DM07: Leverage price guidance when quoting

Sales Manager / Account Executive

Business Objective:

Support Sales during quoting with price guidance, inline analytics to optimize the business outcome / goals / return / margin. / Improve margin, speed, and quote win rate with guided selling and decisions support

Time consuming manual process for quoting with limited pricing and margin visibility and guidance, limited governance and decision support.

Seamless guided selling workflow with optimized price guidance and product recommendations, in-line analytics, and built-in workflow.

• Improve margins

• Higher win rate

• Speed up quoting process and be faster than competition

• Increase sales efficiency and decision support and improve sales confidence in prices

• Due to approval workflow better control and visibility of sales price

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Currently, the process of creating pricing recommendations for sales people in the process industry is very time-consuming and lacks inline analytics or understanding of where opportunities for pricing and value increase might come from. However, this is something that sales executives and persons can definitely use to improve their ability to add value to deals with customers, as well as support the price organization when it comes to price realization for the price setting process. The opportunity we have here is to provide this guidance in a very efficient and user-friendly way. We'll be using a workflow to enable the opportunity to add validations for low margins or prices that might be out of a certain threshold. Some of the benefits we'll get include expanded margins and capturing as much value as possible from customer deals. Because of its integration with CRMs, Pricefx allows for the creation of these quotes directly from opportunities within those CRMs, providing guidance within those frameworks as well. Ultimately, our goal is to enable sales people by allowing them to have visibility into where the opportunity is, make better decisions when dealing with customers, and have the ability to track customer performance over time.

Let's take a look at how we can use sales guidance in Pricefx.

To get started, we'll create a new quote. We'll use one of the templates available in the system and tailor it to a specific customer. We'll set up the name of the quote, effective dates, currency, and payment terms to match our customer's needs. Once the quote is created, we can add items to it.

We can navigate to our product master and select the items we want to add, or we can copy items from an Excel file and paste them directly into the quote. With the items added, we'll take a look at the input parameters to make sure everything is set up correctly.

The first thing we will do is we'll capture a quantity for all of the items in the quote. We'll select them and perform a mass edit to set the quantity to 100 units. We'll also capture a discount that the customer is asking for to set up the quote from the beginning.

With the price recommendation and request from the customer captured, we can compare it to the price guidance in the system. We can see that some of the products have a rather low price quality and that the system is recommending prices that are higher than what the customer is asking for. This gives us valuable insight into how we can adjust prices to better align with our pricing strategy while still meeting customer needs.

One of the main benefits of using price guidance is the confidence it gives us in the accuracy of our pricing decisions.

We can see actual information within the system, including an inline analytic chart that shows what different customers are paying for the same product. This provides a useful reference point for setting prices, and in this case, we'll use the price guidance to set the price for this product.

We will adjust the price to the target price of 53 and recalculate the change.

With the price adjusted, we can see that our price quality has improved. We will do the same thing for our other products, using the margin and price recommendation to select the recommended target price.

Once we confirm the changes, we'll put together the quote. With these price adjustments made, we can see that our quote is now above target, putting us in a much better position.

You are now able to see that the price, quality, and deal score for each of the line items has improved significantly. With this information, you can review the workflow for approval and determine how many levels of approval will be needed for this quote. It looks like we'll need three levels of approval, so we'll go ahead and submit the quote for approval.

Once approved, it can be exported it into a PDF using one of the templates available in the system and send it to the customer. This will allow us to move forward with the deal and continue building our relationship with the customer.

This is the end of this flow for how to leverage price guidance when quoting in Pricefx.