Data science is an ever-evolving field, and its roles are also changing. As businesses increasingly rely on data to inform their decisions, there is a growing need for people with both the technical skills and domain/industry expertise to drive measurable value.

Analytical fire drills and knee-jerk pricing actions are becoming increasingly common in the consumer goods industry. With intense competition and ever-changing customer needs, companies must be agile enough to rapidly adjust their strategies to remain competitive and deliver relative value to their consumers.

By creating a dynamic integrated performance deep dive, CPGs can identify specific areas of improvement to maximize efficiency while delivering high-quality products at competitive prices — all of which will help them stay ahead of the competition in today's market.

In the below quick guide, we'll explore the steps needed to build a reproducible and highly actionable (and impactful) performance deep dive that can help CPGs address Revenue performance shortfalls.

It's no secret that many retailers and distributors are struggling with suboptimal prices, leading to substantial profit losses or missed revenues.

But by developing a solid price-testing playbook, retailers and distributors can maximize profits without sacrificing sales.

You don't need to spend 12-18 months deploying an enterprise price optimization solution or waste a ton of CAPEX. You can start building your own semi-automated price-testing solution today at a fraction of the development times and costs.

If you're a Pricing or Finance executive looking for a way to improve your company's bottom line, read this 5-minute guide on how to build a sustainable Price Testing playbook.

A brief guide for Manufacturers and Distributors to boost profits by 5-10% using simple, effective pricing and analytics techniques.

If you're a manufacturer or distributor, you know that discounting is vital to the success of your sales force. But are you discounting enough? Are you discounting too much?

This article will discuss the importance of discounting in B2B settings and how to determine the right discounts for your customers and products. We'll also discuss when to use each type of discount and offer tips for increasing Net Revenue and Gross Profit with analytics and surgical discounting.

Below are my top Revenue Growth Analytics quick wins that Distributors should implement (or right-size) to boost gross profits $ by 5-20% and increase liquidity.

At its very basic level, industry margin pools help you understand what share of the total profits goes to each supply chain participant, from Manufacturer, Distributor, to Retailer.

If you are a ~$1B Manufacturer or Distributor that spends ~ 15% of its Gross Revenues on Promotions & Rebates, every 50bps improvement in your Promo ROIs will drive +$0.75MM to your EBITDA. Let me describe the steps to take to enable these capabilities for your organization.

Did you know that most promotional investments by Manufacturers are a negative ROI investment, and each 1% improvement in Promo ROI can be a massive benefit to your Operating Profit?

Many mid-market manufacturing CFOs, CMOs, Pricing, and Sales executives are struggling with Promotional spending outpacing Profit growth, leading to unnecessary profit erosion.

Fortunately, most companies have the proper data assets to build sophisticated and actionable Promotion Effectiveness & Optimization solutions in-house, using methods and technologies they are already familiar with.

If you've always wanted to know how to build robust Pricing & Promotion Analytics capabilities organically and quickly (in ~ 4 months), please read this detailed Case Study that walks you through the critical steps with concrete examples.

Part 1: Using Gross Margin % vs. Net Sales Customer Matrix to segment customers into actionable Sales & Pricing performance clusters.

Have you ever offered a deep Price Discount in December in hopes of accelerating 4Q and YE target achievement, only to drive Unit Sales but suffer huge Gross Profit losses?

If you haven't tried #bayesian analysis to attack common business problems, I highly encourage you to explore it.

Companies' data science curve often starts with linear regression before a giant leap to ML within weeks or months (ensemble models, even some deep learning).

In pragmatic terms, the power of Bayesian modeling comes from being able to assign probability intervals to predictions.

Commercial Analytics, aimed at improving Gross Profits and Sales Productivity, doesn't have to be complex to drive the proper outcomes with Pricing and Sales teams.

𝐒𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬 & 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐑𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 is another simple yet effective Revenue Analytics technique to steer Sales behavior in the right direction and drive incremental Net Sales (and Gross Profits).

Most mid-market companies are still stuck with basic reports and ad-hoc Pricing & Profitability analyses that take several weeks, offer little actionable insights, and are not reproducible. There is also a widespread misconception that it takes heavy upfront investment (both time and money) to build Margin Analytics & Optimization platforms that can truly transform an organization's Pricing discipline and customer & product analytics rigor.

Regardless of your company's growth stage, it is paramount that you have an easy-to-use and actionable Margin Analytics platform that provides rapid descriptive (what happened), diagnostic (what caused it), and predictive (what will be the impact) analytics capabilities.

I often see Manufacturers and Wholesalers making the mistake of trying to revolutionize entrenched Customer habits vs. creating easy-to-use, pragmatic analytics solutions that Customers understand and care about.

This week, we'll dive into another foundational but influential Margin Analytics technique, the Gross Profit Growth Decomposition using raw Transactional Data.

Commercial Analytics in B2B environments is a team sport: you need to win the trust and credibility of the Sales Team to accelerate the impact of analytics and drive sustainable Pricing and Data ROI for your company.

Read this brief opinion piece on why listening to and collaborating with your Sales teams is not optional - it's essential.

This week, I wanted to show you another simple yet effective revenue analytics technique to steer sales behavior in the right direction and drive Gross Profits.

Why is it essential to understand the business impact of Price changes and Promotional investments, and what are the analytical approaches to estimating Price elasticities?

With continued data proliferation and the democratization of popular Machine Learning methods among the data analyst community, knowing your Price and Promotional elasticities at the Customer-Product level is fundamental to Finance, Sales, and Revenue management.

Below is a quick guide summarizing a previous Revology Analytics article that demonstrates why healthy Customer Data is crucial to enabling powerful Sales Growth Analytics for companies. It also highlights steps you can take today to translate your CRM data into Revenue & Margin Growth.