Business Outcomes
13.4%
higher realized gross margins among high-adopter sales reps
~100
less manual quotes per person, per day
This high-tech company is one of the worlds leading manufacturers and is constantly transforming its own internal processes, including the best way to achieve pricing effectiveness, while providing faster, superior service to customers.
The pricing complexities at this manufacturing company are mind-boggling:
- A huge portfolio of over 12 million SKUs
- Selling in 145 countries
- Managing 20 million sales records
Each member of the pricing team was manually reviewing about 100 quotes a day which would require a quick decision to be made, was a manual process, and was taking up large portions of the team’s day. With 25% of the high-tech market share, the stakes are high, and the company could no longer afford to get tied down with a slow, cumbersome pricing process or be so far off on target pricing and discounting that they risk margin decline and revenue leakage.
However, pricing spreadsheets made it impossible to keep up with an ever-changing market. They were facing:
- Error-prone pricing since pricing decisions were based on limited data, rushed analysis, and rules of thumb, which meant they were potentially losing money.
- Long price cycles due to manual intervention slowed quote turnaround and created bottlenecks.
- Lack of insight into overall pricing performance, making it difficult to learn from their data to understand things like shifts in consumer behavior.
To become more strategic in their pricing operations, they needed a technology company with experience to:
- Provide transparency into pricing
- Deliver relevant AI-based pricing recommendations
- Speed up pricing responses to customers
- Improve price realization
We wanted to use the best technology to evolve our pricing and capture the full value of our products.
Pricing Leader
High-Tech Manufacturer
The Smart Price Optimization and Management solution feeds into the in-house quoting tool to support the go-to-market strategy for the commercial business unit. Pricing recommendations flow directly into the quoting tool, where sales reps enter quotes and negotiate with large enterprise customers. Since reps are focused on margin-based deals, the pricing recommendations help them negotiate winning deals that are within targeted prices.
This tiered low-touch system streamlines the approval process. The solution feeds into Microsoft Dynamics (CRM) where they can surface price recommendations to customers with speed, accuracy, and transparency. This streamlined process enables the high-tech manufacturer to get quotes out to customers quicker, improve their pricing strategies, and increasing margin.
How Conga solved the pricing challenges:
- Intelligent pricing—Conga provides recommendations based on massive market-derived data and deep analytics, specific to each transaction.
- Faster negotiations—A streamlined price management tool returns quick pricing recommendations, which speeds decisions and reduces manual intervention and approvals.
- A holistic view of pricing—Centralized pricing analytics engine supports pricing strategies and execution.
- Supports multiple GTM motions—The solution is highly customizable and caters to all the ways the customer goes to market.
Since implementing Conga [pricing] we have seen a significant increase in pricing quotations closer to target levels, which has contributed to overall gross margin improvement in our business.
Vice President of Finance, North America
High-Tech Manufacturer
- + 7.4% Gross margin difference where Conga pricing recommendations are used vs. not used.
- +13.4% Realized gross margin difference between salespeople who are high adopters of Conga and low adopters.
- 3% annualized margin uplift which is equivalent to about $25 M in margin uplift.
FAQs
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What is AI-powered pricing, and how does it work for high-tech manufacturers?
AI-powered pricing uses machine learning and large-scale transaction data to generate pricing recommendations tailored to each deal — rather than relying on rules of thumb, gut instinct, or static spreadsheets. For this manufacturer, Conga's Price Optimization and Management solution ingests data from 20 million sales records across 145 countries and 12 million SKUs, then feeds real-time, transaction-specific recommendations directly into the sales rep's quoting tool. Reps see a target price and can negotiate with confidence, knowing their quote is grounded in data rather than a manual estimate.
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How does dynamic pricing help manufacturers improve gross margins?
Gross margin leakage typically happens when reps price based on limited information — discounting too aggressively, missing upsell opportunities, or simply not knowing what the market will bear for a given product and customer. Dynamic pricing solves this by continuously analyzing market signals, customer behavior, and deal-level data to surface the right price at the right time. For this company, deals that used Conga pricing recommendations produced 7.4% higher gross margins than deals where recommendations were ignored — a direct, measurable link between AI-guided pricing and profitability.
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How does Conga Price Optimization integrate with Microsoft Dynamics CRM?
Conga feeds pricing recommendations directly into Microsoft Dynamics, so sales reps receive accurate, margin-targeted price guidance without leaving their existing workflow. When a rep enters a quote, the system returns a recommendation instantly — eliminating the bottleneck of manual pricing review and approval that had previously slowed the process for this manufacturer's team. The tight CRM integration also means that pricing analytics and performance data are captured in a centralized engine, giving leadership a holistic view of pricing execution across all deals and geographies.
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Can one pricing platform handle the complexity of 12 million SKUs across 145 countries?
That was the core challenge for this manufacturer, and it's precisely what makes enterprise-grade price optimization software different from a spreadsheet or a homegrown tool. Conga's solution is built to support highly customizable, multi-market go-to-market motions — handling everything from direct enterprise sales to channel and partner-driven models. Pricing recommendations are transaction-specific, meaning the system accounts for the customer, the product, the geography, and the competitive context before surfacing a number. At 12 million SKUs and 20 million sales records, that level of granularity simply isn't possible without AI.
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What's the business case for improving sales rep adoption of AI pricing tools?
The data from this customer makes the case clearly: high adopters of Conga pricing recommendations achieved 13.4% higher realized gross margins than low adopters. That gap represents real revenue left on the table when reps override or ignore AI guidance. Building adoption isn't just a change management exercise — it's a direct margin lever. The most effective path is making the recommendations easy to access, fast to act on, and visibly accurate so reps develop trust in the system. Streamlining the approval process and surfacing pricing guidance inside the tools reps already use, like Microsoft Dynamics, is how this company drove the adoption that drove the results.
