Driving revenue through integrated pricing

Industry Sector: Chemicals

Business Function: Marketing

With the Palantir Foundry Integrated Pricing Tool, teams across Sales and Marketing have a way to seamlessly collaborate across Microsoft Dynamics and Palantir Foundry to generate, price, and track quotes made to customers while maximizing margins and maintaining customer retention.

Challenge

Before the Palantir Foundry Integrated Pricing Tool:

• Sales Managers were requesting prices over phone or email, without providing much context around the opportunity leaving the Marketing team in the dark as to what and who they were pricing a product for.
• Marketing Managers had to manually gather information from different systems (historical prices offered to similar customers with associated costs and margins, forecasted raw material costs from the procurement department, freight cost quotes from the logistics department, etc.).
• Marketing Managers had no feedback on their pricing decision: Was it accepted by the customer or did they lose the deal in favor of a cheaper competitor, or because the product/delivery methods did not match customer expectations?

Solution

Marketing Managers review open quote requests made by Sales Managers. They then make a price proposal based on context related to the deal opportunity (what is the customer going to use this product for), historical performance of similar opportunities, business targets and future cost estimates. After the customer negotiation, the final outcome (deal won or lost) is fed back into Palantir Foundry to better inform future decisions.

Users and stakeholders

• Sponsor: Head of Marketing
• POCs: Marketing Managers, Sales Managers

Impact

The key metrics to track to evaluate the success of this use case:

1. Agreement of business performance (revenue, volumes, margins) with targets.
2. Number of deals won and associated revenue.
3. Speed between first quote generation and closure of deal.

How it's made

Two core implementation details make this workflow compelling:

1. Synchronization between Microsoft Dynamics and Foundry: Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) data is refreshed every five minutes in Foundry via Magritte REST plugin to reflect new Quotes being generated. Once Marketing has taken a decision, the proposed price is written back in the CRM via Webhook.
2. Price Determination Quiver Workflow: on each submitted quote, Marketing managers get to interact with a templated Quiver Analysis bringing together all the information they need to propose an educated price, including:
   • Historical business performance (volume, price, cost, margin) of "similar" opportunities (same material/customer/region/volumes).
   • Forward-looking cost estimates, including raw material cost estimates based on future material prices and bill of material information.

Implement a similar use case

This use case implements the following Pattern. Follow the link below to read more about a particular Pattern and learn how it is implemented within Foundry.

• Operational process coordination (used for 8 other use cases)

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