Intelligent Price Management for Global and Country Price Lists

An in-depth explainer about how to intelligently accelerate and streamline price management of global and country price lists.

Global and Country Price Lists Require More Intelligent and Efficient Price Management

For most global companies, the management of global and country price lists is anything but efficient. The process of setting, managing, and updating global and country price lists is often time-consuming and error-riddled due to an overreliance on cumbersome manual processes and spreadsheets.

Making matters worse, these manual processes are insufficient, and ultimately too slow, to keep up with the velocity of price changes facing businesses due to market volatility, inflationary pressures, supply chain disruption, and a fiercely competitive landscape. The ability to respond to these pricing challenges with speed and precision is critical. Waiting too long to enact a price change can negatively impact your bottom line and lead to lost margin.

Before we dive into the main challenges of managing these prices manually, let’s start with a refresher on global and country price lists.

What is a Global List Price?

A global list price is a reference that is used to differentiate prices. List prices are a great way of defining what the maximum price is in the global marketplace. B2C businesses will often have list prices that will represent the highest price before it is discounted. In a B2B context, there may be a list price provided by a manufacturer or distributor, or a list price from a manufacturer may be considered a reference that can be discounted.

Learn more: Price Modes: Setting A Standard & Updating List Prices Across Countries

What is a Country List Price?

A country list price is the global list price expressed in the country’s currency or other country-specific factors. Country pricing managers also have the option of applying country adjustment factors to the products they sell in their country, to ultimately arrive at the country price. Country prices are then used as the reference point for in-country matrix prices, negotiated prices or customer-specific prices.

Learn more: Zilliant Demo Series: Dynamically Update Prices When Costs Change

What are the Price Management Challenges for Global and Country Price Lists?

A global pricing manager manages the full set of global list prices. This means establishing the list prices and managing the exchange rate conversions, which results in the country list prices that are used by the country pricing managers to determine further discounts.

While this sounds straightforward, when done using manual processes, it can be time-consuming and inadequate to respond to cost changes driven by today’s volatile landscape. Here is an example of the steps involved in manually managed global and country price lists, and how this approach slows this process down:

• Manually aggregating cost and other reference data: Manually aggregating massive amounts of data does nothing but take time and manpower away from more important tasks. The point of data aggregation is to gain immediate insight into how costs are changing and understand how prices will need to change as a result. Spending hours bringing data into an unwieldy spreadsheet is the first roadblock to quickly updating global and country price lists.
• Emailing price lists: Delivering the price lists to country pricing managers shouldn’t involve attaching a spreadsheet to an email and hitting “send.” Additionally, after emailing out the price lists, you must wait for feedback and then incorporate any feedback into the spreadsheet before moving on to the next step. Each point of feedback and manual adjustment within a spreadsheet introduces a new opportunity for error.
• Manual updates for currency exchange and other country-specific adjustments: When it comes to transitioning the global price list down the price waterfall to a country price list, making price adjustments based on country-specific pricing factors is of utmost importance. Manually making numerous adjustments like currency conversion or adding in country multipliers or other country-specific fees leaves the door open for human error and miscalculations. Leveraging the power of pricing software to streamline these adjustments is the only way to ensure error-free price lists.
• Wait on technical resources to update the pricing system of record with new list prices: A pricing system of record is another way of describing a company’s “pricing engine.” It is the foundational structure that holds all price records and logic and is used to calculate and deliver prices out to various commercial systems.

With a manual approach, a global or country pricing manager would have to wait on a member of their tech or IT team to update the pricing system of record with the new price list. However, pricing software can dynamically update prices and deliver them seamlessly into a company’s pricing engines.

Read more: Legacy Pricing is Harming B2B: Do This Instead

What is the Best Way to Streamline the Price Management of Global and Country Price Lists?

Previously, many companies deemed deploying price optimization and price management software time intensive or difficult to implement, which is why pricing and commercial teams rely on spreadsheets to manage pricing, sales operations, and commercial functions.

The Zilliant Quick Start program shifts this paradigm and offers packaged solutions and templates to address specific pricing and sales challenges, each of which can be up and running in the span of three to eight weeks, work seamlessly with each other on the same platform, and are extensible to fit the unique needs of B2B companies.

Read More: Get a Head Start With Zilliant Quick Start

The first of these Quick Start packages is purpose-built to streamline global and country list price management with a standardized price waterfall. Zilliant Quick Start for Global and Country Price Lists enables companies to be up and running with Zilliant Price Manager™ in as few as four weeks and allows users to:

Easily update global list prices as costs change using pre-defined cost pass-through strategies Perform currency conversions to calculate country list prices Make additional country factor adjustments to list prices Provide scoped user access to centralized and decentralized pricing teams within the same system of price management

If managing your global or country pricing requires additional elements in the price waterfall, Quick Start offers out-of-the-box extensions, which include:

Extending the price waterfall Interjecting into the price waterfall Changing the granularity of lists and/or adjustments Changing from a virtual (calculation) to a physical price list

Read More: Price Manager Quick Start: Global & Country Price Lists

Learn more: Demo: Quick Start for Global & County Price Lists

Conclusion

Zilliant Quick Start is a transformative approach that enables significantly faster deployment times and faster time to value. This allows our customers to gain an edge in the critical response against market volatility, inflation, and supply chain disruption and stay ahead of the competition. Empower your global and country pricing teams today by equipping them with the tools required for accelerated, intelligent, and more efficient price management.

Contact us today for a demo and see how to unlock a simpler and faster approach to price management for global and country price lists in only four weeks.