No Room for Lagging Prices in the Digital Marketplace
Valerie Howard,
By connecting their ecommerce platform to a real-time price calculation engine, businesses can deliver prices optimized for current market data and personalized to each buyer, Valerie Howard of PROS writes.
While the B2B marketplace has operated at an accelerating pace year after year, today’s COVID-19 crisis drives unprecedented market conditions that are forcing businesses to be more agile than ever before. Businesses need to adapt to changing customer demands and stay attuned to changing buyer preferences in order to better serve their clients—downstream businesses who are likely trying to make sense of how to reliably service their own customers in this new environment.
Traditionally, the B2B purchasing engagement has been rather rigid, requiring a tedious dance of price opacity and careful negotiation. With large portions of the global economy under stay-at-home orders, many businesses are forced to move a lot of the traditional sales engagement to digital channels. And selling digitally makes it a lot more difficult to keep prices ambiguous. The businesses that succeed today understand that today’s conditions require differentiated digital experiences—and often that can be achieved with responsiveness, transparency and personalization.