2022 B2B Sales and Pricing Trends: The Rise of Real-Time
By Greg Peters, Chairman, President and CEO
Feb 18, 2022
Read the full article on RT Insights
Companies will rely on data science-driven approaches to getting insights in real-time, at scale across the business, and will quickly push out that information to an omnichannel environment.
The largest, most lingering lesson that companies will take from the pandemic-laden years of 2020 and 2021 is the notion that significant, unpredictable change is constant. We’ve helped customers navigate unprecedented waters amid the pandemic: A seismic shift to eCommerce, inflation and extreme cost volatility, and supply chain disruption that created previously unseen inventory availability challenges. As a company, we helped customers find the smartest pricing, sales, and commercial strategies possible to help them retain and grow market share and improve margins. Increasingly, key factors include the need for more intelligence and real-time actions.
Moving forward into this year, I don’t foresee the pace of change slowing. Those who are prepared to act swiftly and smartly will be the ones to thrive. Here’s a look at what to expect.
Trends to watch: Real-time, intelligence, and more
The three big trends to watch for in B2B are:
The emergence of new ways to handle real-time price execution The mass exodus from spreadsheets and email as a means to share intelligence Mainstream adoption of price optimization and management softwareReal-time price execution:
A lot goes on behind the scenes of the final price presented to a customer: cost, value, competition, relationship, order size, shipping, taxes, freight, and so much more. Historically, this unique blend of factors was calculated within the existing pricing system of record. However, the emergence of eCommerce has overwhelmed these systems, and they simply cannot keep up with the digital demand for pricing. As a result, P&L owners are seeking an alternative to the traditional pricing engine.
In 2022, we’ll see a new breed of pricing engines emerge. Instead of clunky, monolithic software that makes it difficult to update pricing logic and architecturally difficult to provide real-time pricing, companies will increasingly adopt a third-party pricing engine that is cloud-native with a highly available API. By doing so, they can execute real-time pricing calculations against necessary pricing logic in response to calls from any commercial system, incorporate an unlimited number of disparate data sets into the pricing engine, perform complex calculations on demand, and enable real-time price delivery back into commercial systems.