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...