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Which Pricefx Software Package Should I Begin With?

February 3rd, 2022 (Updated 03/10/2023) | 12 min. read

By Sean Philippe

Now you’ve made the weighty decision to upgrade your organization’s business to a modern pricing software solution, another important question has begun flashing through your mind – Which Pricefx package should I begin with? 

Of course, we are naturally inclined to say, ‘aw heck, why not get them all?” and an unbiased and impartial case does exist to have all three of the Pricefx packages – Plan. Price. Profit. – in your pricing software closet – (but more of that later in this article).  

Equally, there are also some unique business models that will not require you to have all three. 

For example, if you’re a retailer selling single items to multiple ever-changing customers from either your online or bricks-and-mortar store, you may not require the Profit package. A critical component of the Profit package is the Quoting that is designed support individual pricing and sales, while retailers sells with mass approach and almost “one-size-fits-all” prices. The Profit package may not fit your retail business perfectly right now. But on the other hand, if it’s in your mind that your business model may change over time to include quotes, you might want to consider future-proofing your pricing software to include it anyway. 

At Pricefx, we get constant inquiries from businesses wondering which of our software packages best suits their unique business requirements.  

That is exactly why we have put together this article to help you discover which Pricefx package you need, which you do not and why. 

The 3 Pricefx Packages – A Quick Snapshot 

Pricing is a complex but necessary part of business processes to help you respond best to your unique set of business requirements and optimize profit. The 3 uniquely packaged software solutions that Pricefx offer can neatly stack together or can be used independently according to your needs. We’ll examine all 3 in depth this article, but here is a quick snapshot: 

  1. Plan – Use Plan for an accurate overview of your businesses’ pricing and identify optimal margins and pricing opportunities. Analyze your business data quickly and get actionable pricing insights within minutes. 
  2. Price – The building block of the Pricefx offering, Price can be used to set your price lists and optimize your price offerings on a journey to profit maximization leveraging your existing data across whatever segments of your business you see fit. 
  3. Profit –  Use Profit for fast and accurate quote creations using error-free quote configurator (CPQ), to identify underperforming products and customers, set up a ship and debit management process and track all your discounts and rebates.  

What Does the Plan Package Do?

Pricefx-Plan-Package

The Pricefx Plan Package consists of: 

  • Analytics 

The Analytics included in the Plan Package provides you with the key capability to see what is going on inside your business with your pricing (right now in real time), identify what is working well and what is not. Get accurate insights into your company’s pricing, margins, customer, and product segments while analyzing and identifying pricing opportunities to maximize your company’s returns and overall profitability. 

The key tool of the Plan Package, Analytics can be quickly accessed using accelerators called Sales Insights and Customer Insights. A predefined panel of easy-to-read charts, dashboards and graphs connect directly to your data. Of course, you can augment the pre-built versions with other custom-built charts if you wish. However, you can immediately use the pre-built ones to begin to see how you are performing in terms of price and where your margin opportunities might lie to increase profit. 

If you are discounting too much or certain customer segments or product portfolio segments of your business are not priced accurately for the markets or the regions that you’re selling in, it’ll be easy to spot for correction. What’s more, the inline analytics will assist you in seeing pre-filtered information on where your prices need to be in terms of profitability and margins at the click of a single button. 

Information easily displayed = quicker and more accurate decision-making. 

What Does the Plan Package NOT Do?

The Pricefx Plan package does not supply a ‘set and forget’ pricing policy. Your pricing team will need to remain engaged with perusing the data responses provided. Given the rate of inflation and rapid market shifts across a number of industries in the last 12 to 24 months, staying on top of your pricing is key. 

Which Type of Business Can Benefit by Using the Plan Package? 

While almost any business will gain some benefit by using the Plan package, those businesses most impacted by the remarkable number of price increases in the last 24 months will get the most out of the power of the Plan package. 

Has your business experienced multiple price changes to your products in any single 12-month timeframe (where you would have only one price shift in previous years) over the last 2 years?  

Getting on the front foot by shifting to automated data analysis to drive real-time price recommendations and changes will assist businesses like these to combat margin leakage and remain profitable. 

Businesses also stuck in the grind of doing analytics of manually sifting through Excel spreadsheets line-by-line will get the most out of setting up the automated analytics of the Plan package. In an effortless way, your data analytics will be easily found, displayed on a dashboard, and acted upon quickly with the Plan package.

Which Type of Business MIGHT NOT Benefit by Using the Plan Package? 

Any company (large or small but usually a large one) that has recently spent a ton of money on building themselves a customized pricing solution may not be a perfect fit for the Plan package. It may take too much of your organization’s time, energy, and IT resources to undo what you may have recently done to start all over again with a new pricing system. 

On the flip side, if you were looking to incorporate the entire Pricefx solution after reading this article, your business may find value in dismantling what you’ve recently built to set up a holistic one-stop pricing shop. 

What Does the Price Package Do?

Pricefx-Price-Package

The Price package is the one tool that most large-scale enterprise businesses regardless of region and industry will find value in. It consists of: 

  • Price Setting
  • Agreements & Promotions
  • Optimization
  • Pricefx Plasma 

Price Setting is the key component of Pricefx pricing software, allowing you to set your price lists, and have different price lists for multiple types of products, regions, or customers, or even combinations of those things and any other demographic requirements you need.  

Agreements & Promotions, on the other hand, enables even the largest global companies to track what agreements they have entered into worldwide and the effect of individual or wider promotional discounts. When used in combination with Price Setting, it is possible to gauge how contract changes and recalculations may affect overall business objectives. 

Live Price Grids enable automated price recalculations based on defined triggers. Opportunities are signaled informed by AI. Opportunities are signaled for Price Optimization powered by AI, including simulations of the impact of price changes on customer and competition behavior (based on your demographic choices), and of course, on your bottom line.

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

What Does the Price Package NOT Do? 

Just like Plan and Profit, the Price package only works when your pricing team is engaged in its use.  

Which Type of Business Can Benefit By Using the Price Package? 

Of all three Pricefx packages, Price is one package that all large-scale businesses will potentially benefit from. 

Why? For example, imagine that the boss of yours or any business sets a required profit increase of let’s say $10 million. The Optimization component of the Price package will allow you to model what will be required to achieve the goal. It may advise you to increase prices in Product Group A by 2%, Product Group B by 5% and Product Group C by 7.5%. What’s more, it will allow you to model those increases against what has happened in the past and/or recalculate price shifts by region or other customer groups to help you get to your $10 million target. 

No more sifting through data in Excel to try and find where and how to find the critical price points you need to target. More time to develop big-picture ideas. It also means smaller, leaner pricing teams across all businesses informed by data and not by manual processes. 

Which Type of Business MIGHT NOT Benefit by Using the Price Package? 

See above information on the type of business that may not benefit with the use of the Plan package. 

What Does the Profit Package Do?

Pricefx-Profit-Package

The Profit package has a number of key components; 

  • Quoting
  • Agreements & Promotions
  • Rebates
  • Channel Management 
  • Deal Planning
  • Optimization 

Quoting – Quoting is the key element of the Profit package and allows for unparalleled response times to sales inquiries and turns around quotes faster than ever before using fast and error-free quote configurator (CPQ) solution and informed by cutting-edge AI pricing simulations and calculations. 

As your quotes are based on these automated deal and negotiation processes, they permit your sales team to utilize optimal price guidance for any customer/product combination, drawing down on the historical evidence of your previous deals. 

Channel Management – Channel Management automates and validates ship & debit claims in any industry across the globe.  

By addressing common problems encountered during the claims management process, like; 

  • Delays in submitting claims to the manufacturer due to the sheer amount of paperwork and calculations. 
  • Inefficient workforce and/or human errors  
  • Miscalculations at the manufacturer’s end meaning distributors are over or under paid, and; 
  • Budgeting complications for manufacturers due to unprocessed claims from previous fiscal years.  

Channel Manager provides a more streamlined and organized system with long-term cost savings and customer satisfaction for clients.  

Rebates – One of the best tools in the Profit package for businesses that create, calculate, track, and execute incentives, all from one central location. 

Deal Planning – One of the most recent additions to the Profit package, the Deal Planning allows you to efficiently streamline, organize and automate the deal process from its preparation, through negotiation, to its closure and review. It establishes a clear and aligned negotiation plan and strategy, resulting in the end-to-end organizational alignment you need.

What Does the Profit Package NOT Do? 

The Profit package is not a tool that most retailers may need to consider as it may not necessarily add value to their business. See more below in the “Which Type of Business MAY NOT Benefit By Using the Profit Package?” section. 

Which Type of Business Can Benefit By Using the Profit Package? 

Primarily those companies that will benefit most using the Profit package will be companies (such as manufacturing companies) selling to distributors. Overall, the Profit package has benefit to just about any company involved in B2B (business-to-business) transactions and commerce. In saying that, the Profit package homes in on industry stakeholder roles and pricing software requirements across our recognized ‘Big 4’ key vertical industry sectors comprising; 

  • Discrete Manufacturing
  • Chemical and Process Industry
  • Distribution
  • Food and Beverage 

Which Type of Business MIGHT NOT Benefit By Using the Profit Package? 

As mentioned above, retail industries that sell to single, one-visit customers to their website or bricks-and-mortar retail outlets in malls or in downtown areas may not require the Profit package as they are selling to end users. 

Retailers are not quoting, nor selling large volumes directly to other businesses, so there is no need for Quoting. Discounts are calculated and delivered at the checkout, taking the need for Rebates out of the equation. Transactions are usually smaller than B2B transactions, so Deal Planning is generally not required, unless of course they are big players like Amazon that have huge B2B accounts.

Which Pricefx Package is a Good Starting Point for Any Business?

Starting-Point-White-On-Green-Astroturf   

Those companies wanting to start small in developing their journey with pricing software (and by the way, that is a great idea!), in general the best starting point is with the Price package. 

Of course, it will vary from company to company, however, Price is the package that will fit the capabilities that most companies require to start with pricing software. 

The functionality that most companies crave of using AI and data-informed algorithms to organize pricing into segments and create a straightforward and unlimited number of price strategies, calculations and simulations is key. Once implemented, the Price package will allow you to test and tweak your pricing policies based on real-world constraints and business-specific factors.

Is There a Benefit to Using All 3 Pricefx packages in Combination? 

Given the unpredictability and sudden rate of change that the global pandemic triggered, the benefits of using all 3 packages in unison are huge. 

As a Pricing Professional yourself, you’ll know that you kick-off the year with several goals and objectives that you wish to achieve for your organization. Each year, (but even more so over the last 24 months in particular), very quickly those goals get pushed aside by price shifts triggered by inflation or supply chain issues.  

Consequently, the benefit of having all 3 packages up-and-running for your organization is that you have a total and real-time solution adapting to the current market forces at hand working in harmony as a complete unit. Whether it’s changing your contracts, shifting prices, or adjusting rebate agreements, those elements are all working together co-operatively and not independently in a siloed environment.

Turn Your Great Pricing Ideas into Reality

Turn-Ideas-Into-Reality-Sign-In-A-Window-Sill 

Now you understand the full functionality of all 3 Pricefx packages, it’s time to begin on the pricing software journey and turn your business objectives into reality, faster and with less workforce effort. 

At Pricefx, our commitment to rapid time-to-value for businesses, short implementation and integration times, outstanding pricing outcomes and flexible package choices for your unique business plan are key to who we are.  

For those wanting to continue their journey in learning more about Pricefx pricing software, check out this article: 

Pricefx-How-Much-Does-Pricing-Software-Cost

Or if you have already made up your mind which package you need; 

CTA -Pricefx-English-Talk-To-An-Expert

 

 

Sean Philippe

Solution Strategist , Pricefx