How the right price delivers the best business outcomes

While the adage says that “people buy from people,” it’s clearly not the only influencer of buying decisions—we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of having market-relevant pricing.

As our recent case study explains, we’ve taken a closer look at pricing as part of our multi-year journey to digitally transform our business services. Like many organizations, our pricing approach had become outdated with people having to rely on ad hoc and scattered pricing tools pricing resources and manually re-enter information—it was time consuming and open to error.

Accenture wanted to find a company-wide pricing approach that would enable us to price in a way that’s more relevant today. We were looking for a quick and efficient means to bring us flexibility and adaptability to respond to changing market conditions.

The solution? Manage myPrice, our new pricing platform that offers differentiated pricing solutions based on group-specific attributes across services. Let me explain what I mean by that: rather than simply automating the pricing process, Manage myPrice reinforces and supports the differentiated pricing approaches taken by each different area of our business. It means we can focus on the value Accenture creates and delivers, rather than simply on reaching a profitability target.

More than a tech solution

Manage myPrice helps us deliver informed pricing, drawing on data from other sources. It builds a market-relevant starting price point based on third-party competitive intelligence, historical Accenture opportunities and market-centric targets.

Of course, such a new approach to pricing involved more than building a technology solution. We baked in the process of learning and behavior change, helping our people understand the “why” not just the “how” behind Manage myPrice.

In fact, we provided an entire suite of audience-specific training and ongoing support, including business stakeholders, and introduced a change network across the company.
Here’s some of the other elements that made a difference to the success of Manage myPrice:

• We got buy-in from the top: Senior-level support came from forums tailored specifically to stakeholders to get a better understanding of their individual pricing needs.
• We paced ourselves: We began development with a small segment of Accenture’s business that was mature and had a high level of leadership engagement before expanding to other parts of the business.
• We sought out commonalities: Manage myPrice syncs with other solutions in the broader “Manage my” suite of cloud-based, data-driven applications and tools. Information only needs to be entered once and offers a common source for granular pricing data.
• We put agility first: We followed a minimum viable product approach. To keep our delivery agile, we defined processes to enable quicker build and test turnaround and off-cycle deployments to production. We took advantage of end-user feedback to improve pricing profitability, productivity and predictability.

Having a sophisticated solution like Manage myPrice means our clients know that our services are competitively priced. At the same time, we’ve drastically reduced the time to price—from hours and days to minutes.

Read the case study to find out more about Manage myPrice and its role in our powerful suite of applications. As our teams work faster and more effectively, winning work more quickly and profitably, we can make sure the price is right, for our clients and the business.