Pricefx Partners with Bain & Company to Launch the Pricing Industry's First Big Data Powered Benchmarking Platform

Pricefx, the global leader in cloud-native pricing software, today launched PricefxPlasmatm, the first big data powered benchmarking platform for the pricing industry. Powered by Bain & Company, PricefxPlasma leverages real world pricing data mapped to industry standard key performance indicators (KPIs). Businesses can discover strategic insights on their own pricing processes and performance as compared to market averages using benchmarks on a pre-defined set of industry relevant KPIs.

"Every company is looking for an edge over the competition and pricing is one of the strongest levers for success in the marketplace," said Marcin Cichon, CEO and co-founder at Pricefx. "By launching the first pricing analytics and intelligence platform via a joint project with our valued partners at Bain, Pricefx is giving its customers a whole new level of cross-industry insights. PricefxPlasma is a revolutionary new offering for the pricing industry, providing businesses the information and insights to improve pricing efficiency and effectiveness and uncover new opportunities for revenue growth."

PricefxPlasma combines a massive amount of anonymized and aggregated transaction and quoting data from industries, sliced and segmented by region, industry and other factors. Data is then compiled into more than 20 pricing performance benchmarks, delivered in intuitive visual outputs and designed to answer the most important pricing analytics questions.

KPIs currently measured in PricefxPlasma include:

• End-to-end price waterfall: detailed price buildup, including on- and off-invoice discounts, cost elements, geographical prices, list prices and margin elements.
• Deal approval process: deal velocity, the percent of deals outside discount guidelines, the number of steps in the approval process.
• Price setting: the value capture of price increases, the number of list price changes per year.
• Measures of customer and product concentration: the percent of customers/products to reach revenue deciles.

Companies often struggle to understand how their pricing practices measure up to industry best practices. Additionally, according to a Bain & Company survey, many B2B companies do not provide their salesforce with the right tools and data to make effective pricing decisions.

"Companies typically assess the effectiveness of their pricing strategy and execution using a combination of anecdotal data, generic or poorly defined benchmarks, and a lot of guesswork," said Robert Kugel, Senior Vice President and Research Director at Ventana Research. "Having reliable industry benchmarks derived from real world data provides businesses valuable insight to how they measure up to their peers. PricefxPlasma is an attempt to make useful benchmarks readily available and consumable. Having reliable pricing data also can help businesses identify market trends that enable them to make better decisions about strategy, investments and products."

How PricefxPlasma Works

Pricefx gathers, anonymizes and aggregates its customers' data into standardized metrics. These metrics are loaded into the PricefxPlasma platform, which aggregates and filters the metrics further to create industry-level benchmarks. The customer's data is anonymized by Pricefx via double-blinding, ensuring that it is impossible to trace individual customer data.

Industry benchmarks are compiled from aggregated metrics from a number of anonymized entities. The resulting benchmarks are distributed to Pricefx's customers' environment. Customers can view these benchmarks through a set of standard Pricefx dashboards and customers can also include this data in their own dashboards, allowing for a direct comparison between their company and the benchmark. Benchmarks may be filtered by industry and region to arrive at the desired peer set.

Pricefx partnered with Bain & Company, a global management consulting firm, to develop the benchmarking capabilities and IT systems.

"Combining Pricefx's world-class pricing software with best practices from Bain's Pricing and Benchmarking Centers of Excellence, PricefxPlasma provides unique pricing insights never before available that compare your pricing processes and performance to peers," said Ron Kermisch, Partner at Bain & Company. "Together, we discovered a way to aggregate massive amounts of valuable data and synthesize that data into market relevant KPIs for B2B enterprises to unlock data-driven insights and create a business advantage."

Pricefx and Bain & Company previously collaborated to launch price Accelerators and the Bain Pricing Navigator powered by Pricefx. Pricefx is a member of the Bain Alliance Ecosystem ? a network of best-of-breed partnerships with complementary tool, technology and service providers that accelerates delivery of breakthrough client results.

Availability

PricefxPlasma is available now and is free of charge to Pricefx customers. More information can be found at www.pricefx.com/pricefxplasma. Insights from the platform will also be available to Bain clients and more information can be found at www.bain.com/pricefxplasma.

About Bain & Company

Bain & Company is a global consultancy that helps the world's most ambitious change makers define the future. Across 59 offices in 37 countries, we work alongside our clients as one team with a shared ambition to achieve extraordinary results, outperform the competition and redefine industries. We complement our tailored, integrated expertise with a vibrant ecosystem of digital innovators to deliver better, faster and more enduring outcomes. Our 10-year commitment to invest more than $1 billion in pro bono services brings our talent, expertise and insight to organizations tackling today's urgent challenges in education, racial equity, social justice, economic development and the environment. Since our founding in 1973, we have measured our success by the success of our clients, and we proudly maintain the highest level of client advocacy in the industry.

Learn more at www.bain.com and follow us on Twitter @BainAlerts.

About Pricefx

Established in 2011 in Germany, Pricefx is the global leader in SaaS pricing software, offering a comprehensive suite of solutions that are fast to implement, flexible to configure and customize, and friendly to learn and use. Pricefx delivers a complete price optimization and management platform based on native cloud architecture, providing industry leading time to value and total cost of ownership advantages to customers. Its innovative solution works for both B2B and B2C enterprises of any size, in any industry, in any part of the world. Pricefx's business model is entirely based on the satisfaction and loyalty of its customers. Today, Pricefx delivers Passion for Pricing to customers in more than 37 countries worldwide. For more information, please visit www.pricefx.com.

PricefxPlasmatm is a trademark of Price f(x) AG.