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How Pricefx Supports Sales & Marketing Processes

January 25th, 2023 (Updated 07/12/2023) | 11 min. read

By David Owen

Are your sales teams taking weeks rather than hours to get quotes and proposals out to your prospects? Or is your marketing team unable to get your most up-to-date price lists into their hands fast enough to effectively promote your organization as fast-moving, progressive, and up-to-the moment? Either way, it sounds like you need a pricing software solution to support your internal processes. As an award-winning pricing software solution, at Pricefx we feel perfectly positioned to give you expert advice on how pricing technology (and ours in particular) can assist in managing and supporting your organization’s sales and marketing processes. 

At Pricefx, we have spent the last decade assisting customers to track price moves and trends in real time. Through those broad experiences, we have developed technological pricing solutions that can assist in giving all today’s modern business organizations the kind of innovative tools they require to support their internal sales and marketing teams while simultaneously driving bottom-line profit. A point not lost on our industry expert peers and reinforced by Pricefx’s shortlisting in the Best SaaS Product For Sales and Marketing category for the 2022-23 SaaS Awards.

In this article, we will examine precisely how your sales and marketing can gain greater efficiencies, develop, and enhance your organization’s custom-centric outlook and whatever they may be, help your company achieve its own unique set of business outcomes. 

The Top 6 Ways that Pricefx Supports Your Sales & Marketing Departments 

Although sales and marketing are two separate departments inside most companies, still they collaborate to meet the same objective, i.e., generating leads and increasing sales, revenues, and profit. By gaining new clients and selling the goods to the end user, both these departments carry out a crucial task in every organization. 

The sales team usually executes the plan and closes the deal, whereas the marketing team typically seeks out and engages the target market with their messages before identifying prospects. Both departments work toward the same goal, however, focus on distinct stages of the process. When both departments are aligned and working together, it becomes fertile ground for fast and lasting business growth.   

Nowadays, most organizations invest a lot of time and money in their marketing and sales teams to hire the best and brightest minds available to improve their business outcomes.  

So why not give both teams the best tools to do the job? 

To establish a solid basis for your business, Pricefx pricing software can help you integrate your marketing and sales activities with achieving your core business goals by:

  1. Getting Accurate Quotes Out the Door & Into the Hands of Prospects Faster 
  2. Defining Easily Understood & Defendable Pricing with Analytics
  3. Matching Sales & Marketing Expectations with Customer Reality
  4. Optimizing Cross-Sell & Upsell Opportunities
  5. Identifying New & Unexpected Customer Segmentations
  6. Benchmark How You Are Doing Against Competitors in Your Segment

1. Getting Accurate Quotes Out the Door & Into the Hands of Prospects Faster 

Pricefx supports your sales and marketing teams by putting together the prices that they need to do their jobs faster with greater flexibility and visibility, while empowering them both with ‘pricing corridors’ to use as negotiation tools. 

But how does it do that exactly? 

Firstly, ensuring that the accuracy of that quote is an extremely important and powerful tool. Making sure that you are putting the right price, the right products and everything into that quote and getting it out as quickly as possible solves real struggles for both your sales and marketing teams. 

With CPQ (Configure – Price – Quote) Software, your Sales Representatives can produce professional quotes and proposals containing all the products being quoted along with their pricing, company branding information, billing and shipping information and customer and product-specific terms and conditions. 

 

Pricefx Price Guidance and Recommended Products Screen (Sample)

Pricefx-Price-Guidance-Quoting

 

All quotes are centrally stored, making re-quoting simpler as they can be regenerated for similar deals or quotes.

In a perfect world, marketing is looking to present themselves as being advanced and forward thinking right there in ‘lock-step’ with your customer. And if it is taking weeks rather than as matter of hours to get accurate proposals out to your customers, you are already showing the customer that you are not up to the task. With its CPQ software solution, Pricefx takes those issues away for your marketing team by transforming overpromising and under-delivering of quotes into accurate and powerful ‘done-right/right-now’ marketing messaging. 

Similarly, Pricefx puts a new standard of accuracy into its CPQ software technology providing your sales team with increased ability to quote confidently at an increased rate of knots than thought possible previously. 

Moving away from the traditional ‘gut-feel’ pricing methods of days gone by, Pricefx empowers your salespeople to become more knowledge and trusted industry experts. 

But how does it do that exactly? 

Rather than fumbling through reams of spreadsheets searching for a price that may or may not be out of date or saved in an Excel document that has been saved in multiple versions and multiple locations, the Pricefx CPQ software solution delivers your salespeople a sole source of pricing truth to share accurate pricing with their prospects faster.  

What’s more, you can set your quote approvals to be automated as per your company’s conditions allowing to have your quote sent to your prospects ASAP in hours, rather than wait for your supervisors or managers to become available or return from vacation etc. 

Pricefx Quoting Workflow Approvals Screen (Sample) 

Pricefx-Quote-Work-Flow-Approvals-Screen

The time saved, data-driven pricing, and shared accuracy means three important things:

  1. The chances of being the first quote received increase dramatically. Usually, the first quote received wins the deal more than 50% of the time.
  2. Integrating a CPQ solution with an overall price optimization tool, Pricefx produces a ‘sales corridor’ for your salespeople between a floor price, targeted and stretched ceiling price rather than one static selling price.  

Pricefx Floor, Target & Stretch Price Screen (Sample) 

Pricefx-Inline-Analytics-Quoting-Stretch-Floor-and-Target-Prices

The result = more negotiation power for your sales team + more sales

         3. As part of a natively integrated system, Pricefx CPQ software is not only more accurate but more efficient and easier to manage. Unlike some of our first-gen pricing software competitors that use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) or adapters to clunkily link their CPQ tool with the overall pricing software solution, Pricefx is natively built as a single smooth-performing platform 

That means enormous efficiencies with Pricefx are possible, not least by always leaning into optimizing the ‘P’ (Price) into the CPQ process ensures that your business is always:

Producing the right price for the right product at the right time for the right customer

2. Defining Easily Understood & Defendable Pricing with Analytics

There is certain level of respect that you will earn from your prospect if you are saying to the marketplace; ‘this is the value of my product and this is the price that it is worth.’ However, getting to that level of confidence with your prospect will take some work and the insight of modern pricing analytics to do so. 

Often, salespeople are not armed with the full complement of tools to understand the ‘why’ in prices are what they are. In years gone by, salespeople have stuck with their price points based upon experience of what they have always done in the past and ‘gut feel.’ However, gut feel has its limitations, particularly when costs of production are changing rapidly due to inflationary or recessionary pressures. 

With the power of the Pricefx pricing analytics software, it gives your salespeople visibility and knowledge to know what similar customers are paying for comparable products, which turn gives them the confidence to turn to your customers and say ‘well, because of our product’s value, our price is slightly more than the market rate.’  

Virtuous-Cycle-Value-Based-Pricing

With the simple visibility of an analytics-driven pricing waterfall, your salespeople can see in a quick visual snapshot of how much it is costing your organization to do business with your customers,  

Pricefx-Price-Waterfall-Simple-Example

That means when the customer comes back to your salespeople and says ‘Hey, your prices are too high,’ your salespeople can return serve with: ‘Well, you know what, because of the way we shipped to you in the past and we had to store those products for some months and it cost us extra to keep them in storage, the price has shifted.’  

Long story short, quality pricing analytics like that offered by the Pricefx solution gives full your salespeople full visibility and authority to defend your prices. The confidence built by this type of transparency can transform business relationships with your customers from adversarial ones into long-term business partnerships built on mutual trust and honesty.  

3. Matching Sales & Marketing Expectations with Customer Reality

As discussed above, the natural bi-product of a streamlined quotation process with Pricefx CPQ software means getting quotes out to your prospects faster. Of course, that means more sales, but the trust runs deeper than pure ‘straight’ sales numbers alone. 

Once the trust has been won with your clients, it means that they are more likely to return to buy from you again and transform into long-term clients. 

Customer-Satisfaction-Smiley-Faces

With the pieces of quote (the configuration – the ‘C’) matched with automated and optimized pricing (the ‘P) and getting the quote (the ‘Q’) into the hands of the customer in a matter of hours rather than weeks, it produces a ‘win-win-win’ for all concerned parties in the relationship; (i.e., your sales team, your marketing team, and your customers all become aligned in shared expectations in terms of service delivery). 

4. Optimizing Cross-Sell & Upsell Opportunities

Pricefx’s CPQ Software can track your customers’ preferences. The next time you are preparing a quote for a previous client, the software can suggest just the right mix of products and services for that client specifically.  

For example, imagine your client is purchasing a laptop. Of course, it only makes perfect sense to offer the client a mouse, keyboard, extra screen, headphones, and a Wi-Fi booster. But that is a simplified B2C example. 

 

The Pricefx CPQ solution can also extend those types of optimized product mixes into the B2B environment as well and track what kind of ‘extra’ products have been offered to your clients in the past and how successful those deals have been.

 

Pricefx Recommended Products Screen (Sample)

Pricefx-Recommended-Products-Selection

CPQ allows your salespeople to cross-sell and up-sell more easily, increase your per invoice revenue and optimize the maximum profitability from each quote prepared and delivered to your customers. 

5. Identifying New & Unexpected Customer Segmentations

Extending the concepts and ideas around product and customer segmentation a little further, identifying new and unexpected customer segmentations is a great bi-product of the Pricefx solution due the unique way we look at historical transactions and their effects on pricing. 

By examining your range of previous transactions, you can track sales histories across industries and identify matching industries and produce new and frequently unexpected buying history combinations. 

From a marketing standpoint you can discover and unearth new and unique markets you never knew you had.

That means by working with Pricefx pricing software, your marketing team may develop new opportunities to promote your product portfolio to a combination of industry customers that you may never have considered before, such as unlikely, but proven industry combinations like pharmaceuticals and semiconductors.  

It may seem counter intuitive, but your historical transactions don’t lie and can provide you with unlimited business insights. 

6. Benchmark How You Are Doing Against Competitors in Your Segment

Above, we looked at the efficiencies of how the Pricefx CPQ software tool has been proven to reduce quote times from weeks to hours in getting your proposals into the hands of your customers. 

Using the PricefxPlasma™ tool, you can benchmark not only how your quote times compared to what your business had done previously, but also quantify how you are matching up against your competitors. 

If you discover that your business is behind what your competitors are doing, you can take steps to address the delays or customer service gaps to help improve the quotation process. Plasma makes it possible.  

As we mentioned earlier, any improvements that your sales and marketing teams can make through better insights can have powerful and long-lasting positive influences on your company’s bottom-line profit. 

But Which Pricefx Package Do I Need? 

Every business is unique in what requires from a pricing software solution. Now that you know how Pricefx’s award-winning pricing software can support the efforts of your sales and marketing teams, you may want to check out and learn more about which Pricefx package may best suit your organization:

CTA-Which-Pricefx-Package-Should-You-Begin-With

Or if you already know which of our pricing solutions best suits your business requirements, talk to one of Pricefx pricing software experts now:

CTA-Resized-Talk-To-An-Expert-English

David Owen

Solution Strategist , Pricefx

David Owen is a Solution Strategist at Pricefx. For the last 10 years, he has been working with leaders at growing companies to increase their overall revenue & profitability through SaaS-based technology that optimizes pricing, quoting, rebates, and revenue management. 30 years of working with companies of all sizes, in many diverse industries, to develop better technology to improve their business processes and profitability.