How Pricefx Supplies Sales Guidance to Your Sales Team

Do your sales teams rely heavily on tribal knowledge and gut instinct to determine how to follow the pricing team’s pricing guidance? Your sales team may need a gentle nudge to get moving in the right data-driven direction. They may be blissfully unaware that the comfort they have in their existing sales guidance processes could potentially be replaced by something more user friendly, less manually operated (and kiss goodbye to those error-ridden spreadsheets!) and allow them to work much smarter not harder, perform more interesting tasks and spend more time doing what they do best, sell more of your product. The challenge is to help your sales team to defeat the intrinsic human resistance to change and have everyone heading in the same direction; show them there is another way instead relying on data intelligence to drive prescriptive guidance, and that they will benefit as much as your organization does. That’s exactly why we’ve prepared this article on How Pricefx Supplies Sales Guidance to Salespeople. 

Over the last decade and more, at Pricefx we have made it possible to analyze, manage and identify the optimum price points through the data of large-scale enterprise businesses just like yours. We use pricing as a tool to not only improve deal profitability, but to also increase the win-rate of your deals. Supplying your sales team with the best data-informed pricing and sales guidance that they can easily access, understand and defend is one of the key methods to get the power of Pricefx pricing solution driving your profitability ASAP. 

In this article, we will examine why it is critical to engage your salespeople in using the technology and the key ways that Pricefx pricing software can be used to benefit your company’s business objectives by supplying the best sales guidance possible, and how your team will benefit too. 

Why it is Important to Engage Your Sales Team in Using the Pricefx Sales Guidance 

Over the last few years, companies just like yours have been taking up the use of pricing software in droves.  

As one of the 4 biggest players in the large-scale enterprise business pricing software industry, Pricefx sits perfectly placed to have seen the incredible growth of companies leveraging the data that sits in their systems to provide their salespeople with powerful pricing insights. 

Pricefx supplies sales guidance to your salespeople via 4 main methods that we will explain in greater detail; 

1. Providing transparency to salespeople on how discounting affects sales compensation  
2. Leveraging Negotiation Guidance 
3. Increasing User Adoption = Sales Guidance Uptake 
4. Offer the Pricefx CPQ solution to streamline your company’s quoting procedure 

1. Providing Transparency to Salespeople on How Discounting Affects Sales Compensation  

For most B2B organizations, their salespeople are the major generators of new income and making money by closing new deals and along the way, increasing profitability for the business. With that being the case, your large-scale B2B company will naturally look to make it definite that your sales team are well-compensated for the efforts.  

In a perfect world, the sales compensation plan will need to crystal-clear and fair, ensuring that your sales team are galvanized to use your pricing software solution to bring in deals that grow your business.

With the Pricefx Sales Compensation function, your salespeople and account managers have a transparent technological tool to provide clear guidance and advice on how they are performing towards their targets and how much money they can expect to make.

But the Sales Compensation tool comes with extra added benefits. 

The Pricefx Sales Compensation tool be used as an indicator of how your organization will grow its revenue and pathways to profit by ensuring that by following its guidance:  

• Your salespeople consistently sell within the optimized price guidelines.  
• Your salespeople sell larger deals, emboldened to cross-sell and switch-sell, or alternatively; 
• Your salespeople do more deals aligned with your unique business strategy and how the sales team is incentivized. 

In other words, it’s a win-win for your sales team and for what you decide on as your implemented pricing strategy. 

With Pricefx’s Sales Compensation, you can repurpose a tool originally designed to bring clarity to salespeople and account managers on how the team are performing on their sales targets, into a forecast projection tool for the outcomes of your pricing. Use Sales Compensation to also provide notification flags of the likelihood of achieving your quarterly or annual growth targets. 

With sales forecasting functionality to check if your organization is performing sluggishly overall against individual sales targets or not, the results can help you decide whether to push your products more aggressively where and when required, or to discover additional profit possibilities you never knew that your organization could take advantage of. 

2.Leveraging Negotiation Guidance 

Naturally, your salespeople are always looking to price their deals to maximize their chance to win extra commission and/or hit their targets and along the way use the opportunity to build profit for your business. 

Simultaneously, your salespeople are required to deliver sufficient margin and keep in mind both the current market trends, and your customer’s perception of the value of your products.  

What your salespeople need to balance all the factors is a solution which learns from past and combines those learnings with an assessment of all the variables to achieve an optimal price. And they need such a solution to be good, fast, and easy to use.  

The Pricefx Optimization capability ensures that ‘good’ means that’s what you get with the Negotiation Guidance on offer.  

Negotiation Guidance is designed for sellers to use when negotiating with a customer. It provides recommended pricing for their specific customer and product combinations. The pricing is provided with the related negotiation. 

 

Negotiation guidance is based on the segmentation of products and customers and their similarities observed and historical data.

The process starts with a basic setup, including the definition of a target outcome for the optimization, such as gross margin percentage or whatever outcome falls under your organization’s chosen and unique business objectives.  

The software identifies key attributes for the creation of segments based on automated analysis of historical sales data, then it can identify dimensions that differentiate pricing across your products and customers. The most important attributes are automatically identified and can be prioritized, added, or removed to create the segmentation.  

What that does is to allow you full control of what attributes drive prices for your customer. The results are visualized in a segmentation tree where you can see the outcomes based on your defined criteria.  

For each segment, you get a summary of KPIs that you request as relevant to your company, and recommended pricing for the specific segment for your sales team.  

Ultimately, you can see an overview of the result of the optimization process and understand the prediction of its overall profit and revenue impact with a range of details. This is the incremental value you can drive when using recommended optimized prices as team selling guidance.  

3. Increasing User Adoption = Sales Guidance Uptake 

As a Manager or Thought Leader, you may not realize that your Sales Team are not motivated by the uptake of following sales guidance in the same way that you might be.  

Your salespeople are not responsible for signing the significant checks that cover the cost of something like a pricing software solution, so, they are unlikely to be moved by fast times to ROI (Return On Investment) like you are. 

The Sales Team are far more likely to be moved by either; 

• The promise of greater work/life balance that Pricefx provides; and/or; 
• More interesting work than tracking down prices in Excel spreadsheets. 

For example, highlight to your team a proven example like Pricefx reducing the price list update time of a large company like Michelin from 2 months to 20 minutes, and those type of time savings potentially making their working lives easier and improving their work/life balance. 

 

The price lists your Sales Team ultimately will as a result be more competitive as they are produced in real-time, rather than out-of-date even before they are even finalized.

 

User adoption of transparently developed and easily defended and understood price lists generated by the Pricefx Price Setting functionality can be incredibly attractive to your Sales Team as it will make their working lives more enjoyable all while making your company more profitable.

Your Sales Team will be happy to be working smarter, not harder and undertaking more interesting work and empowering them to spend more time doing what they do best – quoting confidently and selling more. 

4. Offer the Pricefx CPQ Solution to Streamline your Company’s Quoting Procedure 

One of the ways large-scale business organizations are finding that they can benefit from automation in their daily work is by reducing the number of productivity-killing and error-ridden tasks they execute every day to keep the business running.  

After all, an automatically generated quote is a faster one. Faster customer response dramatically improves win-rates with customers and Improving win-rate is like getting the impact of hiring a new sales rep without actually having to hire one. 

Salespeople who are spending time on manual tasks such as data entry and writing price quotes are heavily reliant on spreadsheets and use other slow and outdated tools to create generic or incorrect quotes (more that 55% of salespeople regularly make errors due to manual inputs).  

If you need to slowly scroll through tens of thousands of lines of data to find the exact product that you are looking to add to your quote, even a superhuman can easily make mistakes and replicating that error time-and-time-again is also a distinct possibility. 

If all that sounds like the situation that is happening in the sales department of your large-scale enterprise company right now, then there is a better way.  

Clearly the time has arrived for your organization to consider the Pricefx Configure Price Quote (CPQ) Software solution (also known as the Quote Configurator) to streamline your company’s quoting procedure and give your sales team the ability to quickly generate transparent and accurate quotes that they can defend confidently. 

Engage the sales team to use the Quote Configurator sales guidance by; 

• Informing your sales team through evidence-based training that the Quote Configurator will give them more time to spend doing what they do best (selling and providing excellent service) and less time on performing repetitive administrative tasks. 
• Showing how Quote Configurator delivers optimal pricing recommendations based on what you have done previously with comparable products and across similar client bases. 
• Demonstrating how Quote Configurator Guidance improves Win Rates.  
• Showing how Quote Configurator supports value-based pricing and up-selling and cross-selling opportunities to assist your sales team members in reaching personal and team targets. 
• Promoting the price negotiation process enhancement with your clients. 
• Improving quotation productivity, as quotes are faster and easier to make. 

Sales Team Engaged – Check – Next, Engage the Pricing Team! 

Now you know how to get the Sales Team engaged, given confidence and practical use cases to follow the intelligent sales guidance provided by the Pricefx pricing software solution. 

Now the time is right to have the pricing team onboard too. Make your pricing team aware of the significant long-term gains and pricing efficiencies offered by the Pricefx technology too, for easier and more strategic work tasks. 

Click on the image below to discover more in a handy article on the transformations that your pricing team may experience on route to working with an automated and smart pricing solution like Pricefx;