As for the financial results, Acuity's operating profit margin has grown from 7.4 percent to more than 12 percent over the last two years, according to its quarterly reports. "A significant contributor has been our ability to price appropriately," Quinn says.
Acuity is now using Zilliant's Deal Manager software to integrate this analysis with its sales quotation system — which will give the salespeople the most up to date information and help the company optimize its margin on the spot for entire customer bundles, say lighting products for an entire building and a parking lot, Quinn says.
It's important to note, Quinn says, that the push to acquire pricing optimization software at Acuity came from the business side. Business side colleagues approached IT to help find a tool. Quinn says he doesn't think it would work for IT to drive a price optimization effort.
Gartner's DeSisto agrees: Most of the successful deployments he's seen have started with a desire from the business side. "Pricing's a very sensitive thing," DeSisto says. "It can't be driven out of the CIOs's side. You do it wrong, it's going to really impact your business."
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