Recently, the fluctuating and volatile nature of the prices of raw materials used in your company’s production means that your organization is required to update your global price lists faster and more often than ever before. With your costs rising that quickly it may be difficult to stay on top of the business impacts those price list changes are making to your company’s bottom line. Wouldn’t it be great to have a tool up-and-running in a few weeks that could assess the business impacts of your price lists updates before they are applied to market, and simulate the impact while involving all the elements of your price waterfall? Pricefx’s Price List Impact Simulation Accelerator has the capacity to perform that task and it is just one of the several accelerators that Pricefx has on offer. Join us in this article as we discuss ‘Pricefx Accelerators – What They Are and When to Use Them.’

At Pricefx, over the 12+ years, as a native-cloud, next-generation pricing software provider, we have taken it upon ourselves to bring value to hundreds of companies as quickly as possible. A critical part of developing the fastest return on investment (ROI) in the pricing software marketplace today has been our development of our pricing software Accelerators that most businesses can get up-and-running in just a few short weeks and quickly start discovering value points that they never knew they had.

In this article, we will examine all the Pricefx accelerators currently on offer/in use, and an example of how each might be used to help your business become more profitable and efficient faster. However, let’s first take a high-level overview of what Pricefx accelerators are.

Accelerators are tools provided by Pricefx to jump-start the pricing application quickly. In contrast to most pricing applications that require significant resources in terms of time, money, and manpower, the use of Pricefx Accelerators implements the company’s values of FAST and FLEXIBLE. These tools developed for a range of flexible pricing outcomes enable customers to get started quickly with a fast time-to-value implementation.

The role of the Pricefx Accelerators is to act like jumper cables to jump-start your pricing application in no time and get your pricing application running FAST. The use of these Accelerators gets our customers started very quickly with speedy time-to-value implementation.

The value provided by the Pricefx Accelerators is in simplifying the most difficult part of any application implementation, i.e., the architectural design and its adherence to business requirements. With Accelerators, pricing application components can be up-and-running in a matter of weeks instead of months, providing quick and efficient value.

But no business wants a straight out of the box, cookie-cutter solution that is that is inflexible and demands business to adapt their processes to fit it.

That is where the Pricefx ‘flexible’ secret sauce comes in.

The Accelerators are designed to be flexible, allowing customers to influence their behavior without touching a single line of code by fitting customer data into predefined structures. This ensures that the solution is customizable and can be used as part of the entire Pricefx pricing software suite of products.

Pricefx has analyzed the pain points of hundreds of customers and put together accelerator packages that are constructed to specifically (and quickly!) address the most common pain points that large enterprise companies are currently facing today.

Let’s get started by running through the Accelerators currently available, the pain points they are built to solve and examples of when businesses may find a use case for each.

At Pricefx, we have segmented our pricing software solution into distinct categories of Plan, Price, Profit, (and a couple of standalone accelerators) and each of these addresses’ specific sets of pricing requirements.

Consequently, our Accelerators are also separated into the same distinct groupings to focus on solving common problems in these areas.

Find your next opportunities for profit growth with a set of dashboards that analyze your product and customer profitability and related margin leakages.

Use Sales Insights to identify your profit margin outliers with ease. Perhaps your company sells a range of products at different prices and profit margins. It could be that you have a particular product that consistently generates higher margins and revenues compared to other products in its category. This product is an outlier in terms of both margin and revenue, and you want to understand why.

By identifying the factors driving the success of this outlier product, you can develop a strategy to replicate this success in other products or categories. This could include adjusting pricing, promotions, or other marketing strategies to better align with customer needs and market trends. Ultimately, identifying and understanding margin and revenue outliers is critical to optimizing pricing strategies and driving revenue growth for a business.

Analyze the relationship between revenue and margin percentage from various perspectives and also examine:

• Outliers – Analyze the best and worst performing products and customers
• Price Waterfall – Waterfall analysis with grouped adjustments and their details
• Price Waterfall comparison – Compare waterfall analysis per time period, product, or customer.
• Revenue breakdown – Uncover reasons for the difference in revenue between two specific periods.
• Margin breakdown – Uncover reasons for the difference in margin between two specific periods.
• Regional revenue and margin – Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) visualized in a world or continental maps.

Prevent margin leakages through a set of actionable analytics for sales and pricing that enables identification of customers at risk (with a low health score) and the reasons behind it. It includes advanced analysis of the performance of all individual customers and customer groups as well as product performance for customers.

A manufacturing company can prevent margin leakages by conducting advanced analysis of their B2B customer performance, as well as product performance. The company can make informed pricing and sales decisions to improve profitability and reduce the risk of losing high-value customers. This allows the company to take a proactive approach to pricing and sales strategy, ensuring that they maintain healthy margins while continuing to grow their B2B customer base.

Customer and Product health scores in addition to:

• Revenue, Margin and Volume trends
• Pricing and Sales opportunities

Here is one for your IT Team, rather than those involved in your organization’s pure pricing functions. This accelerator provides the implementation basis for the creation of new charts within your available Dashboard package. The key audience of the Dashboard library are usually users responsible for IT implementation and configuration.

As the genesis of uncovering new business opportunities, your IT Team can use the Dashboard Accelerator to facilitate how you can visualize your data in understandable and customized chart types such as:

• Scatter
• Column
• Column Stacking
• Heatmap
• Boxplot
• Bubble
• Pie
• Bar
• Line
• Maps

Make comprehensive price lists in addition to dynamic price lists. Design your price lists quickly and across various hierarchies (standard price list, global vs. country price lists, etc.).

Use this quick pricing strategy response tool when your organization needs to quickly adjust your pricing strategy in response to market changes or competitive pressures.

Another case where the Pricefx Price Setting Accelerator can be helpful is when your company wants to optimize your pricing across multiple channels or regions. Or use this tool when your company needs to improve your pricing governance and establish clear guidelines for pricing decisions.

The following pricing strategies are built into the Price Setting Accelerator to enable your business to switch between them on the fly:

• Competitive based pricing
• Recommended retail pricing (RRP)
• Promotion pricing
• Cost plus pricing
• Price increase
• Attribute-based pricing
• Kit & bundle pricing

Learn more about pricing strategies in our Complete Pricing Strategy Guide.

Increase your ability to respond to volatile market changes using dynamic pricing capabilities and automate your regular price maintenance and updates through price recalculations based on defined triggers and formulas.

Use the Price Flexibility Accelerator to keep pace with rapidly fluctuating raw material costs and pass them on to your customers when they occur. For example, use this accelerator to enable your pricing team to monitor what approved price levels and notify customers of price changes on time to avoid margin leakage.

In times of high inflation, this can mean tracking results at a customer-item level on a weekly or even daily basis to gain an understanding of where to increase your business focus.

Price Notifications for newly added or updated products plus:

• The Price Setting and Price Flexibility Accelerator are designed to complement each other perfectly.
• Definition of rules for price building logic and automated price updates through Live Price Grids
• Scheduling of automated pricing updates without manual inputs, adding operational efficiency to your pricing team.
• Automated new pricing approval processes through automated workflows

Assess the business impact of your global price list updates before they are applied and simulate the impact while involving all the elements of your price waterfall.

If you want to raise (or lower) the prices of your products across any scope of your business (products, geographies, customers, special agreements, discounts, etc.), simulate in advance what the price shift will have on your overarching business objectives. For less advanced price setting simulation, that is available through the Price Setting Accelerator.

Conduct business impact assessment of assumed price list changes, and:

• Calculate impact on business KPIs
• Visualize comparison of simulated scenario with your pricing status quo
• Simulate across any scope of your business (products, geographies, customers, special agreements, discounts, etc.)
• Simulate Price Lists and Live Price Grids

Utilize next-generation AI-informed price optimization to simulate improvements and provide price guidance to impact your goals through right customer / product segmentation and the optimization of your related pricing.

This allows your company to visualize your pricing waterfall and identify areas to improve your pricing strategy. It gives you guidance on the size that each element ‘should’ be to maximize your KPIs. This visualization is also in the Sales Insights Accelerator if you only need to ‘see’ the results. The strength of the Price Waterfall Optimization  Accelerator is that it “tells” you what action to take.

For example, your company can identify areas where you are giving away too much margin or where you can potentially increase the price of your products or services without losing customers. This accelerator is particularly useful for companies that are looking to optimize their pricing strategy by identifying areas where they can make minor changes that can have an enormous impact on their overall profitability.

Price Guidance and optimization based on your defined business goals and relevant user-defined constraints plus:

• Optimize all pricing elements (list price, discounts, etc.)
• Price Optimization Realization Dashboard with the optimization results and comparison with the current status quo
• Predict impact on revenue, volume, margin
• Perform breakeven analysis

One of the most powerful of all Pricefx accelerators, the CPQ accelerator will provide your business with the ability to generate error-free quotes in a manner that is timely, effective, and accurate.

Imagine yourself as Kit Home manufacturer that supplies homes shipped to your door in flat packs with precut materials for self-assembly. You sell to individual buyers but also do deals with building contractors who assemble the homes for customers in bulk tract and public housing complexes. You operate across the mainland United States, Canada, and Central America.

You can use the CPQ Accelerator to improve your quoting and pricing process, standardizing it across all regions, streamlining your quoting process for bulk orders from hours to 15 minutes, giving your salespeople and customers a faster understanding of pricing and saving your salespeople from a tedious manual quoting procedure.

The result – increased efficiency and profitability for both you and your customers.

The CPQ Accelerator allows sales reps to modify quotes with a user-friendly interface, reducing errors and time to quote, and;

• The software can offer real-time pricing guidance and recommendations (if combined with a price optimization implementation) to help sales reps optimize pricing for each quote based on market trends, customer history, and other factors.
• Automated Error-Free Quote Creation: (as discussed above)
• The software offers a centralized repository for managing proposals, making it easy to send messages on proposal revisions and approvals.
• The CPQ Accelerator streamlines the sales process with workflow automation, ensuring that quotes are reviewed and approved.
• The software provides real-time insights into sales performance, allowing sales managers to identify trends for upselling and cross-selling, track key metrics, and make data-driven decisions.

Ensure the value-driven profitability of every deal you make. The Negotiation Guidance Accelerator provides your salespeople with price recommendations based upon the willingness-to-pay of your range of customers.

Imagine you’re a sales manager negotiating a deal with a potential customer. You’re unsure of the right pricing strategy and don’t want to leave money on the table or lose the deal. With the Pricefx Negotiation Guidance Accelerator, you can input the customer’s requirements and budget constraints, and receive real-time guidance on optimal pricing and negotiation strategies, such as bundling, discounting, or upselling, to help you close the deal quickly and profitably. This tool can also provide you with a simulation of potential outcomes to help you make data-driven decisions.

Price guidance delivered your salespeople on every deal and reflecting uniqueness of every situation plus you can use:

• Price recommendations for every ‘price segment,’ following differentiated willingness-to-pay
• Historical sales data to improve future recommendations to maximize your profit and win-rates
• Floor, target and stretch prices supported by visual analytics at the time of quoting

This accelerator quickly provides a standardized process that ensures that your sales compensation agreements are aligned with your organizational goals.

Manage, calculate, and payout sales compensation plans efficiently, all while giving your sales team visibility on their compensation level at the time of quote.

Simultaneously, you can use that data to assess how your organization is performing overall against individual sales targets and consequently, push your products more aggressively where and when required.

You can either use predefined sales compensation plans, flat rate incentives target, variable pay, multi-targets amounts and much more plus:

• Calculate payouts
• Track Adjustments
• Define approved workflows
• Seller assignment administration
• Dashboards for reporting and analysis

Effectively manage your organization’s rebate agreements and recognize margin leakage using pre-defined rebate types.

If your rebates are out of control and you’re losing profit between the cracks as your accruals, allocations, and pay-out processing times drift outside your guidelines, use the Rebate Management Accelerator to regain control.

Define, calculate, execute, and maintain rebate agreements – all in one place quickly and easily.

Leverage predefined 20 most frequent rebate condition types, agreement output templates as well as automated approval workflow to keep on full track plus;

• A dashboard for all existing rebate agreements
• Overview of business performance of existing rebate agreements
• Definitions and calculations of financial impacts of new rebate agreements

The Product Recommendation Accelerator will provide you with the right product mix to effectively reach optimal customer value (with upselling and cross-selling options).

Imagine a customer is ordering a product from your manufacturing business, and the order history shows they often purchase a related item. This is an opportunity to suggest upselling a higher-end version of the original product. You can also cross-sell by recommending complementary products that could enhance the customer’s experience or offer additional value. Timing is key, so consider offering these suggestions when making the deal.

Provides up-sell / cross-sell recommendations during quotation process to drive deal value and:

• Data-mining based identification of product correlations for presentation to appropriate customers
• Increased deal revenue, profitability, overall optimal customer value and increased satisfaction

This accelerator provides methods for control and tracking of automated approvals for key processes (quotes, rebates, price lists, etc.). Users can define their own processes and rules, allowing them to build or alter approval workflows without getting into writing code.

Use the Pricefx Approval Workflow Accelerator when you need to streamline and automate your pricing approval process. This tool can help you increase efficiency, reduce errors, and ensure compliance with your pricing policies. With the Approval Workflow Accelerator, you can create custom workflows and rules to automate the approval process based on specific criteria, such as product type, price thresholds, or customer segments.

This can help you save time and reduce the risk of pricing errors, while also providing a clear audit trail for your pricing decisions.

Define approval workflow types and approval steps for each of them and;

• Define users, user groups or business roles as approvers
• Define conditions to apply in each approval step
• Execute workflow processes
• Workflow history tracking

Compare more than 20 pricing performance benchmarks against the anonymized aggregate transaction and quoting data from your industry and across the wider economy.

Use the Pricefx Plasma Accelerator when you want to know how your business is comparing against your industry competitors or how quickly you close your deals. Have you always wanted to see if your organization is discounting on more occasions to close deals than your industry colleagues do?

If those types of pricing insights are the sort of thing that your company is looking for Pricefx Plasma brings unprecedented pricing insights enabling you to measure your performance against pricing benchmarks, set up a competitive edge on other industry players in your sector, improve your internal pricing decision making, and optimizing your pricing strategy aligned with your overarching business requirements. *Note, to access this accelerator, you will need to opt-in to the Price Plasma program.

Access reliable quantitative benchmarks to objectively measure and compare your performance, and:

• Identify market trends to improve decision-making on future strategy, ambition, and direction of growth
• Data- driven assessment of developing opportunities and target setting
• Over 20 KPIs available and related to
• End-to-end price waterfall
• Deal approval process
• Sales effectiveness
• Price setting
• Concentration
• Sales effectiveness

Although each Accelerator has its own unique functionality and capabilities that are linked to pricing issues they are designed to resolve, their installation and deployment of them are quite easy.

Any of our Accelerators can be deployed to your partition using our Platform Manager product. Simply select one of them from the Platform Manager Marketplace once you have become a customer and are using the award-winning Pricefx pricing software solution.

if you would like to learn more about our Pricefx total pricing software solution works hand-in-hand with our Accelerator options, click on the link below to talk to one of our pricing experts:

Or if you would like to continue your pricing software learning journey, click here to learn more about the 5 types of Pricing Software.

Happy Pricing!