Pricing Management
Summarize
Summary of Pricing Management
The Pricing Management application empowers your organization to define, manage, and optimize pricing strategies within any Sales Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. It enables sales teams to quickly generate opportunities, quotes, and orders with accurate and competitive pricing. As the foundational pricing component in Sales CRM, it offers flexible and comprehensive tools to handle various pricing scenarios tailored to your business needs.
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Key Features
- Price Lists: Create and manage multiple price lists based on currency, customer account, or other criteria. Price lists provide quick access to product pricing during quote and order creation. Price lists can be copied and updated to streamline pricing management.
- Pricing Methods: Support for one-time fees or recurring pricing (monthly/annual), set at the product offering level and reflected in price list lines.
- Sales Agreement Price Lists: Automatically generated price lists reflecting finalized unit prices from completed sales agreements, valid within specified date ranges.
- Cost Books: Define unit costs for products to enable sales agents to perform profitability analysis by comparing cost versus quoted price. Cost books can be copied and updated as needed.
- Cost-Based Attribute Adjustments: Adjust base costs based on product characteristics (e.g., model, size) using fixed or percentage markups/markdowns, improving margin accuracy in quotes.
- Price Adjustments: Apply markups, markdowns, or overrides based on product attributes (like color), non-product attributes (such as shipping location or sales channel), and bundled product offerings to reflect discounts or special pricing.
- Pricing Matrices: Utilize decision rule frameworks for complex pricing logic, including default price list and cost book selection, standard price adjustments based on context variables, and pricing adjustments for bundled products. Custom context variables can be created and mapped to tailor pricing rules further.
- Matrix Validations: Implement system-defined or custom validations to ensure accuracy and consistency in pricing and eligibility rule matrices.
- Pricing Plans: Use or customize default pricing plans that sequence calculation steps and adjustments, enabling tailored pricing workflows aligned with your organization’s strategies.
- Pricing Extensions: Customize the pricing engine via integration points to retrieve pricing data from external sources or modify processing logic. Extensions cover default price list and cost book selection, product list price retrieval, attribute adjustments, cost derivation, and pricing adjustments.
What to Expect
By leveraging Pricing Management, your organization can:
- Ensure accurate, competitive, and flexible pricing tailored to various customers and scenarios.
- Streamline quote and order creation with quick access to relevant price and cost information.
- Perform profitability analysis at the quote level to make informed sales decisions.
- Implement complex pricing rules and adjustments with decision matrices and customizable plans.
- Extend and integrate pricing logic to fit unique business requirements through pricing extensions.
Overall, Pricing Management equips your sales and pricing teams with the tools to efficiently manage pricing strategies, improve sales effectiveness, and support profitability goals within your ServiceNow Sales CRM environment.
The Pricing Management application enables your organization to set, manage, and optimize pricing strategies for any Sales Customer Relationship Management solution. These pricing strategies enable your sales team to generate opportunities, quotes, and orders with accurate and competitive pricing quickly.
Price lists
Price lists define the prices for products and services offered by your organization. Your agents use price lists to find product pricing quickly when creating quotes and capturing orders. Your pricing admins or managers create price lists and add price list lines that define the list price for each of your product offerings. They can also copy a published price list and its price list lines and use the copy to update the pricing or reuse the price list without having to create a new price list.
- Support for multiple price lists
- Pricing Management supports multiple price lists, such as price lists based on currency or customer account. The initial, default price list that you create is based on the currency used, but you can change
the default price list used by your agents. For example, you can create account-based price lists that are tailored to the needs and preferences of a specific customer or provide pre-negotiated prices for them. You can set an
account-based price list as the default, which is then used by your agents when they create quotes or orders for that particular customer.
Figure 1. Example of account-based price list - Pricing methods
- The pricing method is either a one-time fee or a recurring pricing fee with monthly and annual frequencies. The pricing method is set in product offerings and is displayed in price list lines.
For details on setting up and managing price list features, see Configuring product pricing.
Sales Agreement price lists
If you're using the Sales Agreement feature, a published sales agreement price list is generated automatically when a sales agent creates a sales agreement from a completed quote. The sales agreement price list reflects the final unit price for each product that is captured as part of the sales agreement. The sales agreement price list is valid for the start and end dates specified for the agreement. To learn more about sales agreements, see Sales Agreement Management.
Cost books
Cost books define the unit cost for product offerings. This information is used in the Quote Management application to provide sales agents with the unit cost, unit margin amount, and unit margin percentage for products in quotes. With this information, your sales agents can perform a simple profitability analysis by subtracting the cost of the product offer from the quoted selling price.
Your pricing admins or managers create a cost book and add a cost book line to set the unit cost for each product offering. They can also copy a published cost book and its cost book lines to revise costs in the cost book (update the copy) or reuse a cost book without having to create a new one. For details on setting up cost books and cost book lines, see Create and publish a cost book and Create a cost book line. For information on activating the cost book and cost margin features in Quote Management, see Configuring Quote Management.
Cost-based attribute adjustments
As a pricing admin, you can capture the base cost for a product based on its characteristics, such as model or size, since those attributes can affect the final cost. You can define a cost-based attribute adjustment for a product by specifying a fixed amount or percentage markup or markdown to be applied to all cost books or to selected cost book lines. The base costs are used by the pricing engine to calculate profit margins for products in sales quotes. For more information, see Create and publish a cost-based attribute adjustment.
Price adjustments
- Product attributes: Define a price adjustment based on product characteristics, such as model or color. For more information, see Create a product attribute-based pricing adjustment.
- Non-product attributes: Create a price adjustment based on characteristics that aren’t related to a product, such as shipping information or sales channel. For example, you can create a pricing adjustment for customers in a particular region. For details, see Create a non-product attribute pricing adjustment.
- Bundled products: Create price adjustments for product offerings in a bundled product. For example, you might want to specify a markdown amount for certain product offerings in the bundle, because the bundle provides discounted pricing. For more information, see Create pricing adjustments for bundled products.
Pricing matrices
- Price List Defaulting: Select the default price list to be used, such as the standard price list or an account-specific price list. For more information on configuring this price list matrix, see Control the default price list on transaction header or header line.
- Cost Book Defaulting: Select the default cost book to be used, for example the standard cost book or an account-specific cost book. To learn more about configuring this matrix, see Control the default cost book on transaction header or header line.
- Standard Price Adjustment: Apply an adjustment based on context variables that represent non-product attributes, such as shipping location or account. Pricing Management provides certain system-defined, non-product context variables that you can use in this matrix, but you can also create your own custom variables, for example, market segment. Your pricing administrator can work with your administrator to develop custom context variables that can be used in pricing matrixes. For details on configuring these adjustments, see Create a non-product attribute pricing adjustment. For more information on configuring custom context variables, see Create a custom context variable and Map a custom context variable to a transaction entity.
- Configuration Component Price Adjustment: Adjust the price of a product when it's sold as part of a product bundle. For details, see Create pricing adjustments for bundled products.
Matrix validations
As an admin, you can use system-defined validations or set your own validations to validate rows entered into the decision tables for pricing and product eligibility rule matrices. For more information on these validations, see Configuring matrix validation rules.
Pricing plans
Pricing Management provides a default pricing plan that defines the sequence of steps in which pricing calculations and adjustments are applied to determine final product prices. Adjustments include the pricing changes set in the pricing adjustment matrices. You can use the default plan, or you can copy the default plan and customize it by adding or changing the pricing steps to tailor it for your organization. To learn more, see Configurable pricing plans.
Pricing extensions
- Select Price List (DefaultPriceListExtensionPoint): Change the selection logic for using the default price list on a quote or order header.
- Select Cost Book (DefaultCostBookExtensionPoint): Change the selection logic for using the default cost book on a quote header.
- Get Product List Price (ListPriceExtensionPoint): Get pricing directly from another data source or extend the current price list derivation.
- Apply Attribute Adjustments (AttributeAdjustmentExtensionPoint): Get attribute adjustments from another data source, such as product manufacturers, or extend the current adjustment derivation logic.
- Get Cost (CostExtensionPoint): Get the unit cost for a product offering directly from another data source or extend the current cost book derivation logic.
- Apply Pricing Adjustments (PricingAdjustmentsExtensionPoint): Get pricing adjustments for a product offering from another data source, or extend the pricing engine logic by not relying on the Standard Adjustment and Component Configuration Rule Matrices to get the adjustment values.