Date-driven pricing is an integral part of any business, for the simple reason that every company, no matter the industry, needs to update pricing on a regular basis. Maybe you only adjust yours a couple times a year, or maybe you’ve got your fingers on the pulse and make continuous changes.
Either way, incorporating date-driven pricing into your strategy is crucial for staying ahead of your competition and optimizing profits. After all, the alternative is remaining stagnant, and in a fast-paced digital world, that’s equivalent to falling behind.
The most common date-driven pricing challenges
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to simply include date-driven pricing in your overall strategy. You’d also need a powerful ERP solution to make pricing changes based on date efficiently. Revenue managers often face challenges when it comes to updating company pricing, as the process tends to be largely manual and involves numerous spreadsheets.
When you’re dealing with substantial customer segments and a chunky catalog of products, even doing a limited-time promotion can be a ridiculously time-consuming task if your ERP system lacks the relevant capabilities. Not to mention the inconvenience of having to make pricing changes the night before discounts kick in.
Traditional ERP software nowadays enables you to assign specific price levels to customers, so you can roll out the pricing in bulk. This allows you to easily pull default prices for transactions, and adjust manually as you see fit. Some more sophisticated ERP solutions may even have date-driven pricing functionalities, but these tend to be limited.
The potential of date-driven pricing
We would not be exaggerating if we said every business needs date-driven pricing to successfully make profit. It just comes down to finding a way to turn what’s historically been a manual, time-consuming process into a seamless, automated operation.
Having a powerful date-driven pricing system enables you to effortlessly handle a range of pricing scenarios and strategically drive your company’s profits. In fact, read below for 3 ways you could start enabling this strategy today.
3 Ways to use Date-Driven Pricing
1. Special customer bundles
Bundle pricing strategy is a popular approach to optimizing revenue and tends to work splendidly when offered for a limited amount of time. Putting a single (often more attractive) price on a group of products or services is a great way to win over customers willing to hand over more cash upfront. It’s no wonder Christmas and Valentine’s Day bundles are so common across various industries, including food distributors and manufacturers!
2. Special occasion sales
And speaking of holidays, the festive season is a prime time to unleash the power of date-driven pricing. In addition to occasion-specific promotions, you can employ the same strategy for monthly or seasonal discounts, limiting your clearance rates to a single day. Wholesalers, for instance, often take advantage of this strategy.
3. Special reduced rates
Tracking competitor pricing and adjusting your rates accordingly is a huge task in and of itself. If you’re trading in a busy market space, attracting customers with price savings is an essential strategy for success. Whether you choose to charge less for your offering, or increase your prices in pursuit of a premium brand image, maintaining dynamic date-driven pricing is a must.
The benefits of a date-driven pricing tool
Date-driven pricing management is vital for your company and could be draining all of your resources. The key to freeing up time so you can focus on other areas of your business without dropping the dynamic pricing ball lies in automation.
With the help of a powerful pricing management solution, you can set up pricing by date in advance and let the system do all the time-consuming work behind the scenes. Just create the date ranges you need, and you can rest assured that your customers would be seeing the right prices at the right times.
From performing complex calculations to keeping track of sale expiration dates, the right date-driven pricing management tool will keep everything running smoothly in the background, incorporating seamlessly with your existing ERP system.
What’s next?
We know when it comes to pricing it can be overwhelming and there’s a lot to consider.
If you’re not sure where to begin when it comes to a pricing strategy or just need some guidance, you can: