A few weeks ago, Amazon.com, Inc. announced that it will be acquiring PillPack, the full-service online pharmacy that delivers to your door. It is no secret that the Retail Pharmacy landscape is unquestionably challenging, but it is about to get even more aggressively competitive. Are you ready?

Retail pharmacies will need to evaluate their current pricing strategies and adopt new approaches quickly. The future lies in leveraging machine learning and advanced price science to be proactive in price optimization across all payment types while remaining customer-centric and strategy-aligned. Advanced pricing optimization software can help retailers dig deep into their data and quickly identify areas of opportunity in real-time. In this rapidly evolving landscape, retail pharmacies need to seek pricing software partners that transform with the industry.

As a global leader in pricing software for over 15 years, Vistaar recognizes the need for change and advancement. That’s why we are thrilled to unveil our Retail Price Optimization (RPO) – Pharmacy Solution 2.0 at the NACDS Total Store Expo (TSE) in Denver on August 25-27.

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Amazon Enters the Pharmacy: Are You Ready? –.

The traditional core objective of pricing technology was centered on the identification of the margin leakage. The pricing team operated the software and provided sales with insights to mitigate the margin erosion. Put another way, the software served as a business intelligence support system with considerable human intervention. From the sales person’s vantage point, the pricing software was on the sideline.

Today, pricing technology is no longer on the sideline, “it’s in the game.” Modern pricing technology has taken on innovative approaches not just to find leakage and assist pricing practitioners – although pricing analysts still play a crucial user role – but to operationalize the sales community as well.

Speaking of being in the game, the 21st FIFA World Cup serves as a great example of operationalized software. Soccer was first played in ancient Rome over 2,000 years ago, and the sport evolved in England into the game we know well today. Yet, what’s not commonly known today are the technology tools that operate easily and quickly in the background to support the referees and teams. Recently, FIFA shared an interesting video on “The Hidden Technology of Football.” The league shared how the three different technologies affect the “users” throughout the 64 matches and ultimately improve the quality of the game.

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Sales Organizations Benefit the Most from Pricing Software, Just Ask a Soccer Fan – Pricing Matters.

Unlock latent potential with price experimentation
With every price quote or posted price, there is an opportunity to learn about the market, and in turn, improve pricing. Yet, a tremendous amount of the information is not captured, systemized or utilized, neither by people in pricing nor the algorithms they employ. The potential in learning from the untapped sources of field information can be tremendous.

To learn from the field, there are two kinds of tools that can be utilized: surveys and experiments. Let’s focus on the latter tool – price experimentation. Any time a price change is executed, there is a chance to observe results and learn. While any price change can be considered an experiment, price experimentation specifically refers to the changing of prices in an intelligent manner designed to yield as much information as possible at an acceptable level of risk. Price experimentation provides an opportunity to gain critical knowledge, learn from that knowledge and act to optimize price and ultimately impact margin and revenue.

However, price experimentation is vastly underutilized, and many organizations are missing out on the opportunity to unlock a lot of latent potential.

Learn by Example: Price experimentation success

To truly understand its potential, let’s examine a real-world example. Vistaar had the pleasure of working on a highly successful project with a producer of digital media where price experimentation was used to learn about market willingness-to-pay and ultimately resulted in tremendous revenue and margin growth.

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How Well Does Your Pricing Organization Learn From the Field? –.

With the latest round of tariffs going into effect last Thursday, many companies are turning to their finance and pricing teams to provide a strategic response that maintains profitability without disrupting demand. To help navigate the complexities of tariffs, Vistaar has put together a four-step guide that allows finance and pricing teams to be nimble, assess the ever-changing pricing landscape, and empower leadership to quickly develop an optimal pricing response consistent with existing pricing strategy.

Step 1: Get the complete picture

First, get the complete picture as accurately as possible. Pricing practitioners must calculate the cost impact of the tariff, by product, across the complete product portfolio. This may include working with procurement to understand their purchasing and hedging strategies. Next, the cost impact by customer should be calculated, so that margin impact is known for each customer. Finally, it is critical also to consider the cost impact at a market level, so the big picture impact is also visible.

You are now ready to answer difficult questions such as – how does this proposed price change impact both the immediate and longer-term financial goals? Pricing technology can provide pricing practitioners and leadership the ability to easily consider the impact of proposed price changes and its effects on revenue and margin. It is a daunting task to iterate through pricing alternatives using excel spreadsheets. Enterprise-class pricing software enables users to focus their time on finding a desirable outcome, rather than combing through data and trapping errors.

Step 2: Don’t throw out the strategy

Pricing teams must go beyond aggregate data and formulaic calculation to achieve the most effective tariff price response. Batch price updates can leverage business rules that reflect your pricing strategy. Also, pre-existing terms in customer agreements such as price caps, collars, not-to-exceed guardrails, linkage to market indexes, and many other terms, must be respected when prices changes are performed.

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The Pricer’s Four-Step Guide to Tariff Response – Pricing Matters.

In today’s fast-paced world, rapidly evolving data and software driven strategies are imperative to creating sustained commercial pricing success. Good processes and experienced personnel alone are no longer enough. It is nearly impossible to rely on spreadsheets, custom software tools, and empirical observation to properly manage the complexity of becoming a “data-driven” pricing organization. That’s why it’s more important than ever to not only understand what Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning are but also to learn how to use them for tangible value in data-driven pricing.

AI is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans.1 Essentially, AI is the ability of a machine or computer to think, learn and act. According to Forbes Technology Council, machine learning is a branch of AI and is based on developing machines to process data and learn on their own, without constant human supervision. Machine learning algorithms supplement empirical data to help tackle the challenges pricing teams encounter on the road to creating sustained success.

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AI & Machine Learning in the Pricing World –.

PPS Fall Session to Showcase Intelligent Data-Driven Pricing Strategies
Today, commercial pricing success demands new ways of managing data. Pricing organizations are tasked with managing increasingly large and complex data sets coming from diverse sources that change rapidly. As a result, there is a failure to operationalize pricing strategy over a long-term horizon. Pricing organizations can no longer rely on spreadsheets, custom software tools, and empirical observation to properly manage the complexity and challenges on the road to creating sustained success.

The good news is advancements in pricing software solutions can empower pricing organizations with new ways of exploiting their data to unlock substantial value. Powered by machine learning algorithms and AI, pricing software enables pricing practitioners to systematically apply their empirical observations and expertise to an increasingly granular and rapidly changing data set. This facilitates optimal pricing changes in real-time, and evolution as markets and customer preferences change.

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Pricing Practitioners: Are you winning the data intelligence game? –.

More firms and their pricing leaders are adopting value-based pricing every year. Research shows increased adoption of this progressive pricing orientation moving from 17% in 2008 to about 25-30% in 2018. Part of the deployment process of value-based pricing is the implementation of the Economic Value Estimation (EVE®) process to quantify differentiation value before it can be communicated to customers and capture from them. While adoption of value-based pricing is increasing, pricing professionals still face difficulties across their organizations. In fact, the EVE® process can be fairly mechanical and, with proper training, can be understood fairly rapidly. The challenge remains therefore what to do with the value models and calculated data.

In this unique workshop, we review the latest science on value-based pricing and the EVE® process. We also review how to operationalize the outcome in value-based innovation, value-based marketing and value-based selling strategies.

ATTENDEES WILL LEARN

• How to operationalize value-based pricing and EVE® in your day-to-day business
• How to practically link value-based pricing with innovation, marketing, and selling
• How to respond to challenges in deploying the EVE® and value quantification process

Want to Drive Profitable Growth in 2019?

The B2B industry is consistently failing to capture hidden pockets of revenue and profit that can be uncovered today. Learn from industry experts on how to put an end to profit leakage for good. Zilliant MindShare welcomes you to our ecosystem of best-in-class partners and thought leaders. You won’t want to miss this event at The Line Austin hotel.

Benefits of Attending

Zilliant is the partner of choice for global B2B enterprises seeking business growth strategies to drive top-line growth and profit margins with AI-based software and customer predictive analytics solutions that maximize customer lifetime value.

Each year, Zilliant brings B2B industry leaders together at their signature event – MindShare, where they are proud to help their customers tell their unique stories of how Artificial Intelligence delivers actionable insights and profitable growth.

Offstage, the learning for attendees continues in authentic, offline conversations about solving B2B business problems amongst our customers, prospective customers, and partners.

The buzzing activity at MindShare sends a clear message – it’s an exciting time for B2B company leaders that are driving real, tangible value with AI-driven applications. More specifically, these technologies can address the real issues that impact manufacturers, distributors, and service providers daily.

It’s not too late to join the conversation – visit the Zilliant MindShare 2019 event page to view the 14 May Customer Workshop and 15-16 May Conference agenda and register.

AUSTIN, Texas, May 20, 2019 – Zilliant, the industry leader in AI-driven pricing and sales growth solutions, hosted its annual MindShare user conference last week in Austin. The company welcomed customers from around the world to share their experiences with Zilliant’s end-to-end suite of SaaS-based Price Management & Optimization and Sales Growth solutions.

Attendees participated in keynotes, breakout sessions and hands-on product workshops over three days.

“It’s an honor to host such a wide array of innovators – longtime customers, companies evaluating Zilliant technology, strategic partners, industry experts – in our hometown,” said Zilliant CEO Greg Peters. “The steep challenges faced by B2B organizations every day are being met head on by our customers, who have harnessed the power of their data and are using Zilliant’s intelligent technology to their advantage.”

MindShare focused on distributors, manufacturers and service providers dealing with a rapidly changing business landscape across various industries, with topics such as:

• B2B eCommerce disruption
• Adopting a Pricing Center of Excellence
• Digitization and optimization
• Pricing modes and methods
• Distributor / manufacturer partnerships
• Omnichannel pricing

“When disruptors, like Amazon, are duplicating parts of your value proposition, you need to duplicate parts of theirs,” said Ian Heller, President & COO of Modern Distribution Management in his message to attendees. “Traditional B2B companies must scale with technology and become more comfortable doing business online, while offering services that are hard for disruptors to digitize.”

A common theme was Zilliant’s comprehensive ability to solve pricing and sales problems big and small, from price list management to advanced, actionable AI-driven pricing and sales guidance.

“We wanted to create a data-driven culture as part of our digital transformation journey,” said Mike Eppes, Managing VP of Parts at Rush Enterprises. “Zilliant has become our data science backbone for our parts operations, serving as the nexus for many of our IT systems, from CRM to eCommerce. As a result of using Zilliant’s solutions, we are achieving higher revenue and profits and are better able to anticipate our customers’ needs.”

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Zilliant Showcases End-to-End Pricing and Sales Growth Capabilities at MindShare 2019.