SKYSHEEP CASE STUDY | 2025
UNDERSTANDING THE LANDSCAPE:
CUSTOMER VISION AND GOALS
A broadline distributor located in the Southern US faced a critical challenge: declining margin rates and revenue. This was primarily driven by a radical shift in their customer base from large contracts to a more fragmented mix of smaller operators. This new landscape demanded increased profitability, customer expansion and aggressive efforts to protect at-risk accounts from churn. Heightened pricing transparency due to increased online ordering by their customers further complicated matters, underscoring the urgent need for data-driven pricing. Moreover, high sales team turnover led to inconsistent pricing knowledge and processes.
The financial targets were clear: drive $1.2 million in margin improvement, automate sales insights, reduce manual pricing workload, identify and eliminate margin leakage, seize volume growth opportunities, and ultimately increase EBITDA in the Fiscal year.
OPERATIONAL AND MARKET CHALLENGES
Achieving these goals presented significant hurdles. The project was unbudgeted, necessitating a rapid return on investment.
Operationally, their existing pricing process was manual and inefficient. Sales reps manually managed pricing for 50-100 accounts each, spending over five hours weekly on key accounts while neglecting others. Less experienced reps lacked price guidance, and aligning pricing across chains or groups required tedious manual effort. Manual price adjustments for promotions or inventory closeouts, often via ad-hoc emails, further burdened both reps and managers.
Margin management and price execution were equally challenging. Weekly cost fluctuations in key categories like protein and dairy demanded more frequent pricing adjustments. Their cost-plus pricing method failed to account for customer behavior, price tolerance, or market trends. Critical data was fragmented across disparate sources, making analysis and large-scale price changes nearly impossible, especially across chains.
The solution also had to navigate specific constraints:
- Integration with an aging ERP system was essential.
- Unlimited customer self-shopping required a market-aligned price for 15 million unique item/customer combinations weekly.
- Reps needed to maintain override capabilities for special agreements.
- Prices had to dynamically adjust with cost changes (unless contracted).
- Finally, the project demanded rapid delivery – less than three months for an ROI within six months – with a phased rollout to minimize risk and without introducing reps to an entirely new system.
INTRODUCING priceflo™: INTELLIGENT PRICE OPTIMIZATION FOR FOODSERVICE
priceflo™ is a purpose-built price optimization platform that transforms how foodservice distributors manage pricing and drive profitability. Recognizing industry complexities, our AI-driven solution quickly delivers sustainable financial growth, expands customer volume, improves retention, and boosts sales team confidence.
The platform's foodservice-specific data model, pre-configured with over 50 variables, significantly accelerates deployment. This provides your sales team with targeted, behavioral-based price guidance, enhancing their effectiveness.
priceflo™ dynamically adapts to the volatility inherent in the Foodservice industry, automating data-driven price updates based on demand and market conditions. It also prioritizes customer retention by adjusting prices based on sales behavior and market trends, reducing volatility. Simultaneously, it unlocks revenue expansion by identifying new product opportunities and automating strategic pricing to win these new products in competitive accounts.
Ultimately, our software empowers foodservice distributors to shift from manual, reactive pricing to a proactive, data-driven strategy that grows margins and strengthens customer relationships.
SWIFT IMPLEMENTATION, POWERFUL RESULTS
Our approach focused on a rapid, yet meticulous, delivery process to ensure immediate value and sustained success for the client.
SOLUTION PROCESS: PRECISION AND PACE
Our engagement kicked off with a 4-week pricing analysis and data validation project. This foundational work delivered a data-driven projected financial impact, which was jointly presented to the Executive Leadership Team and Board, ensuring accountability for the project's ambitious goals. This initial phase also provided a recommended phasing strategy for customer groups and categories, highlighted key process improvement opportunities through automation (like promotional pricing and chain consistency), and outlined a detailed integration plan with their existing ERP.
The Design and Configuration phase then translated these insights into a powerful solution:
- A detailed design was documented, defining the goals, parameters, and constraints for the pricing output.
- A new process was engineered to free up sales reps and managers, allowing them to spend more time with customers.
- We automated all core input feeds, ensuring the system always had the most current data.
- The system was configured to provide an optimized, customer and product-specific price for every item, dynamically adjusting for costs and constraints.
- Automated, scheduled updates flowed directly into the transactional system, while flexible exports allowed reps to maintain crucial overrides for volatile commodities when necessary.
ENABLEMENT AND PHASED DELIVERY: SMOOTH TRANSITION; MAXIMIZED ADOPTION
A key to success was thorough Enablement. We prepared reps for the changes, explaining not just what would be different, but why they should trust the new data-driven recommendations.
Our phased delivery minimized risk and ensured high adoption:
- We started with live prices for a subset of reps and categories to meticulously validate the integration. This allowed us to confirm price acceptance, rep adoption, margin enhancement, and minimal account disruption before scaling up.
- The large-scale rollout was then completed with remarkable speed in just two months, bringing the total project duration to five months. This rapid expansion was efficiently phased over a nine-week period, ensuring a smooth transition for all stakeholders.
TRANSFORMATIVE IMPACT: DRIVING GROWTH AND EFFICIENCY
The implementation of priceflo™ delivered immediate and measurable benefits, fundamentally reshaping the client's pricing strategy and market position. Our solution not only achieved ambitious financial targets but also empowered the sales team, enhanced operational efficiency, and solidified the client's competitive advantage.
QUANTIFIABLE SUCCESS
priceflo™ empowered the client with data-driven strategic decision-making, fostered a more agile market approach, and secured a lasting competitive advantage.
Significant Margin & Revenue Growth
The customer saw over 100 basis points in margin improvement and a 50% reduction in customer churn. They exceeded their one-year margin dollar growth target in just nine months, alongside a 400% surge in new item sales in existing accounts due to improved market alignment.
Reduced Total Cost of Ownership
Implemented in just three months, the project immediately freed up sales reps from managing complex pricing tasks and required 0 new FTEs to support the process.
Boosted Sales Efficiency
By reducing the time spent on pricing by 70%, sales representatives successfully reallocated a substantial portion of their week to high-value customer interactions, driving deeper relationships and better outcomes.
Improved Pricing Alignment
The system's automated strategic pricing adjustments provided a data-driven approach to pricing, replacing manual efforts with a more precise and dynamic methodology.
Minimal Disruption & Seamless Integration
Reps experienced no change to their ERP, simply seeing a "smarter" price in the existing interface. The system proved robust, requiring no changes even during the company's acquisition, earning it the label "the most solid system."
Unmatched Process Resiliency
The pricing process demonstrated uninterrupted reliability, operating with 100% stability and zero reported incidents or system failures.