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• Are you fed up with errors being made on your quotes?

• Does it take you a long time to create quotes manually?

• Can you see an opportunity to attract customers with precisely tailored offers - but it's too complicated using your current quoting process?

Let's face it, we're not the only company offering Price Management and Configure Price Quote (CPQ) software, but we're bringing something special to the table that will set us apart from our competitors.

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Your competitors may all be falling over one another to get a piece of the market - and discounting heavily to make sure they win their share of that market. However, you are really not compelled to join in; better in this instance to stay neutral in the conflict and let the others fight it out.

BlackCurve provides price management and configure price quote (CPQ) software. As mentioned in my earlier blog post detailing BlackCurve's story, many companies are still heavily reliant on spreadsheets and basic pricing strategies that are unknowingly holding them back from growing.

It's really not rocket science – in order to maximise your profits and stay ahead of the competition you know you have to price at the optimum level.

In order to achieve this, what your business needs is an accurate price management system (definitely not spreadsheets) – and the modern, accurate and most efficient solution to all your pricing demands is to invest in price list software.

During my time as a Sales Director in the software sector, I was increasingly coming across businesses (manufacturers, distributors, retailers and service providers) that were requiring more sophisticated tools to manage their pricing.

Yield management is the process of understanding, anticipating, and influencing consumer behaviour to maximize yield or profits from a fixed, 'perishable' resource, such as hotel rooms, tables in restaurants, theatre tickets, airline seats, media, telecommunications and energy, to name but a few.  The idea is to coordinate timing, price, and consumer buying patterns to achieve the best return.

Come on, admit it - you may have made one or two pricing errors during your esteemed pricing career – but surely none as costly as those detailed below?

Is your company big or small? Do you sell b2b or b2c? Are you the market leader or new to the marketplace? Wherever you sit you will all have one thing in common – the need to achieve the best price for your products to maximise both sales and profits.

Do you have any nagging doubts that you might not be getting quite the optimum price for your products or services?  Are you confident you always utilise your skills, expertise and know-how to squeeze out those extra profits for your business?

The right price can boost profit faster than increasing volume ever will. The wrong price can shrink a profit just as quickly. You may understandably be wary of increasing prices for fear of alienating or losing customers but the result of not managing your price performance could be far more damaging.

BlackCurve has pointed out in earlier blogs the many problems associated with using spreadsheets to manage your prices. So, if you agree with us that solely using spreadsheets for this task is a bad idea, our recommendation is to make the switch to Configure Price Quote (CPQ) software. Many industry leaders use CPQ software to inject speed and accuracy into their sales engines – could this software be the answer if you are experiencing a sales slowdown – or are troubled by errors and time delays associated with using spreadsheets to manage your prices?