Pricing Improvement Program · PE-Owned Welding Manufacturer

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London, UK · Private Equity Portfolio · Industrial Manufacturing

Pricing Improvement Program

Private Equity-Owned Welding Supply Manufacturer

+2–3pp

Gross margin per market, sustained after engagement close

12 mo

Programme length, 4 rollout waves

Up to 35%

Same-product price variation eliminated

100%

Sales team adoption at programme close

Situation

Three years of transaction data showed the same product being sold to comparable customers at prices varying by up to thirty-five percent. The variation was structural, consistent across geographies, and entirely the result of autonomous rep decisions made without any shared pricing framework.

Approach

Built rep-level price opportunity capture sheets. Set rep-specific improvement targets. Wave-based rollout with individual coaching. Power BI impact tracking dashboard. Revised distribution price book.

Impact

2 to 3 percentage point gross margin improvement sustained after engagement close. Sales teams began using the tool voluntarily in client meetings. Resistant markets became the strongest advocates.

Results visualised

Gross margin recovery across four engagement waves

Each wave represents approximately three months of value capture, starting with highest-alignment markets and using early results to bring resistant markets along.

Read the complete case study

Full methodology, results visualisation, Power BI dashboard breakdown, and value capture learnings from all four deployment waves.

Obstacles we overcame

Raw material costs had risen sharply but prices had not kept pace, with high variation in profitability across comparable accounts and cost leakages from freight, returns, and payment terms invisible in reported margins.

The recoverable opportunity was larger than the original investment thesis assumed. But recovering it required changing how the entire sales organisation thought about pricing, not just correcting a spreadsheet.

Initial group workshops met significant resistance in two markets. We shifted to individual coaching sessions working through each rep's own account data. Personal data proved far harder to dismiss than aggregate patterns. The wave-based rollout let early adopter markets serve as proof of concept for resistant ones.

Custom Tooling Built

Tools that stayed in use after we left

Rep-level price opportunity capture sheets, personalised per sales territory
Power BI gross margin tracking dashboard with wave-by-wave progress view
Revised distribution price book with floor pricing and discount logic

AI-Ready Use Cases

How AI applies to this type of engagement

AI-assisted transaction clustering can identify structural discount patterns across years of data in days rather than weeks of manual analysis
Automated flagging of accounts with the highest recoverable margin surfaces the 20% of accounts driving 80% of the opportunity
Rep-specific insight packs can be built at scale, one per territory, without adding analyst headcount

Other PE commercial transformations

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€3.9m pricing opportunity captured · 14 regional teams

Consumer Healthcare · Margin

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+5–7pp gross margin recovered, EU-wide rollout

Industrial Manufacturing · Segmentation

Agent Segmentation · Global Industrial Casting Manufacturer

€7m additional sales, first 6 months · 50+ markets

Facing a pricing challenge in a portfolio company?

We have delivered pricing transformations across manufacturing, distribution, and B2B services.
References available on request.