Volatility has become the new normal in the business landscape your organization is operating. Tariffs, inflation, supply chain disruptions, and geopolitical events now shift market conditions with unprecedented speed. This volatility presents C-Suite executives like yourself with both significant challenges and strategic opportunities. Organizations like yours that proactively manage volatility - particularly through sophisticated price setting capabilities - gain substantial competitive advantages over those that merely react to market changes.

At Pricefx, we are a stalwart provider of modern pricing software. We have a decade-plus worth of experience in dealing with all manner of economic tempests. As a result, we have been at the forefront of addressing the myriad pressure points faced by our customers, guiding them through times of sudden and extreme change, and providing them with flexible and transparent data-driven solutions that allow them to be set up as best as possible for the changes and challenges they will face. We have assisted companies across a range of industries to dramatically improve profitability and market share by defining optimal prices and pricing strategies with our advanced pricing software.

In this article, we explore why strategic price setting has emerged as a C-Suite imperative in volatile times and how modern pricing technology like that offered by Pricefx enables you to protect margins, capture market share, and build resilience against unpredictable market shifts.

The New Reality: Volatility as the Norm

Volatility now defines your business environment rather than representing a temporary disruption. You are now facing this volatility in multiple forms:

• Commodity price fluctuations: Raw materials such as steel, oil, and rubber now fluctuate rapidly, directly impacting your cost structure
• Geopolitical events: Trade conflicts, wars, and regional instabilities disrupt global commerce with increasing frequency
• Regulatory shifts: Governments implement tariffs, environmental regulations, and compliance requirements with minimal notice
• Supply chain disruptions: Factory outages, labor strikes, and transportation challenges create unpredictable delivery timelines
• Inflation and economic uncertainty: Unpredictable cost increases alter consumer behaviors, affecting demand patterns

For B2B companies like yours, these volatility factors create substantial operational challenges that demand immediate attention:

• Costs increase across raw materials, operations, and logistics, squeezing margins
• Unpredictable cost fluctuations complicate pricing decisions
• Supply chains become unreliable, affecting product availability
• Customers shift buying behaviors, often delaying, or reducing purchases

Consider the tire distribution industryas a recent example. Inflation has caused customers to postpone even essential purchases like tire replacements, significantly impacting distributor revenues.

The Cost of Inaction When Volatility Occurs

Many organizations respond to volatility with caution - waiting for clarity before making decisions. This wait-and-see approach appears safe but imposes substantial hidden costs:

• Margin Erosion: Each day you maintain static pricing during cost increases directly damages your bottom line. Analysis shows that in industries where 30% of cost of goods sold depends on  imported materials with 20% tariffs (such as the automotive industry), companies lose approximately 300 basis points of gross margin if they fail to increase prices. Maintaining pre-tariff gross margins requires a price increase of 4%.
• Competitive Vulnerability: While you hesitate, competitors with more agile pricing capabilities quickly adapt, capturing your market share and customer relationships. Volatility creates market share opportunities for those prepared to act decisively.
• Customer Relationship Damage: Customers value clarity, responsiveness, and fairness during uncertain markets. If you cannot explain price changes or respond consistently to market shifts, you risk eroding customer trust and loyalty.
• Strategic Stagnation: Without the ability to quickly model different pricing scenarios, you make decisions based on incomplete information, hampering your strategic positioning and long-term growth potential.

Why Price Setting Has Become a C-Suite Imperative

Historically, organizations delegated pricing decisions several levels below the C-Suite. Today, strategic price setting has emerged as a critical executive function for several compelling reasons:

1. Direct Impact on Financial Performance

Price changes affect profitability more immediately and powerfully than cost-cutting or volume increases. Research consistently demonstrates that a 1% improvement in price realization delivers 3-4 times more impact on operating profit than a 1% reduction in fixed costs. Volatile environments magnify this leverage even further.

2. Cross-Functional Strategic Alignment

Effective price setting in volatile markets requires alignment across finance, sales, product development, and operations - coordination that demands C-Suite leadership. Without your executive sponsorship, pricing initiatives often falter due to organizational resistance or conflicting departmental objectives.

3. Customer Experience and Brand Positioning

How you handle pricing during volatility directly impacts customer perception of your brand. Poorly executed price changes, even when economically necessary, damage relationships and brand equity. Conversely, well-managed, transparent pricing adjustments enhance trust during uncertain times.

4. Competitive Intelligence and Market Positioning

Strategic price setting provides valuable insights into competitor behavior and market dynamics, informing broader strategic decisions beyond pricing itself. This intelligence feeds directly into your strategic planning process.

The Technology Transformation in Pricefx’s Strategic Price Setting

Modern pricing software like Pricefx has transformed what's possible in strategic price setting, particularly in volatile environments.

Unlike traditional approaches relying on spreadsheets and manual processes, today's advanced pricing platforms enable:

Pricefx’s Automated Pricing Strategies

If your organization sells numerous SKUs across multiple channels and customer segments, you cannot manually update prices during rapid market shifts. For businesses operating in industries where price points across channels, products, and customers are continuously subject to change, the heart of Pricefx's price setting lies in its automation of pricing strategies, as it streamlines a once scattered and error-ridden pricing process. In industries with a staggeringly high volume of SKUs, such as discrete manufacturing or distribution, applying a consistent pricing strategy is key to ensuring accurate pricing for new and existing products. Meanwhile, automated pricing strategies enable businesses to easily enforce strategic family groupings across products, while accounting for competitive and costs changes, to promote greater customer acceptance and maintain margins.

Within Pricefx Price Setting, businesses can choose among the pre-built pricing strategies available for deployment. The following strategies are available out of the box:

• Competition Based Price
• Average Competition Based Price
• Maximum Competition Based Price
• Recommended Retail Price
• Cost Plus
• Price Increase
• Kit Pricing
• Anchor Pricing

What’s more, the Pricefx no-code Strategy Designer can be used to create custom price strategies.

A user can review and edit the formula that defines their chosen pricing strategy directly in Strategy Designer’s Live Preview function, offering the flexibility to test the strategy before its implementation and the ability to easily bring in any data to use in your pricing strategy.

Transparent Analytics and Visualization

Pricing decisions in volatile environments require clear visibility into multiple factors simultaneously:

• Margin impacts at both aggregate and transaction levels
• Price elasticity across different customer segments
• Competitive position and market share implications
• Cost pass-through effectiveness

Modern pricing platforms like Pricefx provide visual analysis tools - like pricing waterfalls and dynamic dashboards - that transform raw data into actionable insights. These visualizations enable you to quickly understand complex pricing dynamics and make informed decisions despite market uncertainty.

Dynamic Price Changes and Simulations

Perhaps most valable in volatile times, modern platforms like  Pricefx Price Setting enable you to model different pricing scenarios before implementatio. You can:

• Simulate price changes across thousands of products simultaneously
• Model margin impacts under different scenarios
• Test competitive response assumptions
• Evaluate elasticity assumptions against historical data

For example, as a distributor, you can easily model how fluctuating commodity prices will impact margins across your product portfolio, then implement strategic price adjustments before profit erosion occurs.

Pricefx Live Price Grids can be used when you need to handle many products with rapidly changing prices, e.g. in an e-commerce or chemical industry environment, where prices are recalculated every day or even several times a day – this is a direct contrast to static price Lists which are calculated only once for a fixed period.

Moreover, if you manufacture products with costs tied to publicly available material indexes, you can automate monthly price recalculations for customer price lists, ensuring your pricing remains aligned with cost realities while freeing your pricing teams to focus on strategy rather than tactical execution.

What’s more, Pricefx AI Optimization  takes pricing to the next level, enhancing Live Price Grids by providing remarkable adaptability in dynamic industries. Unlike static price lists, AI Optimization transforms price lists into tools that respond dynamically to market shifts. This ensures that pricing decisions are always up to date. By automating these adjustments, businesses can maintain profitability even in volatile conditions, benefiting from optimized deal profitability, product recommendations, and price waterfall insights. This real-time adaptability not only accelerates the sales cycle but also guarantees sustainable profitability improvements, offering full transparency and fostering long-term adoption.

Streamlined Approval Workflows

In volatile markets, speed matters. Sales and pricing teams are often held back by inefficient approval processes that prevent them from quickly reflecting market-driven and competitive factors in their price lists and achieving shorter, more profitable sales cycles.

Pricefx automates this delegation of authority by enabling businesses to define when a pricing decision requires escalation for approval or when it can be passed on to customer without intervention.

For example, when price adjustments are suggested based on competitive pricing or cost-to-serve factors, a portion of those proposals are automatically routed for managerial approval based on a set of pre-defined guardrails. Sales teams following this guidance can give a customer a response in real time, shortening the sales cycle to just minutes.

You can define when pricing decisions require escalation for approval and when they can be implemented without intervention, dramatically shortening your response times to market changes while maintaining appropriate governance.]'

Cross-Channel Price Alignment

As you sell through multiple channels - direct sales, distribution partners, e-commerce, marketplaces - maintaining price alignment becomes increasingly challenging. This challenge intensifies during volatile periods when price changes occur more frequently.

Pricefx enables you to:

• Define product families and their interdependencies to maintain strategic price positioning
• Implement consistent pricing rules across all channels simultaneously
• Identify and eliminate unintentional price discrepancies that could damage channel relationships
• Maintain appropriate regional price differentials despite fluctuating currency values

This capability delivers particular value in fast-paced, quickly changing, and volatile business environments, where lacking a standardized approach to align prices prevents you from identifying your most profitable products and harmonizing pricing across sales channels.

Data Integration and Decision Support

Effective price setting in volatile markets requires real-time integration of multiple data sources:

• Cost information from your ERP systems
• Competitive intelligence from market monitoring tools
• Customer transaction history from CRM platforms
• Inventory positions from supply chain systems
• Market indices and commodity price feeds

Pricefx provides seamless data integration between your internal and external systems, creating a single source of truth for pricing decisions. This integration enables you to execute pricing strategies with data-driven precision even as market conditions rapidly evolve.

Price setting that occurs in standalone systems and tools inevitably gives rise to process inefficiencies and misalignments in pricing across finance, pricing, and sales teams.

Even with effective pricing tools, without integration, informed decisions can become trapped, and the data required for those choices can quickly grow stale.

Steps Getting Started with Pricefx’s Price Setting

When preparing to use Pricefx's price setting capabilities, companies should take the following steps into consideration:

• Prepare Your Company’s Data: Your organization should identify where their pricing data resides, who is responsible for it, and take pre-emptive measures to ensure it’s in good shape for implementation with pricing software.
• Map Out Your Organization’s Pricing Process: Next, document your company’s pricing process and start considering what your delegation of authority looks like. Other than yourself, throughout your organization, who are the key decision makers and collaborators involved?
• Define Budget, Project Timeline, and Buy-In: In the planning period, make sure your organization has a well-defined budget, a realistic timeline, and has secured user buy-in. This supports a smoother implementation and fosters greater confidence in the new pricing software once it goes live.

If these factors are effectively addressed in the beginning, your company has already laid the groundwork for taking full advantage of Pricefx solutions, including its price setting capabilities once the system is up-and-running.

Rapid Price Adjustments at Scale Are the Antidote to Supply Chain Disruption & Volatility

To safeguard your pricing infrastructure against the uncertainties of supply chain disruptions, it's essential to be proactive, strategic, and swift in adjusting prices at scale. If your suppliers are leveraging this advantage and you’re not, the question isn’t if your margins will shrink - but rather by how much, for how long, and whether your business can withstand the turbulence of volatile market conditions.

Why does mastering pricing agility matter? Consider a hypothetical company generating $1 billion in revenue, facing a 5% annual cost increase. If it takes just four weeks to implement a price adjustment, that delay alone could result in a staggering $4 million in lost margins per year. A costly oversight, wouldn’t you agree?

On your way out of this article, in closing, remember B2B buyers now expect supply chain resilience  and they are prepared to pay for it.

However, you’ll need an automated and data-driven pricing solution like Pricefx to get it done.

To get started with Pricefx as your organization’s pricing technology, talk to one of our friendly experts now, or to learn more about how much it could be costing your company by NOT using pricing software, check out this great article below from my Pricefx colleague, Gabe Smith: