The challenges of pricing in manufacturing mainly include the inability to track prices or maintain price uniformity across channels and regions. We looked closely into the issues that our industrial clients faced with price setting and shared a few common ones. In this blog, we also shared how you can overcome them after achieving successful results for our manufacturer clients.Pricing in the manufacturing sector is more complex than in many other industries. With an intricate web of supply chains, variable costs, and market demands, finding the right pricing strategy can make or break profitability.
4 Pricing Challenges that Manufacturers Face
Let’s take a look at the pricing challenges in manufacturing and strategies to overcome them. If you face any 2 of these issues, we recommend you seek expert pricing assistance. To cut your hunt short, you can reach out to our expert team for further questions.
1. Limited Visibility into International Pricing Structures
When selling products across various countries and distributors, gaining a clear picture of pricing structures is critical. Most industrial companies who start expanding across countries experience this. Without transparency, it becomes nearly impossible to ensure consistency and alignment in pricing strategies. This lack of visibility can lead to pricing disparities, eroding customer trust and harming long-term profitability.
To combat this, manufacturers need tools that provide real-time insights into their global pricing structures. Centralized platforms allow them to monitor and adjust pricing strategies across regions, ensuring consistency and competitiveness.
2. Difficulty in Identifying Margin Leakages
Margin leakages are one of the silent profit killers. Without proper insights into pricing data, it’s challenging to spot where profits are slipping through the cracks. For manufacturers, this often means revenue gaps across regions and distributors remain hidden, directly impacting bottom-line performance.
To mitigate this, industrialists must take swift action to assess all possible areas where profit margins are suboptimal. You can use advanced analytics to oversee all the aspects and analyse pricing data in detail. This would empower manufacturers to take targeted actions that protect profitability.
3. Inability to Track Market Positioning Across Regions
Understanding how your products stack up against competitors in different regions is fundamental. Monitoring competitor prices and their movements gives you crystal-clear insights into how the pricing pattern works and the exact factors it depends on. But sometimes for B2B businesses, like most manufacturers, it’s tough to access competitor’s prices. Going beyond B2B login portals ethically becomes a big challenge. This is where web scraping tools come in handy.
Using an integrated pricing tool has powerful data scraping functionalities and allows you to study each data with finer details. Such pricing platforms can provide industrialists with actionable insights into market trends and competitive positioning. These tools help businesses adjust pricing strategies to stay competitive across regions. Without this visibility, it becomes harder to identify pricing gaps or opportunities to adjust strategies based on local competition.
4. Losing Control of your Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price (MSRP)
Manufacturers often deal with multiple distributors, each using different pricing strategies. Without a centralized system to manage and align these approaches, maintaining a consistent pricing strategy becomes difficult. Maintaining control over your MSRP is critical to protecting brand value and ensuring fair pricing across markets.
However, manufacturers often struggle with distributors and resellers setting prices below or above the recommended levels. This inconsistency can lead to market confusion, erode customer trust, pricing conflicts and damage long-term profitability.
To fight the disturbance of price uniformity, affecting the brand/manufacturer; we recommend a centralised price management tool. This would enable you to enforce a unified approach across all your distributors.
5 Ways to Overcome Pricing Challenges in Manufacturing
Before asking about the pricing strategies for manufacturers that most seek simple answers to, it’s crucial to mitigate the current low-hanging fruits. Here, we share the 5 ways manufacturers can overcome pricing challenges.
- Enhance Visibility into International Pricing Structures
A centralized pricing system is essential for tracking pricing structures across countries and distributors. By adopting tools that consolidate and organize pricing data, manufacturers can monitor discrepancies, ensure consistency, and maintain competitiveness in global markets.
- Identify and Resolve Margin Leakage
Margin leakages often go unnoticed without robust analytics. Manufacturers can leverage real-time data and insights from various sales channels to pinpoint profitability gaps. Proactively addressing these gaps optimizes margins and strengthens financial performance.
- Improve Market Positioning with Competitor Insights
Staying competitive requires a clear understanding of your market positioning relative to competitors. By tracking competitor prices and analyzing market trends, manufacturers can adjust their strategies dynamically. This enables them to better position their brand across different regions and respond effectively to market demands.
- Ensure Consistent Pricing Across Distributors
A unified approach to pricing across all distributors is crucial for maintaining strategic alignment. Implementing systems that track pricing trends and notify you of price changes in real time ensures that pricing is consistent, transparent, and aligned with business objectives.
- Optimize Discounts and Rebates
Discounts and rebates are essential tools for aligning pricing with a customer’s willingness to pay, but without clear guidelines, they can erode profitability. Manufacturers can enhance discounting strategies by segmenting customers and products based on factors like sales importance, market penetration, and competitiveness.
A structured framework, supported by dynamic deal-scoring models, enables sales teams to apply discounts strategically. These models use customer insights and historical data to predict willingness to pay, ensuring discounts are value-driven and aligned with business goals. This approach maximizes price realization and strengthens the overall pricing strategy.
How SYMSON’s AI Pricing Helped KPN Combat Pricing Challenges
SYMSON's pricing solutions delivered measurable success for KPN, driving growth and improving customer loyalty. Here’s a closer look at the standout results:
Read More About How KPN Optimised Customer Value with Symson.
- 6% ROI on Promotions
KPN significantly improved the efficiency of their promotional strategies. SYMSON’s tools enabled data-driven decision-making, allowing the team to identify which discounts and offers would yield the highest returns. This approach not only maximized promotional ROI but also reduced unnecessary costs, ensuring that every campaign delivered measurable value.
- 9% ROI on Loyalty Campaigns
Customer retention is key to sustainable growth, and KPN saw remarkable improvements in their loyalty campaigns. By leveraging SYMSON’s insights, KPN crafted campaigns that resonated with their audience, increasing customer engagement and long-term retention. These loyalty initiatives helped strengthen relationships with their existing customer base while also boosting profitability.
- 85% of Managers Enhanced Decision-Making
A majority of KPN’s managers reported significant improvements in their ability to make strategic decisions. SYMSON’s real-time insights and CLV-focused models provided a detailed understanding of customer behaviours, preferences, and profitability. This empowered managers to make more informed interventions, directly contributing to better customer satisfaction and loyalty at a granular level.
How Symson AI Pricing Helped Royal Talens Achieve Global Pricing Control
Royal Talens partnered with SYMSON to tackle complex pricing challenges across their international markets. With operations spanning 100 countries, achieving consistency and visibility was crucial. SYMSON’s solutions delivered transformational results:
- 100% Visibility into Market Prices
For a global brand like Royal Talens, understanding how prices vary across regions and distributors is essential. SYMSON provided complete transparency into market prices, enabling the team to identify discrepancies and ensure consistency. This level of visibility helped Royal Talens monitor pricing trends, enforce their Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price (MSRP), and align strategies across all markets.
- Pricing Coverage Across 100 Countries
Managing pricing strategies for 100 countries is no small feat. SYMSON centralized Royal Talens' pricing data, making it easier to oversee and optimize prices globally. This centralized approach allowed the company to maintain competitiveness, adapt to local market demands, and ensure its pricing strategies supported both profitability and brand integrity on a global scale.
Why Manufacturers Choose SYMSON's AI Pricing Solution
Manufacturers trust SYMSON to help them overcome pricing challenges and unlock their growth potential. Here’s how SYMSON stands out:
- Automation and Time Savings
SYMSON automated routine pricing tasks, organized market data, and streamlined operations for Royal Talens. This saved time and allowed the team to focus on strategic decisions, improving efficiency and accuracy with an intuitive interface.
- A Strategic Pricing Partner
SYMSON became more than a tool—offering AI-driven pricing strategies and proactive support to help Royal Talens stay competitive. This collaboration ensured sustainable growth and long-term success in a dynamic market.
SYMSON’s AI Pricing Solution isn’t just a tool—it’s a pathway to smarter, faster, and more strategic pricing decisions. Ready to see how it can revolutionize your pricing strategy? Let’s connect and explore the possibilities.
Do you want a free demo to try how SYMSON can help your business with margin improvement or pricing management? Do you want to learn more? Schedule a call with a consultant and book a 20 minute brainstorm session!
