What Is the Impact of Digital Transformation on Pricing?

The tangible impact of digital transformation on pricing is far more profound than merely the digitization of legacy paper-based systems. Sure, automation plays a vital role, streamlining processes and boosting pricing analysts’ and salespeople’s’ efficiency. But real transformation harnesses the latest technology to redefine pricing strategies, solve customer problems, and identify new and exciting revenue-generating opportunities. Some companies can add 2% to their bottom line in the first quarter after transformation showing that there are real stakes involved. 

Price optimization, management, and realization software makes pricing your company’s unfair advantage, generating pure profit that goes straight to your bottom line. Our pricing software can provide a significant reduction in cycle times (by 90% on average), increased deal sizes, and considerably higher win rates. In uncertain times (and they’ve never been more so), when profit maximization and customer retention are crucial to company survival, pricing software (often integrated with an ERP) should form the cornerstone of every forward-thinking company’s digital transformation goals.  

Digital Transformation Streamlines and Expedites the Quote-to-Order Process

The need for immediacy in B2C sales is widely accepted. In the Amazon Era, customers know what they want, and they want it now (or at least the next day!) Why should B2B be any different? The modern B2B buyer (a rapidly increasing proportion of whom are millennials) is demanding a more consumer-like buying experience – they’re no longer prepared to wait days, or even weeks, for a quote. Buyers in highly competitive, fast-paced industries often go with the first company to provide a reasonable quote, and quality leads soon degrade over time. 

With response time and win-rate so tightly correlated, you need a way to push to the front of the quote queue. The quote-to-order process is arguably the area in which digital transformation has the highest impact on ROI, slashing cycle times, and getting more customers moving through the sales pipeline. Salespeople no longer have to spend days finding data, number crunching, and waiting for approvals. The entire process is streamlined. Pricing software provides all the data-driven insights they need to provide an accurate, error-free quote in minutes rather than days.  

Pricing Software Enhances Agility and Flexibility in Uncharted Waters

Retaining agility has never been more crucial than it is right now amidst the coronavirus pandemic. In recent months, we’ve seen highly successful companies with tried-and-tested business models go bust. In contrast, others have been able to pivot and ride the wave of a rapidly changing economic landscape. We’re now starting to catch glimpses of a “new normal,” but nobody knows what the market will look like in six months, let alone in a couple of years. What we do know is that companies with the flexibility to adapt quickly are the ones most likely to survive and thrive. 

Agility – being alert to change, spotting opportunities, and reacting with speed and purpose – is impossible without access to the data that drives the big decisions. Pricing software frees pricing data from Excel sheets, email threads, hard-drives, and the recesses of peoples’ minds, making it easily accessible to decision-makers at the touch of a button. It refines the data, cleansing it of “noise,” and provides powerful insights that encourage pricing teams to act with decisiveness when it matters most. It even identifies patterns in the data that are indicative of opportunities and threats on the horizon. 

Digital Transformation Brings Newfound Confidence to Your Sales Team

Digital transformation automates the slowest, most repetitive, menial pricing tasks (the 80%), freeing up your salespeople to focus on the 20% of critical decision making that actually drives profit and revenue growth. Pricing is an inherently human activity – particularly in B2B, where high-touch relationship selling still dominates many industries. Digital transformation should be designed to serve your sales and pricing teams – not the other way around!  

Pricing software enables salespeople to quickly consume highly accurate and easily digestible data, driving discipline and consistency across a united salesforce. Salespeople gain renewed confidence in the prices they’re quoting, safe in the knowledge that they’re providing real value. And when they experience pushback (which happens considerably less often), they feel better equipped to defend their prices. Increased responsiveness and the elimination of pricing errors enhance your salespeople’s credibility, and customer satisfaction and retention improve as a result. 

The Positive Impact of Digital Transformation is Experienced Company-Wide

The real-life impact of successful digital transformation is felt throughout a company, from top to bottom. Pricing software provides a single source of truth to which everyone has access (albeit with different user roles), enhancing transparency, information sharing, communication, collaboration, accuracy, and effectiveness. Each employee experiences their own set of benefits in line with their unique goals and motivations. 

CEOs benefit most from enhanced visibility, allowing them to step back and make informed decisions based on facts rather than gut instinct. Pricing software gives them an instant, detailed snapshot of the current state of pricing and discounting within their company showing the effects of broader pricing strategies.  

CFOs, meanwhile, leverage this transparency to ensure pricing strategy is filtering down to salespeople operating in the field. IT, continually bombarded with requests for reports, can generate ad-hoc reports from the highest quality data at the touch of a button. And pricing teams can provide discount recommendations without having to collate, clean, and absorb dispersed data, allowing them more time to spend nurturing existing customer relationships and bringing in new business.  

Still not convinced that digital transformation is the way forward? Join this on-demand session with Robert Smith as he breaks down why DX is crucial for a pricing organization’s success.