How to Use Third-Party Research to Find the Best Price Optimization Solution for Your Business

If you’re in the midst of evaluating price optimization solutions, you’re likely trying to learn all that you can about each solution’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as their ability to deliver on your business’s unique needs. Third-party perspectives on your potential solutions are a great place to start – they can provide you with a benchmarked analysis that’ll help you to get to a decision quickly.

Take a Holistic Approach

Pricing is a powerful lever – and every potential additional basis point in price optimization has exponential benefit for your revenue, margin and competitive advantage. Pricing optimization technology can play a huge part in helping you dial up your pricing power – but it can be challenging to decipher what its potential can be for your business.

For a complete evaluation of the available pricing technologies, you’ll want to consider a variety of research that includes analyst reports, customer reviews and vendor assessments. (We’ve made several of these pieces available to you below.) The focus of each report and review vary, so we encourage you to check out the analysis for yourself.

Define Your Criteria

While the research will help you to refine your criteria for evaluation, it’s helpful to have a perspective on what you want answered by the analysis. As you read through the analysis, you might want to consider the following questions: 

• How well does the solution integrate into my existing infrastructure? Your pricing optimization strategy is often dependent upon multiple sources of data, so it’s key that your solution enables you to source comprehensive information.
• How adaptable is the solution? Change is your only constant— both in life and in pricing. You’ll need your solution to be adaptable to the introduction of new products, to the addition of new geographies, and perhaps new price strategies. A key measure of a solution’s adaptability is its ease of use.
• How much will I need to rely on IT or expert users to maintain the solution? Cloud solutions ensure you don’t have to worry about upgrades. Thoughtful configuration workflows and intuitive user experiences ensure business users can manage the solution without reliance on IT.
• What do customers say about the solution? Customer reviews and testimonials give a great deal of perspective on what you can expect your experience to be.
• Will the solution meet today and tomorrow’s needs? You need a solution to meet today’s needs, but it’s important to consider solutions that can meet what you’ll need tomorrow – both in their current capabilities and their innovation plans.

Record Your Analysis

Once you’ve decided on the criteria, you’ll want to track all of your findings in an organized and easy to share format. A simple table like this is likely all that you need:

After you’ve worked through the research findings at this level of detail, you’ll have a clear perspective on which solution providers to reach out to for a conversation and demo. You’ll also have greater clarity on how to champion your initiative within your organization because you’ll have a research-validated perspective on your project’s potential.

Check out these six key perspectives on price optimization and management solutions:


FeaturedCustomers is the leading customer success content marketing platform helping potential B2B buyers make informed purchasing decisions. After evaluating all the potential Pricing Optimization Software companies on its platform, FeaturedCustomers determined only 14 of them met the criteria needed for inclusion in the Spring 2020 Pricing Optimization Software Customer Success Report. Of those companies, PROS was named Best in Category and was one of only three companies to earn a Market Leader award.

In the IDC MarketScape on Worldwide B2B-Focused Price Optimization Applications, the authors provide their perspective on rapid growth and evolution within the price technology market. The 2018 report also provides a comparison of seven key vendors on their capabilities and strategies.

Read this guide from Gartner to learn more about their key findings on the latest price optimization and management (PO&M) software. After reading Gartner's recommendations and vendor overview, use their checklist to help evaluate whether your organization could boost its pricing performance using PO&M software.

The mission of the MarTech Breakthrough Awards is to honor excellence and recognize the innovation, hard work and success in a range of marketing and sales technologies. In 2019, the program attracted more than 2,500 nominations from over 15 different countries throughout the world and price optimization solutions were evaluated under the SalesTech category. 

“Pricing is an often overlooked marketing tool, but perhaps one of the most critical keys to help companies win more business, be more profitable, reinvest in their products and services, better serve their customers, gain a competitive edge and achieve their fullest potential,” said James Johnson, Managing Director at MarTech Breakthrough. “The PROS team displays an incredibly high level of ingenuity with PROS Guidance, with an easy-to-use, precise and personalized platform for price guidance that helps businesses grow market share. Congratulations to PROS on their “breakthrough” pricing innovation and 2019 MarTech Breakthrough Award designation.”

With reviews gathered from the user community and data aggregated from online sources and social networks, G2 Crowd leverages a unique algorithm to calculate customer satisfaction and market presence scores in real time. The result is an unbiased view of pricing software by real, verified users in an easy-to-view grid.

For the Constellation Shortlist on Price Optimization, Constellation Research evaluated 37 B2B and B2C solutions within this market through client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, and research. The report provides a perspective on the key criteria to make the Constellation ShortList on Price Optimization – a designation awarded to merely eight of the 37 evaluated vendors.

Once you’ve had a chance to delve into the research, you’ll find that there is exciting opportunity ahead of you. According to Gartner’s MarketGuide, Price Optimization and Management solutions have been observed to deliver as much as 1% to 5% revenue increases and margin increases of 2% to 10%. If you’re interested in learning how you could achieve similar results at your business or if you have questions about the research, we’d be happy to help – just get in touch.