more, the end is not in sight.  Inflation at the wholesale level has hit an 8.3% year-on-year increase according to a recent U.S. Bureau of Labor report, the largest single annual increase in the Department’s history. Fuel prices and indices for raw materials used in production are going through the roof and the chances are that your organization is not alone in grappling to keep the persistent price fluctuation under control. The result is unreliable projections in revenue or margins and in worse cases, losses in revenue.   What are you to do?  At Pricefx, as a provider of modern pricing software, we’ve spent a decade...

The Phases of a Pricing Software Project Explained  As you and your team start to gear up for a software project, you probably wish someone would just sit down and explain the phases of a pricing software project so that you know exactly how to prepare. Without this preparation, your project will take longer than needed which might result in you spending more on money and man hours than you intended or worse, your project could fail altogether. At Pricefx, we’ve helped countless organizations like yours to move from the discovery stage (sounds a bit like a Star Trek show) of a pricing project all the way to...

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...

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...