The distribution division of a Fortune 50 company added 285 basis points of margin ($6 million) to its bottom line. By re-pricing its entire catalogue of over 150,000 parts, revenues jumped over 20%. Because of the size of the catalogue, many of these products either were not priced or were poorly priced, slowing the customer response for those items. Symphony-Metreo created new customer segmentation based on pricing-critical variables, including customer type, location and quantity breaks. Once prices were set at optimal level, many products that hadn’t moved for long periods of time started to sell. Interestingly, we learned that often the slow moving products actually presented the best profit opportunities. Win rates reflected this reality, going up by 4%.

Automated tools also increased the efficiency of the price desk. Catalog pricing could be completed in two weeks rather than three months and customer responsiveness grew dramatically.

$5billion manufacturer chose Symphony-Metreo to help them gain control over off-invoice rebates and allowances. They were experiencing accelerating margin losses due to the inability of salespeople and distributors to see al the cumulative discounts being offered. By giving business managers the information they needed at their fingertips, they could curb excessively discounted transactions and view the historical profitability of customers at the point of negotiation.

This increased Pricing Intelligence™ allowed them to increase gross margins by 0.5% and to add eight figures of operating profits to their bottom line.

A $2billion Fortune 50 distributor of electrical components relied on Symphony-Metreo to set the best prices for its extensive product catalogue. After re-segmenting its customers and attaching market-based prices to their entire array of products, they were able to add 2% to their revenues and 132 basis points of margin to their coffers.

The industrial manufacturing division of a Fortune 50 company was suffering from wide price variation across its product line—even for similar goods. They were suffering from limited adherence to contract commitments, with customers getting low prices even for low volumes of purchases. They also had inconsistent processes for evaluating deals. With Symphony-Metreo, they were able to isolate price outliers and determine the true cause of each (I.e., poor contracts, lack of compliance to sales guidelines, etc.) They could ensure accurate deal evaluation and negotiation with immediate access to comparable deals and at the point of negotiation, could access contract compliance history.

Thanks to these improvements, they grew win rates by 1.5%, with revenues jumping 9%. They added over 300 basis points of margin to their bottom line.

A $4billion distributor was missing margin targets due to reactive, competitor-focused pricing. They also suffered from slow response times when asked to provide quotes to customers. By adding pricing-driven segmentation variables that took into account customer pricing sensitivity and the company’s profit goals and by giving each salesperson visibility to customer profitability and price guidelines at the point of negotiation, they were able to offer more accurate prices, as well as ensuring better compliance of customers to contracts.

As a result, they enhanced margins by 60 basis points – a significant jump in an industry where profits are usually limited to only a few percentage points.