All right, well. Hello and thank you all so much
again for tuning into yet another episode of the
Professional Pricing Society podcast.
My name is Terrence and today we have a great guest with us who
is going to be spearheading the conversation centered around
turning pricing complexities into opportunities.
And that guest is John Moss. He is the CEO of Flint Fox
International, the intelligent pricing software provider with
world class IP and pricing and revenue management.
An engineering graduate from Oxford University, John went on
to become an economist in the energy industry before moving
into the tech space where he has held a series of senior
leadership roles. And fun fact about John, he is
also trained to use explosive and radioactive devices, which
is pretty cool if you ask. Me, John, do you mind telling me
a bit about the business? What does Flint Fox actually do
and how essentially does it all work?
Yeah, sure. So Flint Fox helps businesses
that have got complex pricing and rebates to protect their
margin increased profits. But the core of our offering is
our pricing and rebate software solution that's we believe the
fastest and most comprehensive pricing management solution on
the market and that's supported by our experienced professional
services team that will help install, configure customizer
software to deliver immediate value to our customers.
We've been around for just under 40 years and our R&D team is
based here with me in New Zealand and we have professional
services and sales teams in each of North America, Europe and
Asia Pacific. And essentially we're a rules
based solution that delivers accurate pricing in real time.
And it doesn't really matter how that price is requested and by
whom. When I look at that customer
base, there are really three reasons why a business would use
Flynn Fox. The first of those is to do what
I call the foundations of pricing.
And there's typically some issue with one of those things in our
in our customers. And so it might be they've got
complexity in the pricing that the ERP simply can't manage.
We know that for many customers, complex pricing is a competitive
advantage and we enable that strategy.
The 2nd is around channels to market.
And so many customers are looking at different ways of
getting product to market and their current pricing solution
simply can't handle all of those channels.
So whether that's through e-commerce, retail, point of
sale, distributors, trade portals, other retailers,
etcetera, we sort of solve that Omni channel complexity.
That third reason is that their pricing solution is too slow.
This is a pretty common one for us.
They simply can't get pricing done quickly enough.
We know of customers that in the past when they run a daily price
catalogue, it takes them over 40 hours.
And so effectively that's that's pretty redundant.
They can't get them done quickly enough.
And so we have a high speed pricing engine, we calculate
everything in real time. You know, our customers have all
of those channels to market when when you scan a barcode at a
point of sale, it's a real time calculation, a real time
pricing. And so we solved that problem.
And then the following one that we do see quite a bit too, is
that the customer has lots of ERP solutions and they want a
single pricing solution that talks to all of those ER PS
Often see that in companies with lots of acquisitions in the past
where they've got multiple ER PS.
And so that's, that's the last of what I call the foundations.
The second reason that a customer uses is to streamline
their pricing operations. And, and that typically is where
the customer's got lots of manual processes.
This is where you see spreadsheets in use, which has a
whole series of issues relating to cost and loss revenue.
Second around streamlining is if they, if they offer rebates or
commissions or receive rebates and commissions and they have
concerns about the right amount of claims, then then we can help
with that administration. And then the last time we've
seen a fair bit in the last couple of years as well is if
the customer wants to use price optimization or CPQ, those
solutions need lots of really accurate, robust data and we
provide that. So we don't offer price
optimization ourselves, but we work with, with partners that
do. And, and we often see our, our
solution used to, to give them really rich, accurate data to
enable them to optimize prices for the customer.
And then the final reason that I see customers using US is simply
visibility, visibility of margins.
And we all know what's gone on the last few years in terms of
input price increases, input cost increases.
And so at both macro and granular levels, we can provide
real time margin visibility. Our solution has both buy side
and sell side pricing, so things you're buying and things you're
selling. And so we can see true, true
margin. And so that those are those are
the real reasons that that I see our customers using US.
And so, yeah, we're pricing and rebase engine, we're very fast
and we solve the whole raft of problems that customers are are
experiencing. And as I say, we've been around
for 40 odd years. People might not know that
because we're down here in New Zealand, but we're we're well
established with a really experienced team.
OK, good. Wow.
You guys are kind of cover it all essentially which is which
is amazing. You guys also our big in what's
called intelligent pricing. Yeah.
Yeah, kind of go in depth about intelligent pricing.
Yeah. I mean, for us, we talk about
intelligent pricing it it's really beneficial both in terms
of saving cost and creating revenue.
And so if you think about the last few years, as I say with
the, with the macroeconomic environment, rising inflation,
input costs, what's really critical is to have that margin
visibility. And that's where the
intelligence comes in. If you're a, a distributor or a
wholesaler that you're buying and you're, you're, you're
collecting rebates or you're, you're selling to a retailer and
paying out rebates, you have to understand all of that chain to
understand your margins. And so the fact that we've got a
buy side, sell side solution, that's the intelligence.
And then almost this reporting that we have within the solution
means you can look at a macro level and a granular level.
So if you want to see one of my margins by region, like
products, by customer group, even at a product level, you can
see that. But if you want to say, OK, for
this particular product, customer, region, even store
combination, what are my margins?
And you can do that with our solution.
It's a very simple thing to do and you know, lots of attention
on pricing in the current environment.
And if you, if you don't have good data, you can't make
intelligent pricing decisions. We, we know that traditionally
RP systems can't cope. They don't provide that rich
data. When you start using manual
workarounds and spreadsheets, then you have data in different
places. It's hard to title together to
get a true picture. And if you don't have that
intelligence in your pricing solution, then we know that
you're going to have errors. You know you're going to lose
revenue, you're going to increase your costs.
We've just some route done some research with PPS and and we
know that 86% of businesses believe that they have missed
out on profit as a result of the inability to quickly adjust
prices. And that's that's a testament to
to the need for intelligent pricing in this environment.
And we know from other research with Forrester, on average
businesses spend about 71 hours a day managing pricing, which is
sort of eight and nine people that are deep in spreadsheets.
And all that means is you're increasing your cost and
introducing the chance of error. And so intelligent pricing to us
is a robust solution that's rules based, that doesn't have
errors, is highly accurate and informs really good pricing
decisions. Good.
That's awesome. I'm glad you kind of laid it out
like that and kind of broke it down just for listeners to be
able to understand it, you know, a little bit better.
How, how, how can intelligent pricing, you know, kind of help
recover, say, lost revenue a business may, may, may have?
Yeah. And, and so I would contrast
intelligent pricing with manual pricing.
That's sort of the the the two ends of the spectrum.
And so intelligent pricing effectively removes and replaces
manual pricing. If you have manual pricing,
there's two things happen. It it means you've got people
involved. So it's time consuming, it's
costly, you're busy with those spreadsheets.
And secondly, it's error prone. And we've seen this often and we
see it in our own business as well, when we, when we have to
use spreadsheets that you make errors, you make mistakes, and
customers are very quick to tell you if you're charging them too
much. And you then have to go back and
process the credit notes, resume invoices, and that that again,
incurs a bunch of cost, but they rarely tell you if you're under
charge. And so you lose revenue.
And that goes back to that. That's a stat that I said where,
you know, businesses believe that they're losing money or
losing profit because they have manual processes.
And so intelligent pricing really stops both of those
situations. It introduces accuracy, it
introduces a standard process and it removes the need to have
people in spreadsheets. You can redeploy those resources
to do something that's more value added.
And so effectively you get operating cost reduction and
increase revenues through accuracy or invoicing.
The other side of that is if you're a business that offers or
receives rebates, there are similar challenges.
If you have a process that's manually driven, what happens is
you have all of this time to try and get rebate approval or
Commission approval. You risk paying too much on
commissions or not claiming enough on rebates.
And so the automation of that process does two things,
increases accuracy and the sharing of data through through
systems means you get much quicker claim acceptance.
So you get your rebates much more quickly and your cash flow
improves. And so intelligent pricing is is
the complete opposite of manual pricing, reduces operating costs
because you can redeploy resources.
And secondly, you have much more accurate pricing, a much smaller
claims department and much faster rebate collection.
You know, when you think about businesses, you know, lost
revenue, let me ask you this as well.
What what implications does the current business landscape have
on pricing And you know, what are some of the biggest
challenges you kind of alluded to a little bit, but what are
some of the biggest challenges in pricing that you have may
have come across or may be experiencing at the moment?
Yeah, it's really topical. I mean, I think anybody in the
pricing industry the last 3-4 years has seen a much heightened
focus on price and pricing. For many years in the year of
low inflation, pricing was a fairly straightforward
situation, whether you have a an annual price increase or a
quarterly price increase, it wasn't that hard to to process
those because there wasn't much going on in terms of inflation.
But the last four years sort of from COVID onwards, all of those
supply chain shocks, year of high inflation, input cost
changes meant that pricing becomes much more important.
And what it means is you've got to focus much more on price to
maintain margins. And now we're going through this
phase where inflation is slowing.
We're getting a little bit closer to to normality as we
know it, but there's still the odd shot coming through.
So the Red Sheep Sea shipping attacks have an immediate effect
on supply chain and prices. We see, we see freight prices
increasing. We see disturbances, of course,
but they are diminishing. And so we're now in a period
having been through those four years where there were lots of
price increases across the board.
People are more aware of those now.
So every single price increase is scrutinized.
You see it in the press all the time.
And not only that, but demand is, is reducing in some areas.
And so if you're in pricing, you've got this real challenge
about how do I set prices that will maintain margins and
maintain or grow profits, but also maintain that the sales
numbers and, and the overall numbers.
And so it's, it's a, it's a really hard gig right now being
in pricing because there's so much going on and there's so
much scrutiny that you hear it all the time.
The words of greed, flation, stagflation, shrink flation as,
as, as packet sizes diminish, but price remains the same.
And so as a pricing person, you just got to be more aware of
technology and more aware of solutions and, and be more aware
of the, the customer sentiment. You can't, you can't increase
prices by double digits now that you could do maybe 1-2 years
ago. You still have to increase
prices to main margins, but they're going to be much more
thoughtful and you need to support them in solid data.
So again, the intelligent pricing solution that gives you
robust data to make good decisions.
And, and then of course, you have to factor in what's going
on in your particular industry and market in the region.
And so, yeah, the the challenge is very definitely price setting
in an environment where there's intense interest on the prices
that you set. That's good to know.
When you mention you have to kind of be in the know as far as
technology is concerned and just kind of be in the loop and just
aware of what the current market may be showing or what the, you
know, trends are at the moment to help you adjust.
Like you said before, you know you can probably make a make a
price adjustment by double digits, but now compared to
before where you that might not have been that feasible.
But you know what, when it comes to trends, what trends have you
kind of seen in response to, you know, the growing demand for
precision pricing? Yeah, Yeah.
I think, I think continuing that that last answer.
And so for pricing professionals, for people in
finance and marketing and sales, so knowing the environment,
they're taking a much closer look at their own pricing
systems and processes and trying to work out how they fit for per
person. So you know, when you look
inside your own business and you, you look at how much is
manual, how much is through our ERP or through our pricing
solution, what can we see in terms of margin visibility And
partly it's about the speed. So how quickly can you make a
change? And so if, if your suppliers are
changing their prices every week or every month, how quickly can
you change your price and your strategy to make sure you
maintain the, the, the margins? And so you know, to, to maintain
and grow profits, you've got to have both margin visibility and
execution speed. Without both, it's, it's really
hard to do that. And then, you know, beyond the
systems, businesses are looking at the pain points.
So, so where do they lose efficiency?
Where do they have to resort to manual prices?
What's going on? What's, what's the failure in
our system that means we've got to have a spreadsheet or a, some
sort of document that, that that does that in, in manually.
And what are the results of those on the bottom line?
So I think there's over the last 3-4 years, there's been
increased focus on the impact of pricing process on the bottom
line. And then once they know that,
and then it comes down to, OK, So what can we do to, to solve
those? And so I think there's been a
lot more awareness within organizations of potential
pricing technology to help solve those pain points, whether it's
a solution like ours that's very much around pricing execution
and rebate management, whether it's price optimization, whether
it's CPQ, lots of businesses are looking at solutions from
technology that can automate and deliver both intelligent and
precise pricing. Again, from that that PPS
survey, we know that 50% of businesses use spreadsheets
outside their ERP to manage pricing, which which we know
introduces errors. We know that 46% of businesses
say their pricing solution can't manage their rebate and pricing
needs and 36% say they've got inaccuracy in pricing.
And so we know that systems today aren't quite meeting the
needs. And I think we're seeing that
generally across the industry that more businesses are looking
for a bespoke pricing solution and not simply relying on their
ERP pricing, which as is often the case, ER, PS are fantastic.
They are necessary for, for running a business, but they're,
they're, they have lots of different horizontal solutions
that don't go very deep in functionality.
And I think businesses and customers are realizing now they
have to go a little bit deeper on pricing.
And then I guess the other thing is what, what it all means is
businesses are very aware of the macroeconomic environment.
They're looking for ways to improve, which is fantastic, and
they're looking for greater control.
Like in this environment, it's often hard to to retain control.
And I think having a intelligent, precise pricing
solution allows you to get more control over your business and
to make better decisions going forward that will hopefully
maintain and grow your profits. All good to know.
I do want to ask you one last question for for listeners, for
those who are interested in learning more about Flint Fox
and what you all stand for or maybe learning more about you in
particular, where can they go to, you know, retrieve some of
your resources or just to learn more about you guys?
Yeah, so definitely go to our website flintfox.com.
There you'll find a number of blogs and white papers and lots
of case studies. That's the best way to to find
out about our business. As I said, we we're clear in our
solution and what can offer. We know that we meet the needs
of certain types of businesses are having both buy side and
sell side means that we're fantastic the wholesale and
distributors, but we're also used by a range of industries.
And so, yeah, we've got particular spaces where we've
got lots of IP beverage distribution, food service, Med
device manufacturing and our team has hundreds of years of
experience between them. As I said, we've been around for
37 years. Our team are passionate about
pricing and pricing technology and we worked across many
different industries. And just as quick examples,
MAPI, which is a global building products manufacturer.
So we help them deliver on their complex pricing strategy.
Site one in the US is as a large landscape supply business, you
know they had a real challenge when Omni channel pricing,
getting all their stores, trade bars, e-commerce working
together. And so we solve their problems
for them. And then Coca-Cola in Africa
have some pretty complex sort of local and cross-border taxes
they have to deal with them. And again, our pricing solution
has lots of functionality that that's creates audit trails
around pricing and that's been really useful with government
agencies. And so if you go to our website,
you'll see those case studies and you'll see a whole bunch of
information through white papers and blogs that will help you
understand what we do. OK, sounds good.
Thank you so much. John Moss with Flintfox.
For those who are interested, you can visit flintfox.com.
You can also learn more about PPS as well by visiting Pricing
society.com and just to learn more about the different pricing
opportunities and pricing trends and topics that are happening in
today's market and in today's world.
Until next time you all have a good one.
Bye bye.