Service Area: Sales & Marketing
Client Type: Industrial Distributor
Service Provider Type: Pricing Strategy Consultants
Industry: Distribution
The client required a structured, consistent approach to pricing to eliminate inconsistent discounts and optimize margins. The organization needed a model that could guide its sales team in setting strategic prices based on client, product and deal characteristics, ensuring profitability and competitiveness while aligning with the company’s broader financial goals.
An industrial distributor faced wide price variations due to individual sales representatives setting prices independently, sometimes without full understanding of the value the company delivered to customers. This practice led to lost margin opportunities, misaligned pricing strategies and resistance to change among the sales team, which affected profitability and cohesion across business operations.
BluWave connected the portfolio company with an expert B2B pricing consultancy to develop a robust pricing engine. This included identifying key price drivers, designing a pricing engine that factored in customer profiles, product specifications and order characteristics, and finally educating the sales team on pricing and negotiation approaches to reinforce long-term value creation.
The new pricing engine delivered close to a 200-basis point margin improvement. Beyond tangible financial gains, it shifted the organizational culture towards disciplined, strategic pricing. This approach improved the team’s awareness of margin impact, aligning individual performance incentives with the company’s financial success and boosting overall company value.
The price engine is invaluable, but the biggest impact was changing how people think about pricing –linking it directly to company value and individual success.
-Managing Director at PE Firm
