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Most pricing edits a sales rep makes are reactive, and most of them go one direction: Down. A customer pushes back, an item gets competitive, a deal needs saving, and the price drops to keep the business. What almost never happens is the move in the other direction: catching the accounts where there's real room to hold or raise margin, and acting on it before the week gets away from you.

That gap is what we walked through in our first public look at Pepper's new Price Management product and Pricing Agent. Andrew Linville, PM for price management joined Nick Ziech-Lopez to walk through the new product. Here’s what we covered:

Why Pricing Got Harder, Not Easier

The tools most distributors have today haven't kept up with the speed at which customers now order. In the webinar, we ran a quick poll on how much time reps spend each week getting margin right, and the answers were all over the map with some reps spending almost none, some spending more than five hours a week, and a big group in the middle. Either way, the underlying problem is the same, and it shows up as three consistent pain points:

"Tell me where to focus." A rep has more accounts and more items per account than anyone can hold in their head. There's no single place to see where the biggest margin opportunity actually lives across a whole territory.

"Put the information in one place." Once a rep knows what to look at, the data that should inform a price is usually scattered across a few systems. Piecing it together takes time, so most of the time, it doesn't happen.

"Let me execute fast." A single cost change might touch 20 customers. Searching for each one, finding the item, making the edit, and moving to the next is slow, repetitive work that eats the time it was supposed to save.

For sales leaders, those rep-level frictions roll up into a familiar set of headaches: wide performance variation between reps, new hires who ramp slowly because they've never priced out on the street, and almost no way to audit what's happening day to day. As Andrew put it, the goal is to make your best reps better and bring everyone else up to that bar.

Price Management

Price Management lives in Pepper's new sales rep portal view, available on web and tablet, with an entry point right from the customer-facing app reps already use.

Cost Changes

This is the workhorse. It surfaces everything across a rep's portfolio that moved on cost over a configurable window (typically the last week), so reps can build a Friday-afternoon habit of getting ahead of the week to come. It sorts by largest negative gross profit impact by default, and every column is configurable: reps toggle data on and off and drag it into the order that fits how they work. Click into an item and you see every customer buying it, with six weeks of order bars, the last five invoices on hover, and a 12-week volume average for context.

The Peer Range

For each customer, Pepper looks at the margin range across that customer's peer set and shows where they land. A customer sitting at the low end of the range is a signal that there's headroom to move up; one at the top is a signal to ease off before you get caught speeding. How a peer set is defined is up to the customer, and Pepper can help build it where there's no existing concept to read from.

Bulk Editing

Reps can edit line by line, or select a group of related accounts and set a consistent price or margin across all of them at once. Built-in quick actions handle the small, high-frequency moves, like rounding a whole set of prices up to the nearest nine. 

None of it commits until the rep reviews the draft and hits publish; changes then save as overrides in Pepper and export back to the ERP, which stays the source of truth.

The Pricing Agent. 

This is where the work really comes off the rep's plate. The agent does the hunting, the first example we showed finds items being sold well below what a customer's peers are paying, synthesizes the relevant context into a recommendation, and surfaces it with the rationale attached. A rep clicks once to accept, twice to reject, again to reset, or edits the value to override.

 Accepted and overridden changes go live on publish while rejected ones drop off and untouched ones wait. The logic is customizable per distributor, so it can hunt for below-peer opportunities, react to cost changes, or hold price when a falling cost would otherwise drag margin down on a last-margin basis.

Impact Reporting

For managers and executives, a dashboard rolls up every margin and price change across the business (increases, decreases, gross profit impact) broken out by rep, customer, and week. 

It's the audit layer that's been missing: Who's adopting the tools and growing margin, who needs coaching, and drill all the way down to a single change and its full price-and-cost history.

How to Get It

Price Management is live in the US, Canada, and Australia. Get in touch with us to find out more!