How Does Pricing Software Impact Company Culture?

Pricing software is more than just a tool for optimizing your pricing strategy – it marks a complete shift in your company culture, which can be met with resistance from teams if the right change management strategies aren’t implemented. If mismanaged, the period leading up to implementation can give rise to limited user adoption, lessen the impact of your solution, and even drive dissatisfied employees to find opportunities elsewhere.

At Pricefx, we’re no stranger to the change management challenges inherent in pricing software implementation, and the lion’s share boils down to a lack of preparedness for a data-first company culture.

To help, we’ll explore the impact of pricing software implementation on company culture, including specific changes to expect within affected departments, and offer up an action plan for companies to facilitate a successful transition.

Pricing Software’s Culture Shift: A Move From Gut Feeling to Data-Driven Pricing

Before integrating a pricing software solution into their pricing processes, many companies take to relying on handshake deals and instinct to make pricing decisions.

This tendency towards gut feeling in pricing stems from a few factors, most immediately from a lack of tools to approach the process differently, but also from a particular cultural orientation towards the use of data in decision-making.

While pricing software can quickly address a company’s pricing tools gap, its introduction alone isn’t enough to radically alter an organization’s established data culture. Skepticism or fear of technology, lack of data literacy, or simply a nostalgic attachment to the old way of things, are all symptoms of a company culture resistant to data-driven pricing.

 

First, pricing software requires a major cultural shift in how companies think about and approach data, collectively moving away from “best-guess” pricing towards a pricing model where data is prioritized in decision making.

In the next section, we’ll see how pricing software’s key users are uniquely impacted once pricing software becomes their everyday pricing tool.

How Pricing Software Impacts Sales and Pricing Teams

The cultural shift towards a data-first culture is expressed differently across organizational roles, namely in pricing and sales teams. As the groups most directly affected on a day-to-day basis by the change, they face their own distinct set of challenges before and after implementation.

How Pricing Software Impacts Pricing Teams

With the implementation of pricing software, much of the administrative drudgery pricing teams are often saddled with becomes automated, freeing up space to execute pricing strategies and optimize them in the future.

Pricing teams are often burdened with manual entry work in Excel spreadsheets and similar tools, tasks that do not make the best use of their strategic abilities as analysts. Pricing software allows pricing managers to become cross-functional experts in their field, as it enables them to guide the pricing process with intention and empower the rest of the organization to make better pricing decisions by extension.

However, this up-leveling in responsibility does not come without its own challenges. Pricing managers should expect that because the nature of their role will radically change, and even require entirely new titles, they should be prepared to develop their data literacy skillset to navigate a pricing software solution with confidence.

How Pricing Software Impacts Sales Teams

Meanwhile, salespeople can spend upwards of several days on data sourcing alone. Siloed data systems and tools often prevents them from quoting within a reasonable timeframe, a frustrating reality when the problem is by no means a shortage of actionable data.

Pricing software’s integration across third-party systems, such as CRM, along with pricing analytics and price setting capabilities, eliminates the need for time-consuming database searches. With instant data-driven support for their pricing decisions, sales teams can turn their attention to building stronger relationships with customers.

On the other hand, salespeople may be resistant to the increased vigilance that comes with a centralized pricing solution, previously having enjoyed relative independence in their decision-making. Sales teams should be encouraged to understand that the tool is designed to uphold pricing consistency and reduce error in quoting, not limit their autonomy, both for their benefit and the organization’s.

A 5-Step Action Plan to Effectively Prepare for a Pricing Software Culture

While the transition to a data-driven culture can feel daunting to manage, by following a few simple best practices, companies can ensure that affected teams approach pricing software with enthusiasm instead of resistance. These are our top 5:

1.  Practice Pricing Governance Early

Governance is the first step of any successful pricing software adoption. After all, without it, how else would pricing managers know how to use the tool going forward? Guardrails and approval processes should be decided prior to implementation to ensure pricing decisions align with your strategy from the beginning. And ideally, this should not be a task for pricing managers themselves.

2.  Implement in Phases

When implementing pricing software, a phased approach is ideal, especially if your company is completely new to the process. This should involve drafting a detailed plan that determines who in the organization should adopt the tool first, followed by a close assessment of their progress which will then serve as a basis for deciding how to schedule out subsequent phases.

3.   Conduct a Skills Assessment

Pricing software requires a fresh set of skills and sometimes the creation of new roles and teams, which can be a cause for concern among existing roles. Conducting skills assessments of your employees, and reskilling where necessary with the right training, helps determine where everyone will fit into the new structure and support employee retention in the long term.

4.   Ensure Leadership Alignment

Ensuring the leadership in your company is aligned on why pricing software is being implemented, and more importantly, is delivering a consistent message to those impacted, will help prevent confusion and mitigate project pitfalls. Ultimately, your messaging should illustrate that everyone is in this together and for the same reasons.

5.   Provide Continuous Post-Implementation Support

Your company’s journey to adoption doesn’t end once your pricing software solution goes live. Providing ongoing support to your employees, both within your organization and externally from your pricing vendor, is essential for preventing issues from snowballing and enabling your teams to confidently respond to the evolving needs of your organization.

Next Up: Preparing Your Data for Success

As we’ve seen, pricing software often requires companies to take a significant leap towards a data-first company culture.

Despite the potential challenges inherent in that transition, staying attuned to how those impacted most directly are feeling about the change, and more importantly, making sure they have what they need to succeed, ensures teams are well-prepared to embrace the pricing solution once it’s live.

In this article, we outlined a few ways companies can prepare to embrace a culture of data-driven pricing. Embracing data in your pricing practice also requires the right data preparedness plan prior to implementation.

To help you navigate this process, consider heading to our guide on how to get your data ready for pricing software implementation: