"Our new AI Optimization capability will provide an industry leading optimization capability that is both powerful on its own, and efficient and scalable across any enterprise when combined with our platform and product suite."
M7: What's your ideal customer profile? What AI-powered solutions does Pricefx offer to ideal customers?
PM: Our ideal customer is any company, in nearly any industry, who is looking for a rapid and efficient advance in how they define and implement their pricing. Pricefx has more than 100 such customers across 37 countries, which include some of the largest manufacturing, retailing and energy businesses in the world. In 2019, Pricefx signed nearly 20 new enterprise customers with revenue in excess of $2 billion. In May, we acquired Brennus Analytics, an exciting French start-up with a modular, proprietary, transparent, and configurable artificial intelligence (“AI”) technology. With the addition of their unique AMAS AI technology, we will soon be able to offer the market a “True AI” optimization solution for pricing, designed to organically enable their existing business structures and decision making processes with a powerful new level of intelligence, modeling, prioritization, and executional guidance.
M7: F-Words Are Changing the Industry. Can you elaborate on the three F words that serve as the cornerstones of Pricefx?
PM: You’re absolutely right, the f-words we work and live by at Pricefx are changing the pricing industry because they solve the frustrations we saw from customers who said that delivering business results with pricing often came with so much baggage and headache – long implementation times coupled with hefty price tags. Our values are deeply rooted in being a fast, flexible and friendly cloud solution. If you were to ask our customers and the people we work with – these f-words are in our core. The f-words company culture runs through the veins of the entire organization, pushing everyone to be a forward-thinking leader.
Fast
An industry leading implementation timeline measured in weeks, not months or years, means our customers start seeing their investment pay off in the first year of activation with Pricefx.
Flexible
Point and click integrations. Dynamic data ingestion and activation. Configurable UI, datamarts, dashboards and more. No other pricing platform offers the flexibility that comes standard with Pricefx, and flexibility is a game changer in today's digitally driven economy.
Friendly
Our no barrier to entry / no barrier to exit contracts changed the game in the pricing industry. Our customer teams have been recognized as the industry's favorite to work with. And our platform is awarded for being easy to learn and use. That's what Friendly pricing looks like.
“In the work you’re doing now, think not only about how it can solve the current challenge, but how when designed well, it will solve future challenges without the effort it is requiring today. Make every choice like it’s a brick in the foundation of your future home.”
M7: What industries and departments are most likely to benefit from utilizing Pricefx AI-powered price management solutions?
PM: Our customers have a variety of stakeholders and users ranging from IT groups looking for centralized admin for enterprise price management, to finance departments looking to analyze and improve margin and profitability, to sales and marketing departments looking to improve both the speed and quality of price quoting to their end customers on a global scale. Our customer portfolio is among the most diverse in the industry, ranging from Manufacturing, to Chemical and Process Engineering, to E-commerce, after-market distribution, mechanical parts, durable goods, and even ski lift tickets! With our new AI Optimization capability, we will provide an industry leading optimization capability that is both powerful on its own, and efficient and scalable across any enterprise when combined with our platform and product suite.
M7: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your work - what day to day processes have you had to re-tool to be able to pull them off remotely? What does your remote tech stack look like?
PM: Because we are a global company with our founding offices in Munich, we were able to see how the coronavirus hit our neighbors and we moved rather quickly in comparison to our counterparts. Pricefx is also a flexible work environment. Before the pandemic, we allowed employees to work in their home office or come to our office (whichever they prefer), and flexible working hours to balance work and life.
The global pandemic forced us to reduce our global team travel to zero, and to lean in on how to execute virtual sales cycles and implementation cycles in a way we had not before.
We are a Microsoft run company, and we were heavily reliant on Teams prior to the crisis, so shifting to entirely remote management wasn’t difficult for us, but we have made further investments in Teams and other collaboration tools to improve how our company performs with every single person working from home. It also forced us to move fast on our existing plans – for example, we were already working to virtualize much of our product training and technical workshop efforts prior to COVID, and as a result of the crisis we accelerated those efforts and are now on a path to deliver 3x the amount of training content and support to our customers as before, and 100% virtually and self-service.
"Becoming an effective marketing professional is to see the world through the lens of a salesperson."
M7: What have been your two biggest challenges as a CMO regarding marketing planning at Pricefx, and how did you tackle them?
PM: Challenge 1 – build a high performing team.
I’ve been able to build a world class marketing team by staying focused on my specific role – mainly to create the setting for others to be great, enable them to pursue their strengths and passions, and trust them to deliver for the business.
Challenge 2 – Think Globally, Act Locally
As a global organization with both employees and customers all around the world, it’s critical that I constantly stay focused on both the macro view of the world and different market dynamics, and at the local level how different sellers, buyers, cultures and regions need to be approached in order for our value and message to connect. This balance has required me to work to learn more about the markets and people around the world, while also maintaining consistency in how we as a company present ourselves to them all.
M7: What are some of the common challenges your customers approach you with?
PM: Our customers typically have a handful of similar challenges – a need to centrally manage and deploy their pricing and discounting consistently across regions and teams; a need for better intelligence and analytics to make critical pricing decisions, or a need to achieve better margin and profitability in a rapid and efficient way. These common challenges are why the market is ripe for pricing software solutions like Pricefx. This G2 chart shows the notable surge in pricing software as sales teams are adapting to new demands of remote selling.
M7: What is the most important skill or set of skills that today’s marketing leaders need to have?
PM: The helpful secret to becoming an effective marketing professional is to see the world through the lens of a salesperson. You don’t have to be good at sales but I’ve found it very beneficial to understand their role in the organization to be a better marketer. Also, even when you’re marketing something as un-emotional as pricing software, there is still a need to understand the emotional character and mindset of the buyer.
M7: If I were to say to a bunch of people who know you, ‘Give me three adjectives that best describe you,’ what would I hear?
PM: Focused, Articulate, Creative