Your Reps Are Negotiating Every Order. Do You Know What That’s Costing You?
Food distributors with rep-driven pricing models lose an average of 8.7% in margin on transactions they can’t see or control. That’s $8.7 million in missed margin for every $100 million in revenue.
Rockton Pricing Management (RPM) gives you full visibility into every override, every deal, and every customer so you stop discovering margin erosion at month-end, when it’s already gone.
Book Your Free Margin Analysis
30 minutes. Your ERP data. No slides, no pitch — just your numbers
Most Food Distributors Are Flying Blind on Margin. And the Cost Is Concrete.
In food distribution, pricing is a daily moving target. Commodity costs shift overnight. Customers expect deals. Reps know their accounts and price accordingly, which means your published price list is a starting point, not a reality.
The result: in most food distribution operations, more than 80% of transactions are priced outside the system. Those overrides are invisible. The margin impact is unknown until month-end.
By then, it’s gone. You can analyze it. You can’t recover it.
The problem isn’t that your reps are negotiating. That’s your competitive advantage. The problem is that nobody can see whether those negotiations are protecting margin or destroying it and that invisibility has a price.
80%+
Food distributor transactions are overridden or negotiated outside the price list
$8.7M
In margin leakage for every $100M in revenue when true margin isn’t tracked
$0
Recovered from margin leakage that nobody can see — until RPM changes that
We’ve Seen This Problem in Many Distribution Operations.
Here’s What We Know.
Rockton Software has worked inside distribution pricing for years. We’ve connected to dozens of ERP environments, analyzed millions of transactions, and watched the same pattern repeat: intelligent, experienced pricing teams operating without the visibility they need to do their best work.
The issue is never the people. It’s the infrastructure. When pricing logic lives in spreadsheets, tribal knowledge, and ERP workarounds, margin leakage is structural and not a performance problem.
RPM was built specifically to fix that infrastructure. Not as a rigid pricing system that ties your reps’ hands. As a platform that gives your team better information, and gives you the visibility to lead with confidence.
You can't improve margin you can't see.
— Rockton Software
Getting to Margin Visibility Is Simpler Than You Think.
Most pricing managers assume fixing this requires a multi-month implementation or ripping out their existing ERP setup. It doesn’t. Here’s how it actually works.
Book a Free Margin Analysis
We connect to your ERP data and show you your true margin picture in 30 minutes. No prep on your end. No commitment.
See Exactly Where Margin is Leaking
Decide What to do with that Information
RPM Doesn’t Take Pricing Away From Your Reps.
It Makes Their Pricing Smarter.
The answer to high rep override rates isn’t a rigid system that removes their judgment. Your reps know their customers. That knowledge is an asset.
What RPM does is give them better information and give you better visibility into what they’re doing with it.
Your reps still negotiate. They still close deals. But now they’re working within margin floors you’ve set, against customer history they can see, with guardrails that protect the business without slowing them down.
And you can finally answer the questions that matter:
Which customers are actually profitable?
Which product categories are being discounted into the ground?
Which reps are protecting margin and which ones are giving it away?
What is our true margin by customer, by rep, by product line?
What Winning Looks Like:
Your Reps Negotiate.
Your Margins Hold.
You walk into every board meeting knowing your number is real.
Built for the Complexity of Food Distribution. Not Adapted for It.
RPM is designed for environments where pricing is anything but static. Here’s what that means in practice.
O1
Pricing Automation
Daily Commodity Pricing
When beef is up 15% this week, your prices need to reflect it automatically not after your buyers have rebuilt a spreadsheet. RPM handles date-driven, cost-indexed repricing so your margins move with your costs.
O2
Pricing Visibility
Rep Override Visibility
Every negotiated price is captured, attributed, and tracked. See override frequency by rep, margin impact by customer, and variance from your target price in real time, not at month-end.
True Margin Reporting
List price minus cost isn’t margin. True margin accounts for freight, rebates, commissions, and overrides. RPM gives you that number by customer, by order, by rep, so your P&L reflects reality, not assumptions.
O3
Pricing Governance
Margin Floor Governance
Set the minimum acceptable margin for any product, category, or customer tier. Reps can negotiate down to the floor. Below it, approvals kick in. You stay in control without micromanaging every deal.
O4
Pricing Flexibility
Customer Segmentation Pricing
Not every customer deserves the same price. RPM lets you build pricing logic around customer type, volume, payment history, and value to your business, so your best customers are rewarded and your margin structure holds.
Order Driver Management
Some items you’ll take lower margin on to win the whole order. RPM lets you identify those items deliberately, set the floor, and track whether the attach rate actually justifies the sacrifice. No more guessing whether the loss leader is doing its job.
You're Changing ERPs
A new ERP is a clean slate but only if your pricing logic moves with it. This is the moment to stop rebuilding the same broken system in a new platform and build a proper pricing structure instead.
Most ERP migrations that don’t address pricing simply transfer the problem.
You Have a New CFO or CEO Asking Margin Questions
When leadership starts asking “what is our true margin by customer?” and nobody can answer, that’s the moment RPM pays for itself in the first conversation.
Give your new executive the visibility they’re asking for before they build their own workaround.
You've Grown Through Acquisition
Two companies. Two pricing cultures. Hundreds of customer-specific deals living in spreadsheets, email threads, and tribal knowledge.
RPM brings it all under one governed system before the inconsistencies start costing you customers and margin.
See What’s Actually Happening to Your Margin. In 30 Minutes.
Most food distributors who do a Margin Analysis with us find leakage they weren’t tracking by rep, by product category, and/or by customer. Not because their team isn’t doing their job. Because the visibility simply didn’t exist before.
How It Works
Connect Your ERP Data.
No prep required on your end.
We Run the Analysis.
We show you your true margin picture: where you’re on target, where you’re losing ground, and where the biggest recovery opportunity is.
You decide what to do with it.
There’s no commitment. If what we find isn’t useful, we’ll tell you that too.
Book Your Free Margin Analysis
Connect your ERP. See your actual numbers. No prep, no commitment.
Run on NetSuite, Acumatica, or Microsoft Business Central with pre-built connectors ready to deploy.
Have field sales teams with negotiated pricing authority and high override rates.
Manage commodity or market-indexed product lines with frequent repricing needs.
Can't currently answer "what is our true margin by customer?" without manually pulling a report.
On a different ERP platform?
RPM is API-based. If your ERP supports API access, there’s likely a path to connect. Talk to us before you assume it won’t work.
Not Sure if RPM is the Right Fit?
The Margin Analysis answers that question. If there’s no recoverable margin to show you, we’ll say so.