Sharing our successful implementation of automated dynamic pricing for sales quotes that reduced our quote generation cycle time from 4 hours to 15 minutes.
The Challenge:
Our sales team was manually calculating discounts for every quote based on customer segment, order volume, product mix, and competitive landscape. Account executives spent hours in spreadsheets determining pricing tiers, applying volume discounts, and getting manager approvals for anything over 15% discount. We were losing deals due to slow quote turnaround.
The Solution:
We built a hybrid SuiteFlow and SuiteScript automation that handles the entire pricing workflow from quote creation to approval. The system automatically applies discount logic based on predefined rules, integrates with our CRM for customer segmentation data, and uses custom SuiteScript calculations for complex scenarios like bundle pricing and competitive match pricing.
The workflow triggers when a sales quote is saved, evaluates customer tier from CRM opportunity data, calculates base discounts, applies volume multipliers, and routes for approval only when discounts exceed threshold rules. Standard quotes auto-approve and flow directly to the customer. Running on NS 2023.2 and processing about 200 quotes weekly now with minimal manual intervention.
Impressive results on the cycle time reduction. One challenge I’ve seen with automated pricing workflows is handling exceptions - like when a customer has a unique contract term or special negotiated pricing that doesn’t fit standard rules. How does your workflow handle edge cases without forcing everything through the automated path?
We’re using NetSuite CRM so it’s native integration via saved searches and custom fields. For external CRM like Salesforce, you’d need to sync customer segment data to a custom field on the NetSuite customer record, probably via scheduled integration. The workflow would then read that synced field instead of live CRM data. Adds a bit of latency but keeps the pricing logic in NetSuite.
This sounds exactly like what we need! Can you share more details about how you structured the discount rules? Are they maintained in custom records or hardcoded in scripts? We have similar requirements but worried about keeping rules flexible enough for our pricing team to adjust without developer involvement every time.
What’s your approach for the competitive match pricing? That seems like it would require external data sources or manual input. Do sales reps enter competitor pricing, or do you have some kind of market data feed?
How did you handle the CRM integration for segmentation? Are you using saved searches to pull opportunity data, or did you build a real-time API integration? We’re on Salesforce and wondering if this pattern would work for cross-system pricing logic.
Great question. We use custom records for all pricing rules - one custom record type for customer tier definitions (fields like tier name, min revenue, max revenue, base discount %), and another for product category multipliers. This way our pricing analysts can modify rules through standard NetSuite forms without touching code. The SuiteScript just reads these custom records and applies the logic. Makes it very maintainable.