Finding and Leveraging Hidden Sources of Margin and Revenue
Leading B2B companies are looking beyond the obvious segmentation criteria. In so doing, they’re finding profitable opportunities their competitors are unaware of, making them more resilient in the down times and positioning them for a stronger recovery in the days ahead. This paper exposes some of the more “unique” sources of margin improvement that have been discovered recently in the B2B environment.

Strategies and Tactics for Optimizing Your B2B Price Matrix
In many businesses it’s common to find 30% to 60% of corporate revenues being priced through non-negotiated price mechanisms such as a price matrix or price grid. But there’s one big problem that shows up and robs the price matrix of its full potential.In this paperk, learn how leading companies are taking an innovative approach to reclaiming lost profits on the non-negotiated side of their business.

More Profitable Pricing for Build-to-Order Products
How do you figure out how to price a product you’ve never sold before and may never sell again? How do you determine the truly optimal price for a product that’s built-to-order or uniquely configured? Learn how one manufacturer used a powerful combination of approaches to reclaim $40 million margin-dollars that would've otherwise slipped through their fingers.

Manufacturers: Stop Sending Margin Downstream
On the Pricing Capability Matrix, most manufacturers tend fall into the Level 1 capability category. But while manufacturers have been focused elsewhere, downstream players in the value-chain have been quick to exploit the situation. For years, customers with more-developed front-end capabilities have been eagerly scooping-up the margin-dollars being left on the table by manufacturers.

The Top 10 Margin-Killing Myths About B2B Pricing
Every B2B company would like to maximize their margins, improve their profit-performance, and ultimately, increase their shareholder value. What’s preventing some companies from leveraging the power of pricing to improve their performance? In our experience, we’ve found that what often separates those who succeed from those who struggle is a series of closely-held myths about pricing in B2B.

Margin-Killing Myth: The Market Controls the Price
This myth alone has done more damage and cratered more markets than all of the other margin-killing myths combined. When executives and managers hold this belief, their margins are virtually guaranteed to suffer. For many executives and managers, this mistaken belief is playing a role in their decisions and preventing them from fully-utilizing the most powerful profit-lever available.

How Can Manufacturers and Distributors Gain Competitive Advantage in the Current Downturn?
In the midst of this downturn, visionary manufacturers and distributors aren’t just hunkering-down and waiting it out. They aren’t content to just survive. Rather, they are working proactively to develop advantages that will not only help them weather the storm, but also help them emerge in a stronger competitive position.

Simple Steps to Help Minimize the Fear-Factor That Leads to Excessive Discounting
The "fear factor" is a reality in any market condition. But in a downturn like this, concerns about losing the deal, losing the volume, or losing the customer, are often taken to the extreme. As these heightened fears work their way into negotiations and pricing decisions, they can turn a bad -- but manageable -- situation into a full-blown margin meltdown.

Exploring the Myth That "Pricing Needs to Be Simple" in Order to Be Effective
Regardless of how it happens, the reality is that companies too often connect the dots between their underlying pricing model and ease-of-execution in the field. The result is fairly predictable: These companies adopt extremely rudimentary pricing models that are easy to understand and execute, but that ultimately allow millions of margin-dollars to just slip through their fingers.

When Your Costs Are Dropping, Should Your Prices Follow?
The biggest challenge in dealing with price decreases in a period of softening demand and falling costs is determining just how far to go. The real “trick” is to drop prices far enough without going too far. If you can pull this off, you can protect your volumes and market-share without it costing more than it is worth, or more than is really necessary.

The Myth About Inefficient Pricing Processes Being the Biggest Problem
It’s easy to understand why many manufacturers and distributors default to process improvement when attempting to capture their pricing opportunity. What no one likes to talk about, however, is the fact that process improvement is only really powerful when the object of the process in question is fundamentally sound to begin with.

Exploring the "Better Prices Faster" Emerging Best-Practice Model
After more than a decade of working with clients to generate more profitable pricing, we’ve found that a new best-practice has emerged with respect to the underlying pricing-improvement model. Whereas just a few years ago, a “command and control” process model was considered to be best-practice, technology has enabled a different model that has proven to be more effective and efficient.

Should B2B Companies Be Pulling More Profit Levers in this Downturn?
In many cases, extreme focus on the operational aspects of their businesses can cause B2B companies to lose sight of other powerful profit-levers that are crucial in a downturn. These companies tend to act as though they only have one tool in their tool-belt. And when a downturn hits, their natural reaction is to grab that one tool and just start swinging it even harder and faster.

How the Revenue/Volume Myth Can Hurt Your Margins in a Downturn
In a market condition like this, it’s not uncommon to find sales teams falling prey to the myth that just securing more revenue-dollars or unit-volumes will solve the company’s problems. As a result, the team’s entire definition of “going too far” is altered --- kicking off an unnecessary margin-meltdown that can cost manufacturers and distributors millions.

Over-Discounting IS Optimal---Just Not for Your Company
Executives of all stripes, but especially finance executives have strong beliefs that sales reps over-discount. Recent research shows why not only is that expected, but why the conventional remedy, compensating sales on margin instead of volume, is not enough.

Exploring Five Pricing Challenges in Distribution
This paper describes five pricing challenges faced by many distributors, and presents examples of how leading companies have overcome these challenges with Zilliant’s datadriven pricing solutions, and achieved significant profit gains as a result.

It's the BOM: Capitalizing On Order Circumstances
This paper describes two interesting findings related to the portfolio of products on a BOM, which are both common across many businesses and which reveal opportunities for significant margin improvement. The underlying premise is that BOM product prices interact. These interdependencies and influences can be detected by careful analysis of historical data. Once identified, smart pricing machinery can help the business capitalize on these findings on every future transaction.