Join Vendavo’s CEO to look at the changes impacting the industry. Learn about the strategic directions Vendavo is taking to ensure it remains the market leader in large enterprise pricing solutions, and in delivering maximum value to its customers.

Pricing has long been an underdeveloped opportunity in B2B organizations, and the rise of digital technologies has raised the stakes by introducing massive new risks. Price transparency is greater than ever before, value chains are seeing major disruptions, new pricing models are emerging, and customer behavior and expectations are changing rapidly. Sellers who have harnessed digital technologies and techniques have used this turbulence to their advantage, making better use of customer data to draw deeper insights, allowing them to more effectively set prices and negotiate with customers, develop new products and services that drive premiums, increase stickiness and even launch disruptive pricing models. But for every success story there are dozens of companies still struggling to deploy digital pricing capabilities effectively, and when they fall behind, they risk losing out to digitally-enabled traditional competitors and new digital pure player attackers.

How can companies manage the transition to digitally empowered pricing to drive growth and improve margins? Bain research has studied the success of B2B companies across industries that have successfully captured the pricing opportunities created by digital. Our experience confirms that changing behaviors with executives and at the front lines, and rewiring how pricing decisions are made, are as important to success as selecting the right bleeding-edge suite of digital tools, digital data sources and enabling IT infrastructure. Failure to manage this culture change severely limits the potential benefits even the most advanced new technologies and techniques can bring. But those companies that are able to embed digital deeply within their product management, product marketing, sales teams, deal desks, and pricing specialists have erased or even reversed margin erosion, and positioned themselves to capture more than their fair share of growth.

“Pricing transformation projects can seem daunting and complex, but as we learned with Project APEX, there is a way to navigate the challenges. With the right combination of senior executive support, an executable next generation strategy for pricing transformation and a pricing team that believes in change, transformation can happen quickly. Join us at the keynote session, as Alex shares his experiences and the challenges he faced as an agent of change and how he is leading pricing transformation at a Fortune 12 company.”

The speed of digitization is all around us. Changing technology and operational dynamics are constantly present. Successful companies work hard to not only reduce the cycle time to respond quickly to these dynamics but to anticipate changes ahead of time. This drives our collective need to be nimble and agile. Leaders increasingly speed up their ability, their business velocity, to adapt to change. Today, there is immense value in keeping pace in a digital economy.

This session will focus on an overall best practice methodology to run price improvement projects. Come learn what resources it takes to setup a project, the step by step methodology, and how to gain leadership support to ensure recommended actions are taken.

The modern Chemicals market is all about volatility impacting your input costs, the prices you compete against, and now, import/export/duty/tax/investment uncertainty with the new administration. What are your options for high level pricing and margin strategy with so much uncertainty? What tactics might support a particular strategic choice? How can you stay flexible to adjust what happens in the short term, yet stay on track with long-term goals? Fluctuations and changes are the new norm and the chemical industry is in the midst of the turmoil. Join industry experts who will discuss strategic and tactical insights to address challenging market conditions. We will keep the discussion grounded and you will learn more about pricing best practices and key industry benchmarks that you can operationalize immediately to gauge your pricing effectiveness.

In this climate of Big Data and open access to information, how can we leverage competitive data to price better? Get ahead of the pricing curve by using your competitors’ information to drive new insights back into your pricing optimization efforts. In this roundtable discussion, we will pick the brains of panel members who are leading the race of acquiring and leveraging competitive information to improve their businesses. Lace up your running shoes and, join us!

Rather than offering upfront discounts, B2B organizations increasingly provide incentives on the back end of the order to cash process. They rely on rebates, pass-through special pricing and other programs to incentivize their direct customers and channel partners. The reasons are myriad, ranging from rewarding total sales volumes, meeting competitive pressures due to ever-changing market dynamics, or simple price masking in highly competitive industries. Despite the growing complexity and the rate at which new programs are introduced, even large multinationals try to manage the process with a mixture of homegrown legacy systems, ad hoc databases and the ubiquitous, out of control array of interlocking spreadsheets! This results in vast inefficiencies and processing delays, unhappy customers and partners, millions in lost revenue and margins, overpayment of sales commissions, and delays in financial closings. Vendavo and Entomo have teamed up to create an Incentive Management solution for the Digital Economy, encompassing the trifecta of speed, accuracy and auditability.

Success is great! But it doesn’t come without the right preparation. How do you make a winning project a foundational part of your organization going forward? In this roundtable session, a senior leader at a major process industry player describes operational and deployment considerations, and the need for conscious persistence as organizations go through inevitable change.

This session will focus deeply on one aspect of price improvement projects: increasing the success rate of annual price increases. Learn all about the subject, from statistics on the low rate of success of most companies examples of price increase methodologies, to common best practice solutions to double or triple your price increase success rate.

AmerisourceBergen told you all about their Project APEX pricing transformation this morning. In this special panel discussion, the entire team will be available to walk you through their process, sharing best practices and solutions to challenges they had to overcome. Bring your questions to this session and learn successful tactics from the pricing transformation team itself.

You have optimized your pricing model but now need to get it into the field – what do you do? CPQ software is your solution for price optimization and supporting the entire sales process. During our breakout we will discuss key features and functionality of a CPQ platform, identify how CPQ can address key challenges companies have in the sales process, and discuss ‘watch outs’ when introducing and utilizing a CPQ platform.

Attendees will learn:

• Key Benefits of CPQ/Key Domains you maximize the benefit
• Best practices for adapting the CPQ to your company and sales team
• How to gain adoption and create a healthy marriage between your pricing and sales team

A Rapid, Practical & Effective Methodology. This session will focus on a rapid, practical and highly effective methodology for doing value-in-use pricing for new products (or an existing product).as an essential impact lever to profitability. Don’t settle for process improvement only. Learn how to bring much needed IQ to your CPQ processes and maximize your value generation.

In order to deliver the best pricing guidance to the sales rep on the go, a leading high-tech company knew they needed a single source of truth for pricing, and an automated solution for contextual recommendations. Hear how this company bridged the gap between their CRM and ERP systems, drove global growth, sped up approvals, and empowered sales with “best fit” prices.

Distributors normally start with analytics and price optimization as the means for a quick win. Defining the right framework for your profitability and processes, will enable you to operationalized best practices and achieve continued value creation.

But the journey doesn’t stop once price analytics and optimization start creating value.

Join us to see how other distribution customers are successfully maximizing value in a very competitive and complex industry and how it’s helping them to keep winning more profitable deals

Transforming your pricing practice from “struggling” to “world class” is a journey that doesn’t happen overnight. Hear how the old ways of doing things were challenged, and learn how Lennox International is addressing its pricing practice change management needs by adopting an incremental approach to expanding the transformation through the organization, level by level.

Is the price list dead? If not how will it evolve? If it is what comes next? What is the role of pricing intelligence in a digital world? This session will address new capabilities in software, UX design and service delivery are re-shaping the future of Corporate Margin Management in the digital economy. Showcase Vision2020, Business Risk Alerts, Segmentation Refresh, Deal Guide, Intuitive UX and VendavoCloud. What will the next generation Pricing tools look like? What is the impact to the Pricing Practitioner and what are the new skills required to satisfy the demands of the business?

Disrupt or be disrupted! The world is changing at a fast pace. Many organizations are making slow progress and/or left behind . Technological progress is unstoppable and is disrupting go-to-market strategies in many sectors. The choice is not if technological transformations are needed but when and how fast. In this presentation, Stephan Liozu introduces today’s major forces of disruption in the business world as well as highlights how technology is dramatically changing go-to-market strategies. Pricing is not the only approach that is impacted. Segmentation, product offerings, channel eco-systems are also considerably shaken. This keynote presentation proposes some best practices on how to turn disruption into a competitive advantage.
Attendees will learn

• How forces of disruption in changing business dynamics
• How technology is transforming business model and go-to-market strategies
• How organizations can embrace disruption and turn it into differentiation
• How pricing technologies can be become a strategic advantage

Too often enterprises place too much attention on the configuration and quotation processes without understanding the full value impact that pricing optimization can have within a CPQ process. Pricing is recognized by many analysts and industry experts as an essential impact lever to profitability. Don’t settle for process improvement only. Learn how to bring much needed IQ to your CPQ processes and maximize your value generation.

For decades, software industry players have managed profitability through volume. The near-zero marginal cost of selling an additional license has driven the mind-set that any sale is a good sale – any revenue is good revenue. The fallacy of this idea has been masked by growth. With high revenue growth and high gross margins, pricing has taken a back seat as a profitability lever. Many software companies have allowed their price management capabilities atrophy, creating a spiral of dependence on discounting that erodes value.

Attendees will learn how to apply a value-based pricing strategy, the Economic Value Estimation (EVE) Framework, to pull their companies out of this destructive pricing pattern without damaging short-term performance. This will feature the following:

• How can my company developing a value-driven pricing envelope and a value-driver based pricing structure?
• How do we develop segment-based pricing solutions and value messaging?
• How can we build a solid foundation for pricing policies and improved execution?

The EVE is an especially productive tool for software companies making the “as-a-service” transition. This approach assists in the development and articulation of a value proposition in light of shifting economic models that can drive marketplace confusion.

Leading specialty chemical company faced some key decisions regarding their Vendavo solution which is hosted on premise. Due to technology changes and end-of-life concerns, Vendavo’s hosted solution was included as an option for a new technology architecture strategy. This presentation provides details on company’s past, present and future with Vendavo with insights into the strategy to move to Vendavo’s hosted solution.

Vendavo software and analytical tools deliver the critical fact base and analytics required to drive financial outcomes. But the tools and analyses must be paired with a programmatic approach with deep and inspired employee engagement across all of the key functions–from Sales, Marketing, Product Management, Technical Support, Customer Service, Supply Chain and Finance.
Brian and his team will outline a programmatic approach which leverages engagement of the executive suite and key operators across the key functions accountable for communicating and executing price and profit improvement tactics in the marketplace. A key element of the approach is gaining buy-in and involvement from the key commercial functions–Sales and Marketing in particular. Attendees will learn how to couple investments in price and profit analysis tools from Vendavo with a structured and programmatic approach to change and execution. This is a proven approach, which has been implemented across a number of diverse businesses, driving 100-200 basis points of profit improvements per year. This presentation will inspire both mature pricing organizations as well as companies just starting to embark on their price and profit transformation journey.

Rather than offering upfront discounts, B2B organizations increasingly provide incentives on the back end of the order to cash process. They rely on rebates, pass-through special pricing and other programs to incentivize their direct customers and channel partners. The reasons are myriad, ranging from rewarding total sales volumes, meeting competitive pressures due to ever-changing market dynamics, or simple price masking in highly competitive industries. Despite the growing complexity and the rate at which new programs are introduced, even large multinationals try to manage the process with a mixture of homegrown legacy systems, ad hoc databases and the ubiquitous, out of control array of interlocking spreadsheets!  This results in vast inefficiencies and processing delays, unhappy customers and partners, millions in lost revenue and margins, overpayment of sales commissions, and delays in financial closings. Vendavo and Entomo have teamed up to create an Incentive Management solution for the Digital Economy, encompassing the trifecta of speed, accuracy and auditability.

The internet is creating channel pricing challenges across industries. E-commerce brings both price transparency and price precision: the ability to charge different customers different prices. Most manufacturers want to leverage the growth opportunities presented by online channels, but without blowing up their current channel partners.

Channel pricing strategy starts with two seemingly simple questions:

• Should our prices be higher online, or lower online?
• Do I want Amazon.com and other online retailers to bring me customers and volume, or to help improve the efficiency of my service and fulfillment operations for customers that I already have?

In this presentation, Colin will lay out the 7 steps for developing and implementing a channel pricing strategy, and detail the resultant implications for people, process and tools, and in particular discuss leveraging your Vendavo footprint to accelerate implementation of your channel strategy.

Most B2B companies have a small number of customers which drive a large percentage of revenues and profits. It is not uncommon for many businesses to have over 30% of their revenues and profits driven by the top 5-10% of customers. These customers present the most challenging pricing opportunities due to their extra-ordinary downside risk and perceived negotiating power.

Brian will present a compelling and tested approach for preparing and winning large scale, high stakes, big bet contract negotiations and proposal opportunities. Attendees will learn how sophisticated procurement teams in large corporations prepare for these large purchasing events. Leveraging this insight, Brian will lay out a programmatic approach and structured process for managing the flow of large deals in this unique part of the business portfolio. Attendees will take away critical insights to help organize and lead cross-functional teams to negotiate with confidence and top-down alignment, ultimately achieving breakthrough results.

Price analytics is a powerful tool for improving customer price decisions.  Pressures and emotions can run high at the bid desk, so a structured approach to using data is critical.  When evaluating a quote, price analytics can be used for comparing customer prices within segments, understanding customer buying behavior, and interpreting deal profit ratios.  This presentation will show how a manufacturing company uses Vendavo Profit Analyzer to make better decisions when setting individual customer prices in a B2B negotiated price environment.

Change is hard! Change management is a science that requires the full attention of project leaders. It requires an organization mobilization. Everyone in the organization must buy in to make a successful change management project possible. In this panel discussion featuring and led by Stephan Liozu, PhD., it and business leaders from GAF and Molex will discuss cross-departmental collaboration and how strong communication between business and it is key to successful change management. Once these two teams are in sync, the process becomes smoother when deploying change management activities throughout the organization. Hear best practices for and solutions to common challenges that arise when implementing new technologies that move away from traditional strategies and tactics.

Want to accelerate your value capture, and master your pricing transformation? Join Vendavo Strategic Pricing & Business Transformation experts as they demonstrate a new Pricing Maturity Framework that can quickly uncover and eliminate unknown gaps in your Pricing Strategy.

To capture the full value from your products, you need to address three common bottlenecks in value capture:

1. Understanding the full value your customers receive from your products
2. Aligning channel strategy and incentives
3. Executing to get the best pricing decision every time

In this roundtable discussion, participants will share their successes and challenges in each of these three areas and which is most critical for their company.