Price Optimization & Management (PO&M) customization can help you boost your margins and win more business. Adapting your PO&M solution to match your pricing process can save you time, improve your bottom line and systemize what you do best.
When it comes to PO&Ms, the benefits you get out depend on the effort you put in. Fail to define your process and you’ll end up with low-quality data and poorer performance.
A customizable PO&M software supercharges reporting, too, as insights that are specific to your organization give you a higher chance of success by helping you to understand exactly what needs to be improved.
What is a customizable POM?
Refining your pricing process is essential to driving results. Your PO&M needs to be optimized to match that process, so you make your pricing team’s lives easier and get higher quality data.
Customizable PO&Ms allow you to add features or make changes to better fit the needs of your business. That includes doing things like updating the stages of your pricing processes and defining what data is collected about organizations or customers.
Start with goals and requirements
Customization starts with your pricing process. Look at every step in your buyer journey and think about how that’s best captured: what information do pricers need to be recording? What are the key steps in the process?
It’s worth revisiting your pricing and company goals too. Getting a sense of the volume of activity that’s needed and how pricing activity is going to change over time will point to opportunities for customization.
This is a chance to solve problems in your pricing process. Perhaps people aren’t entering the information correctly or sales are being lost at a certain point in the pipeline. You can change that process by using helpful hints.
Once you’ve established what’s needed you can start to look for opportunities to customize your PO&M, which we’ll cover in the next section.
10 benefits of customizing your PO&M
This section includes suggestions on how you can customize your Price Optimization & Management software and the benefits these changes can bring.
1. Using data to develop pricing strategies
Once you’ve customized your PO&M to collect different data, it can provide incredibly useful insight into your pricing process and how to improve it.
Drilling into the data to see behavior based on characteristics helps identify new profit opportunities. You might find customers in a certain area or vertical are responding particularly well to a campaign or new product. Or there are unexpected demographic details that predict deal size.
2. Supercharge reporting through a custom dashboard
Pricing reporting is a critical part of business growth. Refining reporting data allows the team to focus on the right things while having access to live information allows you to react quickly too.
Here are seven things to include on a pricing KPI dashboard:
- Gross & Net Margin
- Gross & Net Revenue
- Profit in % & Money
- Nr of prices changed
- Price in relation to a competitor(s)
- Price Waterfall evolution
- Nr of open price approvals
Pricing dashboards can be created for different purposes. You might have an overview dashboard that allows everyone to track progress as well as individual dashboards for pricers who want to focus on their own activity.
PO&Ms like PriceEdge allow you to customize your insights and reports. You can also filter reports based on custom fields, so you could look at the average market position for specific categories or competitors.
If you get the data collection right, the potential to tap into it for insights is limitless.
3. Get productive: Increase the speed of repetitive tasks
You can carry out repetitive actions like making price approvals and handling price requests from your PO&M.
Don’t rely on copying data from one system to another manually. Integrating tools with your PO&M makes sure you’re capitalizing on the data you have.
4. Use templates for pricing
Systemizing your pricing process creates repeatable steps, including messaging and the sending of documents such as price lists or quotes. These are often customized based on PO&M data or the pricing professionals’ knowledge about a business.
You might have two or three types of proposals based on customer persona or sector, for example, or an email template asking for referrals.
Adding custom templates for price lists o your PO&M saves time. It’s a great way to make sure pricers are equipped with the resources they need, too.
5. Collect data that enhances prices set
Using customizable PO&M software allows you to dictate what data is collected, which can enhance your pricing and promotion process.
The key to data collection is to focus on the information that supports your pricing and promotion process, don’t collect data that isn’t actionable.
Fixing the data in a PO&M retrospectively is difficult. Using required fields, drop downs and help messages makes sure data is entered correctly.
6. Create custom fields to segment leads and customers
Additional information is often added through “Custom fields”. This flexibility allows you to collect information that’s specific to your pricing processes.
It encourages pricers to ask the right questions and allows you to refine the way you target audiences. In PriceEdge we for instance call these custom fields “extensions” and you can add them to any data set (price objects).
7. Use grids to roll out and track initiatives
Launching a new product? Offering a reduced price to regular customers? Want to send a campaign to people that match a certain persona?
There are lots of reasons why you might want to target a particular set of products. But you need a way to tag them to grids in your PO&M to track and market to them effectively.
8. Customize your POM with integrations, add-ons, and features
Using add-ons and new features is a powerful way to level up your pricing process.
Every company’s tech stack is different. You want to use the tools that work best for your business, so it’s important your PO&M is flexible enough to add these apps and features.
The key is to avoid the repetition of data and manual tasks; lead data can’t help you win sales if it’s locked up in a spreadsheet on someone’s desktop.
9. Set bespoke notifications and alerts
We’ve all felt the anxiety of not following up on margin erosion quickly enough. PO&M notifications make sure you don’t miss out on opportunities or take action too late. Getting a warning when margins start to rot or a nudge when an activity needs to be completed prompts people to complete tasks and staying on top of that communication increases your chances of success.
It’s important to customize your PO&M to make these notifications fit your pricing process.
10. Change permission and security settings
Permissions give users rights to access and edit different types of information.
You might have less experienced team members working on data entry but want to prevent them from altering critical data. Similarly, you can protect your data by preventing anyone but admins from downloading complete data sets.
The simplest way to manage access is to create permission sets for particular groups of team members.
Customizing your permission and security settings improves data security and reduces the risk of data being lost.
Should we commission a custom POM?
Custom PO&Ms are built for individual businesses, which means they can define every detail of how the PO&M works.
However, building a PO&M from scratch is expensive. Using a customizable PO&M is normally the best bet, particularly for small businesses.
The important thing is to make sure that the PO&M you pick has the functionality you need to execute your pricing process effectively.
Final thoughts
Refining and systemizing your pricing processes is the cornerstone of growth. It increases your likelihood of winning business and helps train new pricing team members
That means it’s important to customize your POM to reflect your pricing process. There’s no point in working on your buyer journey or researching information about prospects if your POM can’t capture that value.
It’s amazing how much time you can save from a properly customized PO&M too. Pricers only have to input data that’s valuable, marketing has a rich data set of information to target prospects and custom dashboards supercharge your reporting.
That means you need to find the best customizable and flexible PO&M.
About The Author: Radu Marin
Radu is a former Pricing Manager at HP and is now actively working in our pricing projects as a Pricing Analyst and contributes to Price Edge marketing efforts when possible.
More posts by Radu Marin