One Tactic to Hold the Line on Margin in Uncertain Times
By Zilliant
Mar 19, 2020
Table of Contents
Given the unprecedented challenges ahead of us all, as a leader in your business, you’re likely evaluating strategies to retain share and hold the line on margin.
One tactic that is commonly overlooked is ensuring that your pricing strategy is agile enough to dynamically make updates as market conditions change while putting necessary guardrails in place to keep prices rational in the market. Consider this from our partners at Modern Distribution Management in the article, “6 Steps to Prep Your Company for Coming Coronavirus Disruptions”:
“Watch your sales team orders and help them with the pricing.Today, you have many outside salespeople on the sidelines wondering what to do. This may lead to ‘panic pricing’ on manual orders, since the tendency is to get the margin dollars you can if you are paid on commission. Make sure you have the guardrails in place (no orders under X%, floor pricing at the SKU level, etc.)”
Tackle One Price Mode at a Time
Certainly, the many ways a company prices — list, matrices or tiers, customer-specific agreements, spot negotiations and overrides, all of which are interconnected — drive complexity in achieving a dynamic pricing strategy within a large distribution company.
Tackling one way your company prices — what we refer to as a price mode — at a time is a good, manageable tactic to ultimately achieving dynamic pricing throughout the company. To that end, this webinar co-hosted with Modern Distribution Management (MDM) covers one price mode that is commonly overlooked — updating customer-specific pricing.
Customer-specific pricing, or prices that are negotiated and set for one customer, are often the most sacred in your business, and thus, can be the trickiest to adjust when they become misaligned to the market.
Watch this on-demand webinar as Zilliant Vice President of Services Brooks Hamilton and MDM’s Vice President of Sales, Business and E-Business John Gunderson, dissect the complexities of customer-specific prices in B2B distribution and chart a path toward fixing them.
