Setting and overseeing your organization’s prices is one of the most important yet most difficult tasks to tackle—especially in competitive markets. There are a host of moving factors to account for every time you implement a pricing change and an equally pressing set of concerns to ponder if you’re not actively engaging in dynamic pricing.

For instance, you could thin out your potential margins by not efficiently responding to a demand spike with a pricing increase. However, simultaneously, you may lose potential sales to more agile competitors if you fail to slash your prices to match market cuts. Either way, staying on top of an ever-shifting list of reasons to adjust your prices at all times is as essential as it is seemingly impossible—that is, without the aid of new digital tools like cloud-based pricing solutions. 

At Canidium, we frequently implement PriceFX to develop sophisticated digital pricing infrastructure for our clients. Our PriceFX team works with the solution daily—designing, configuring, and implementing it based on client specifications. So, leveraging the extensive expertise of our in-house subject matter expert and Go-To-Market lead for PriceFX at Canidium, Chris Keenan, we will walk you through everything you need to know about the solution in this comprehensive guide.

We will cover PriceFX's benefits, who should use it, and how to start the implementation process. By the end of this article, you’ll have a straightforward understanding of the solution, whether it’s right for your business, and the first steps toward implementing it. 

What is PriceFX?

One of the most established and popular rate management software solutions that enterprise-level organizations turn to today is PriceFX. Simply put, it helps design, oversee, and run pricing strategies at scale. Yet PriceFX isn’t necessarily a simple tool. It has advanced functionality, specific use cases, and potential implementation challenges that are important to understand before you buy in.

To start, let’s go over the fundamentals. PriceFX is software designed to help you optimize how your company prices its products and services, thus improving your profit margins for every sale. 

Moreover, to facilitate this overarching optimization goal, PriceFX boasts a list of functionalities and features that work to adjust your strategies in response to changing circumstances, including the following:

• CPQ Features: PriceFX’s error-free Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) capability produces quick responses to inquiries with accurate simulations.

• Rebate Management: PriceFX helps you design, manage, and implement rebate programs, promotions, and discounts to incentivize sales. 
• Price Setting: This feature, much like its name suggests, leverages AI to review both internal and external factors and subsequently set product or service prices to maximize potential profits in real time.
• Automation: PriceFX’s AI and machine learning technologies can automate repetitive manual tasks. For instance, you can fully automate pricing approval workflows.
• Price Optimization Through Analytics: PriceFX can integrate internal and external data, creating a comprehensive information repository. There, the solution’s AI and machine learning tools work to identify critical strategic oversights or potential growth opportunities and generate actionable insights.

The culmination of these features creates a cohesive pricing ecosystem. However, to give you the full picture of what PriceFX can do, we’ll need to cover the benefits that drive so many companies to look for pricing solutions with these features.

Four Key Benefits of PriceFX

PriceFX grants its users a host of highly lauded benefits. Fundamentally, the solution is designed to improve margins for every sale through various means. 

Of course, the solution's flexibility, combined with each company's unique operational structure, may bring individual advantages specific to your company. However, generally speaking, we see the following four benefits routinely garnered for companies implementing PriceFX.

Targeted Pricing Strategies

Your pricing strategies may seem to be yielding relatively well. However, are you sure your current plans maximize your profits to their fullest potential? Often, pricing strategies are left to play out over months or years, leaving money on the table if they fail.

Ideally, you want a fact-based way to test the efficacy of your pricing strategies on a granular level, which is where PriceFX comes in. It tracks and analyzes key metrics to generate accurate reporting regarding gaps or fail points in your current strategy, helping you identify potential alternatives. 

Due to more optimized pricing strategies, PriceFX customers reportedly see a 30% increase in deal size.

Quicker Pricing Changes

Agility has long been essential for companies in competitive markets. However, today, factors like heightened economic volatility, rising inflation, and unpredictable supply chains are pushing companies to increase their flexibility in nearly every aspect of operations—and financial considerations are no exception.

Pricing solutions have the potential to ease the strain of harsh external market conditions. Essentially, by automating pricing optimization in real-time, solutions like PriceFX can adapt the costs of your entire catalog of products or services based on advanced calculations that factor in your internal company data and industry conditions. This way, you can maximize profits at any moment simply by changing sticker prices. 

The potential ROI for these capabilities could be outstanding. Although, you can see the estimated value of implementing PriceFX for yourself with their pricing calculator.

Greater Organizational Efficiency

A recent survey of IT and engineering leaders found that 74% reported forgoing traditionally manual processing in favor of automation, helping their workforce reduce time waste to the tune of 11-30%. Furthermore, 59% of respondents stated that the costs on those teams were decreased by 11-30%. So, while it might seem self-evident, the data backs up the idea that automation results in notable efficiency gains. 

PriceFX automates administrative tasks, reducing the time-consuming burden for employees and allowing them to focus on higher-order tasks. For instance, instead of spending hours on manual calculations and inputs—a process highly subject to human error, sales team members can spend their time on prospects and customers.

Furthermore, these time efficiency gains can help companies reduce their overhead costs by eliminating the need for resource expenditures such as overtime. 

Increased Pricing Visibility

It’s impossible to optimize processes without some form of insight into their results. So, one of the most essential benefits of PriceFX is that it makes the inner workings of the financial side of your business more accessible and easier to understand. 

Everyone within your organization, from the top down, can gain a more nuanced understanding of pricing decisions. Consequently, even complex pricing structures can be implemented more cohesively and consistently. Plus, different departments within your company can more readily get on the same page regarding pricing, as PriceFX is a single source of truth.

Who Should Use PriceFX?

The more you change your prices, the more value you’ll drive from implementing PriceFX. So, if you frequently need to adjust product costs, implementing a pricing solution is as close to a sure bet as you’re likely to get. 

Alternatively, PriceFX is also highly useful if you’re weathering significant market fluctuations. It eases some tension that sudden economic shifts can cause, making it a good investment if inflation significantly impacts you. 

Finally, companies that deal with a high volume of contracts or quotes will significantly benefit from implementing PriceFX’s tools. These tools shorten the administrative work associated with each inquiry and ultimately optimize deals at scale, reducing the friction that can slow down sales.

Considering these use cases, it’s important to note that PriceFX is a flexible, configurable solution. This means you can adopt specific features or functionalities that are useful to your company without implementing the whole solution. Knowing what exactly you want to do with PriceFX is the key to facilitating a successful implementation. This way, you can intelligently plan to integrate these critical functions. 

What Are the Most Common Concerns Customers Have With PriceFX?

As with the adoption of any new technology, issues often arise during the transition phase before everything is set in place. Yet, in acknowledging and planning for these issues ahead of time, you can mitigate their impacts or avoid them altogether. 

In the interest of planning around roadblocks, let’s look into some of the most common issues that crop up before, during, and after PriceFX’s implementation:

Communicating Value

Communicating Value in regards to investing in a pricing solution to leadership can be a daunting task. You need everyone in your organization to buy into implementing a new solution. However, it’s especially critical that decision-makers are on board with the investment. So, you need to be able to convey the real impact that adopting a sophisticated pricing solution can have on your bottom line. The high ROI of successful pricing strategy implementation makes your task easier. Simply lay out how a solution like PriceFX can maximize profits while helping reduce the impacts of market uncertainty.

Change Management

Change Management can be a thorny problem for employees who are tied to their spreadsheets. So, you’ll need to communicate the value of the change to affected employees by showing them how PriceFX makes their jobs easier. Furthermore, training will be a necessary component of effective change management.

Technical Acumen

Advanced Technical Acumen is required to navigate the implementation process. Only a team of professionals with deep expertise can successfully implement and integrate an advanced pricing solution such as PriceFX. So, often the most prominent hurdle companies face when adopting PriceFX requires external support.

If you’re prepared to deal with these challenges before the implementation process starts, they won’t derail your timeline.

When Should You Work With a Software Implementation (SI) Partner

Working with a Software Implementation (SI) partner is a multifaceted process. Your SI partner provides an entire team of professionals dedicated to implementing your solution. 

A solutions architect designs production applications, configuration engineers oversee the entire development process, and a project manager coordinates all activities and timelines.

This team should be highly experienced in the software you’re implementing and can draw on their knowledge to create the most efficient and cohesive implementation based on your specific needs. Moreover, because of this expertise and experience, the entire implementation timeline can typically run shorter than otherwise possible—thereby generating a positive ROI more quickly. After implementation, SI partners will offer managed services to help drive ongoing value from your solution.

To sum up, working with an SI partner is ideal if you have internal gaps in the necessary skills to implement PriceFX or want to ensure that the implementation process runs smoothly.

The First Step to Implementing PriceFX

If PriceFX's benefits align with your business goals or resolve some of your ongoing pricing problems, the first step is to craft an implementation plan. And if you intend to work with a partner organization on the implementation process, you already have a starting point. 

Choosing the right SI partner is paramount. As we see it, you want to find a partner with the necessary expertise and an approach to implementation that emphasizes communication; your company’s specific objectives should be at the forefront of the application structure and system integration. 

At Canidium, we prioritize your needs, fostering a collaborative approach where our team buys into the goals you’re trying to achieve with your solution. We have some of the most experienced solutions architects, configuration engineers, and project managers available to design, configure, implement, and manage your integration. 

We’ve helped many clients increase their financial agility with partner solutions like PriceFX, starting by walking them through the process. If you’re interested in learning more about how to set your company up for a successful PriceFX implementation, you can start by delving into how to Build Internal Buy-In For Your PriceFX Implementation Project. It walks you through how to present the solution’s value so everyone is on the same page before you begin to design more specific configuration goals.