Case study · RevOps
Making a pricing decision defensible in a multi-â branch trader
A multi-â branch building materials trader, where every salesperson set prices from experience. Years of sales data existed, and none of it helped anyone decide.
The constraint: No external market price available: everything had to come from internal data alone. And a salesperson on the floor will never open a tool that asks them to understand a statistical model before answering a customer.
How it ran
- Diagnosis before remedy: relative margins by branch, family and item, dispersion, share of revenue below the median.
- A reference price derived from the internal market, with a high tariff and a floor rather than one imposed price.
- The decision runs through an explicit tree that a salesperson can read back.
- The calculation module is isolated from client context: the mechanics stay frozen, thresholds and taxonomies adapt to the company.
- A what-â if simulator to arbitrate before applying, with the expected gain waterfall and an export.
- Whatever the tool cannot compute yet is labelled âpendingâ instead of producing a plausible price.
Outcome
- Live at the client, on their real data.
- A pure calculation module, isolated and test-â covered, separated from everything company-â specific.
- Every price shown traces back to internal sales data: the strictest design constraint in the product.
What I take from itThe brake on a pricing tool is the salespersonâs trust: as long as they cannot explain where the number comes from, they do not use it.