The Tangled Web of B2B Price Management

The life of a pricer is hectic. Control is elusive as you toil through your day-to-day at the unpredictable whims of marketplace triggers.

As external forces present themselves, your company’s corporate office reacts quickly and expects the pricing team to do the same. Suddenly you’re getting concerned calls about how quickly prices can be raised in response to a new tariff, or for an updated pricing strategy after your top competitor introduces a new promotion.

These triggers set off a chain reaction in the world of a pricing professional, in which a cascade of decisions, approvals, communications and price updates take place in an often-haphazard fashion. By the time new prices are rolled out to the customer, a new trigger may have hit that starts the process all over again. For many of our customers, this illustration is way too accurate:

It’s a mess. So how do we solve this conundrum? For two decades we’ve been known as the leader in advanced science-based price optimization, but many companies have told us what they really need first is to get a handle on the blocking and tackling of pricing. With or without optimized prices, there is a process problem at the heart of the matter. Who has access to the latest price book? How can we update price lists, matrices and customer-specific prices quickly? Can we automate the manual maintenance of price lists? Why aren’t all prices accessible in one centralized location? How can we better collaborate on price changes (and justifications) with sales reps?

These are just a few of the questions we tackle with customers on a regular basis. Solving these complex challenges is what keeps us up at night and it’s why we’ve reimagined pricing with customer-centric solutions.

Whether it’s our price management capabilities, market-leading price optimization solution, advanced data science, or tools to evaluate and streamline deal management, we are making it simpler for pricing professionals to improve margins and reduce burdensome pricing tasks.

Of course, the right pricing solution can look different from company to company. The right solution must go beyond putting the best prices into market; it must help you make better decisions faster and automate rote activities to leave time for strategy.

At this year’s Professional Pricing Society Fall Conference (1:50 pm PDT on Thursday, October 17) my colleague Samantha Leung and I will be giving a comprehensive breakdown of Zilliant’s customer-driven co-innovation approach to pricing software, followed by a product demonstration so you can see the new Zilliant in action.

We hope you join us in Las Vegas to reimagine what’s possible in the world of pricing! Here’s where you can find us during the conference:

Attend the Platinum Sponsor Welcome Reception from 4:30 – 6:30 pm PDT at the Hostile Grape Wine Bar in the M Resort on Wednesday, October 16. Join Zilliant for a small group dinner at 7 pm PDT on Wednesday, October 16, at Gaetano’s Ristorante. RSVP here. Schedule time to meet with a Zilliant team member on Thursday, October 17, or Friday, October 18 to discuss how we may be able to support your pricing initiative. Attend Brooks Hamilton’s “Setting a Standard for Price Modes” presentation at 1 pm PDT on Friday, October 18. Stop by the booth!

Interested in speaking with us sooner, or not planning to attend the event? Schedule time with our team.