Introducing the Pricing Industry’s First Big Data Insights Machine: PricefxPlasma™ Powered by Bain & Company 

PricefxPlasma™ is our latest solution powered by global management consulting firm Bain & Company that provides industry-level benchmarking to B2B enterprise companies that need to develop strategic insights on their pricing processes and performance compared to similar companies.  

The only solution of its kind in the pricing world, PricefxPlasma gives customers a unique business advantage to improve their pricing strategy and execution. Users can leverage a pre-defined set of more than 20 market-relevant performance KPIs to reveal insights into industry pricing and to measure their pricing performance. 

Doing away with anecdotical evidence, generic and poorly defined benchmarks, and pure guesswork when it comes to assessing pricing in a marketplace context, PricefxPlasma is the only pricing analytics and intelligence platform that leverages real-world pricing data – collected in the first ever Big Data lake of enterprise customers. Laying the foundation for a data-driven assessment of developing opportunities and target setting, it offers a new unique way of engaging and generating new prospects and assists with building a business case for pricing improvement using industry-specific insights. 

Not only does it offer customers access to reliable quantitative benchmarks so they can objectively measure and compare their performance, but also it enables them to identify market trends and to improve decision-making on their future strategy, ambition, and direction of growth. 

The Perfect Partnership in Pricing 

Pricefx partnered with Bain & Co. in co-developing PricefxPlasma in order to leverage both Bain’s best practices and Pricing and Benchmarking Centers of Excellence, and Pricefx’s world–class pricing platform. Bain had recently become a series B investor in Pricefx and the teams quickly discovered a mutual interest in developing something that would provide benchmarking on an industry level to help the many companies struggling to understand how their pricing practices measured up to industry best practices. 

“We knew we had something on our hands, but we didn’t really know what to do with it until Bain came into the picture.” – Steven Cuypers, VP of Product Strategy and Product Manager for PricefxPlasma at Pricefx. 

So, Steven Cuypers, and Elizabet Vučković, Project Manager for PricefxPlasma at Pricefx, teamed up with Nathan Hamilton, Practice Vice President, from Bain & Co, and the pricing industry’s first Big Data insights machine was born. 

The Power of PricefxPlasma 

Once the PricefxPlasma accelerator has been deployed to participating customers’ environment, Pricefx then gathers, anonymizes and aggregates the data into standardized metrics and loads them into the PricefxPlasma platform. It then further aggregates and filters the metrics to create more than 20 price performance benchmarks presented via a set of very easy-to-use intuitive dashboards. 

“These insights give our customers a really unique business advantage. It’s all about answering the question: How good are you at pricing?” 

The secret to the success of this project is its multiple levels of security that ensure absolute confidentiality. Pricefx employs a rigorous double-blinding anonymization process to remove all customer and product identifiers to make it impossible to trace any individual customer data. Additionally, industry KPIs are only calculated once there are a number of anonymized entities. PricefxPlasma comes out of the box with four dashboards and 20 benchmark KPIs and will be updated frequently as the KPI database grows. 

The PricefxPlasma dashboards include Executive Summary, Insights, Manage and Realize and these allow customers to compare their performance against the market and to detect where they’re over or under-performing using benchmarking for: 

• End-to-end price waterfall: detailed price buildup, including on- and off-invoice discounts, cost elements, geographical prices, list prices and margin elements. 
• Deal approval process: deal velocity, the percent of deals outside discount guidelines, the number of steps in the approval process. 
• Price setting: the value capture of price increases, the number of list price changes per year. 
• Measures of customer and product concentration: the percent of customers/products to reach revenue deciles. 
• And more to come! 

“For those who want to move beyond day-to-day transactional pricing and to achieve better pricing as a strategic goal of the company, not only will they be able to set realistic goals and track their performance against in-house benchmarking, but also against a much broader KPI.” 

Delivering the Competitive Advantage 

The first of its kind in the pricing world, PricefxPlasma brings unprecedented pricing insights to enterprise companies, giving them the competitive edge by enabling them to measure their performance against pricing benchmarks, improve decision making and to optimize their pricing strategy in order to meet their future goals. 

PricefxPlasma is available now and is free of charge to Pricefx customers. Existing customers who want to sign up for PricefxPlasma can find more information by contacting their Customer Success Manager or by filling out the form below. 

PricefxPlasma™ is a trademark of Price f(x) AG.