Quote Pricing - Overview
Summary
Peak’s out-of-the-box Quote Pricing Application provides B2B salespeople with the data they need to guarantee the best decision on every unique quote negotiation. Allowing for rapid quote creation on-the-fly, Artificial Intelligence is used to always find the sweet spot between potential deal margin, and quote conversion likelihood based exactly on the specific business goals and guardrails, driving the right behaviour across your sales fleet.
Why is this important?
Sales lack information to make informed offers - quotes typically created based on a ‘finger in the air’ approach (based on cost of list price plus) by a non-technical sales team, leaving potential margin on the table. This problem is compounded by every salesperson doing it differently, providing highly variable customer experiences dependent on the salesperson interacted with.
Quote conversion risk pushes customers to competitors - Lack of understanding on quote conversion likelihood means a long-winded back and forth on prices with customer, and the potential to push the customer to a competitor for better quote
Technology solutions require a heavy lift - Business system re-architecture, or AI ground-up custom or point solutions can’t be justified given the extended cost and timescales
What does this application do?
Your own AI solution that drives the right sales behaviour - Replace sporadic cost or list price plus approach with a single software solution that uses AI to align your sales team behaviour to offer competitive prices based on every unique customer and quote, ensuring driving toward a positive margin on every engagement
Quote conversion likelihood ensures low risk to customer churn - No longer risk losing potential customers based on attempts to maximise quote prices, with AI optimisation that finds the sweet spot between maximum quote margin and likelihood of quote conversion, based on your business goals
Lightweight integration guarantees ROI in weeks - Composable and configurable architecture provides industry-leading speed to use of AI for quote pricing use cases, allowing for optionality with data access and hybrid deployments dependent on IT policy and needs. You have the choice of an API base pricing solution to push AI prices seamlessly into your ERP system you already use for quoting, or a streamlined user interface within Peak itself if you are looking for a quote configuration capability.
Built to flex as your pricing strategy changes - Pricing analysts have the ability to set and adjust pricing strategies in the application at any time (e.g. maximum discount vs list pricing), allowing the AI-driven prices to adjust as your business's pricing goals change.
Dynamic and highly specific pricing - State of the art pricing algorithms allow for highly specific price quoting based on the customer engagement, your historic sales success, and the geographical location of the potential sale.
How does this application do this?
Quote Pricing v2 contains the functionality to:
- Navigate to the new Quote Pricing application
- View Quote listing page containing a searchable table of previous quotes and their manual statuses (e.g. won) selected within Peak user interface
- (Pricing admin only) can click on the edit guardrails button and adjust the pricing strategies the algorithm takes into account when providing prices to sales staff
- The ability to view previously generated quote data and export as a CSV
- Create a new quote within Peak by selecting single or multiple products and quantities, as well as the current customer name or inputting a prospect name
- Optionally selected the geographical region for the quote, to generate prices based on location
- Generate an optimised quote, including key quote metrics (total optimised price, total discount, optimised margin)
- The ability to download quotes as a CSV file, containing both quote-level data (e.g. total discount), and product-level data (e.g. per product discount)
- The option to execute the backend logic ‘headless’ based on API request/response if a basket of goods is created in the customer's own Quote Configuration tool already
Opening the Quote Pricing App
When you log in to Peak, you’ll be presented with a ‘Welcome’ screen.
Expand the left-hand navigation panel and select 'Quote Pricing' from the 'Pricing AI' dropdown.
After opening the Quote Pricing app, you’ll be presented with the overview.
From this overview, you can perform the following actions:
- Search for an existing quote
- Download a quote
- Delete a quote
- Update quote status
- Create a quote
- Edit guardrails (admin user only)
Searching for Quotes
From the overview screen, you can search through all quotes within Peak, using the search bar, highlighted below.
You can see an example quote, as shown, that provides information at a glance about each quote, including customer name, date created, total quantity of items or products within the quote, the total optimized price and the current status.
Quote Options
Once you’ve searched for a quote, you can then perform specific actions against that quote in the overview by clicking the ‘Options’ button at the end of the row.
When you click the ‘Options’ menu, you’ll be presented with a pop-up that provides options to either View, Edit Status, Download, or Delete this quote.
Quote Status
As shown on the previous page, you can click the ‘Options’ button at the end of a row and select ‘Edit Status’.
Selecting the ‘Edit Status’ button will display the pop-up window as shown.
Select a status from the drop-down options and click ‘Update’ to confirm the change.
Bulk Actions
After searching for the quote you’re looking for, you can use the radio button at the end of the row to ‘Select’ the quote. This then allows you to perform bulk actions against one or many quotes, depending on rows selected.
Once you’ve selected the required rows, click the ‘Bulk Actions’ button. This will be greyed out when no rows are selected.
When you click the ‘Bulk actions’ button, you’ll see the drop-down menu, giving you the options to either ‘Download’ or ‘Delete’ the rows selected.
Creating a Quote
To create a new quote, click the ‘Create quote’ button shown in the top right corner of the overview page.
This will display a form allowing you to input details about the Quote you wish to create.
- Within the ‘Customer’ field, you can either use the drop down or search functionality to find the right current customer for this quote. If it’s a quote for a new prospect not in the database, select 'Add new'.
- Select the region the customer or prospect is within for geographically specific prices.
- Add additional products to the quote, using the ‘Add Product’ button.
- Use the ‘Product’ and ‘Quantity fields to add new lines to the quote.
- Once you have added all Products and Quantities to the quote, click ‘Generate Quote’.
After clicking ‘Generate Quote’, you’ll be shown the quote page as below, providing pricing information for this particular combination of Customer, Product and Quantity.
The quote lines show various information about the quote itself, including a breakdown of total costs, price per unit, discounts per unit and the optimised prices.
Insights for this particular quote are displayed at the top of the quote, giving the Total optimized price, Total discount vs list price, Optimized Margin and Likelihood to convert.
You can use this back button to navigate back to the main Quote Pricing overview to either select a different quote or create a new one.
Click the ‘Download as CSV’ button to locally download a copy of the Quote rows with all column details.
You can also update the quote status either here, or on the quote overview page, using the button next to the 'Download as CSV' option. This currently shows as 'Pending'.
Edit Guardrails
You’ll have the ability to view tooltips to understand each model guardrail, adjust and apply them.
If you are a pricing manager or sales manager and have admin access, you have the option to edit and apply guardrails, using the 'Edit guardrails' button, shown top-right, next to the 'Create Quote' button.
Within the 'Edit guardrails' prompt, you can adjust:
- Conversion vs margin weighting.
- Optimisation type
- Global min margin
- Max discount vs list price
- Max premium vs list price
- Max discount vs PSP
- Max premium vs PSP
You can see an example of the tooltip to explain adjustment to the conversion vs margin weighting guardrail, shown in the black box.
