The pricing disruptor has so many forces driving it that it’s hard to decide where to start. Reduction of overhead, the self-directed buying cycle, and the expectations of customers for a certain “experience” are all making overly burdensome B2B pricing and quoting mechanisms obsolete. Technology, however, is one of the main factors behind this rapid change. There is an enormous need to tear down the complex, custom quoting processes that have been the hallmark of manufacturing and distribution for decades, and replace them with more efficient, faster pricing models.
Analyst firm Gartner has predicted that by 2018 “40% of B2B digital commerce sites will use price optimization algorithms and configure, price and quote tools to dynamically calculate and deliver product pricing.” Special quotes and one-off contract pricing agreements often simply cannot be mapped to an efficient technology process, let alone one that can run at high performance on a native mobile app. As has been the case with many backend systems, the actual technology is partly driving the change in process.