How to Build a Custom Sales Pricing Tool That Works for Your Business

How you price your products or services, combined with the ease of the purchasing experience, can make or break your business success.

A well-built pricing model can drive revenue, increase customer satisfaction, and provide a competitive edge. However, developing a dynamic pricing tool that works for your specific business needs can be a complex and resource-intensive task. Building automation into the process, whether for data collection, real-time pricing adjustments, or customer segmentation, can simplify this task and improve accuracy.

Whether you’re building a pricing engine from scratch or leveraging existing tools, it’s important to have a clear plan in place.

In this guide, we’ll explore the key components of a successful pricing model, the technical considerations for building one, and how you can leverage tools like FormAssembly to simplify the process.

1. Define Your Pricing Strategy

Before you even begin building your tool, you need to decide on the pricing strategy you want to implement. This is crucial because your pricing strategy will influence the features and functionality of your pricing engine.

Common pricing strategies include:

  • Cost-Plus Pricing: Set a price by adding a fixed margin to the cost of goods sold.
    Example: A retailer buys a shirt for $10 and adds a 50% markup, selling it for $15.
  • Value-Based Pricing: Price based on the perceived value to the customer, rather than cost.
    Example: A luxury brand charges $300 for a handbag because customers value the exclusivity and quality, despite the cost being lower.
  • Competitive Pricing: Price in line with competitors to stay competitive in the market.
    Example: A fast-food chain charges $5 for a burger because that’s the average price in their local market.
  • Dynamic Pricing: Adjust prices in real-time based on factors like demand or customer behavior.
    Example: An airline increases ticket prices as the flight date approaches, based on rising demand.

2. Identify the Data Inputs

A dynamic pricing model relies on various data inputs to adjust prices in real-time. These inputs typically include:

  • Historical Purchase Data: Past purchases show patterns in demand, helping you forecast what products or services will be popular, and enabling you to adjust prices accordingly for future customers.
  • Customer Segmentation: By analyzing customer profiles—such as their location, browsing behavior, or purchase history—you can price products in a way that speaks directly to their perceived value and willingness to pay.
  • Market Demand Trends: Understanding industry and market trends allows you to adjust prices based on demand fluctuations, helping you stay competitive whether prices are rising or falling.
  • Inventory Levels: By tying prices to stock levels, you can encourage customers to buy surplus items by offering discounts or raising prices when you’re running low to capitalize on scarcity.
  • Logistical Costs: Account for shipping, handling, and regional variations in delivery costs to fine-tune your pricing and ensure profitability, especially when fulfilling large or complex orders.

Using a form builder like FormAssembly can be extremely helpful for gathering these data inputs efficiently. Forms can collect customer demographics and integrate with existing systems like Salesforce to provide real-time insights.https://www.formassembly.com/product/how-it-works/

3. Choosing the Right Algorithm

The heart of any pricing engine is the algorithm that determines how prices change. Several approaches can be used:

  • Rule-Based Pricing: This strategy applies simple “if-then” logic to adjust pricing based on predefined conditions. For example, offer discounts when a donor or student registers for multiple events or classes.
    Maybe you are offering a 10% discount on event tickets for every 2 purchased, or a free ticket for every 5. Rule-based pricing can implement these live changes at checkout.
  • Machine Learning Models: These models use historical data to predict patterns in donor or student behavior, campaign success, and engagement, allowing for smarter pricing decisions or donation tiers.
    For example, a university might analyze past enrollment trends to forecast demand for specific courses and adjust tuition rates and class sizes (inventory) accordingly, optimizing both student capacity and revenue generation.
  • Dynamic Pricing: By utilizing real-time data and customer data you can adjust pricing appropriately, This ensures pricing is always optimized to drive conversions or revenue.
    Here’s one way this could be applied. A nonprofit adjusts event ticket prices in real-time based on registration trends, recognizing and offering discounts to repeat donors.

4. Integrations and Automation

To truly maximize the value of your pricing engine, it must integrate smoothly with the rest of your tech stack. We’re talking about seamless connections with CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, inventory management tools, and payment processors. Why? Because when your pricing engine works in sync with these systems, you can:

  • Adjust prices easily based on what’s happening with your customers and market trends, ensuring you’re always competitive
  • Keep all your systems up-to-date with accurate pricing data so there are no discrepancies or missed opportunities
  • Measure the success of your pricing strategies and make data-driven adjustments to continuously improve performance and profitability

This level of integration across your tech stack empowers your pricing engine to be smarter, more efficient, and more responsive to what’s happening across your business.

FormAssembly makes it easy to integrate with popular platforms like Salesforce and PayPal, giving your pricing engine access to real-time data from these systems. With FormAssembly’s webhooks, you can connect any application in your tech stack, ensuring seamless data flow across your entire infrastructure. This enables your pricing engine to trigger workflows—whether it’s sending personalized offers, or initiating follow-up actions—ensuring you’re always one step ahead.

5. Build vs. Buy: Custom vs. Off-the-Shelf Solutions

When developing a pricing engine, businesses often face the decision of whether to build a custom solution or purchase an off-the-shelf tool. Check out our blog for a more detailed breakdown of this common dilemma. Both options have pros and cons:

  • Custom Build: Offers flexibility but requires significant resources and ongoing maintenance. You can tailor the system to your exact needs but at a higher cost and complexity.
  • Off-the-Shelf Solutions: These are faster to deploy and usually more affordable (at least initially) but may have limitations in terms of customization and scalability.

The right decision depends on your business needs, budget, and resources. If you decide to go the custom route, integrating form builders like FormAssembly can simplify the process of data collection, reducing the need for extensive manual input and providing a flexible interface for managing pricing inputs.

6. Challenges to Consider

While building a pricing engine, there are several challenges to keep in mind:

  • Engineering Overhead: Custom solutions require continuous development and maintenance, which can stretch your resources.
  • Change Management: As your pricing model evolves, internal alignment on pricing strategies and automation becomes crucial.
  • Vendor Lock-In vs. Flexibility: Off-the-shelf solutions may lock you into specific platforms, limiting flexibility in the long term.

Using FormAssembly can help address some of these challenges by streamlining data collection, automating workflows, and reducing the amount of engineering time needed to manage complex data sets.

7. How to Build a Dynamic Pricing Model with a Form Builder like FormAssembly

While building a custom pricing engine involves significant technical infrastructure, using a form builder like FormAssembly can simplify the process by collecting the right data, integrating seamlessly with your existing systems, and empowering your team to quickly adjust pricing strategies without heavy reliance on technical resources. Here’s how you can leverage FormAssembly to support the development of your dynamic pricing model:

1. Data Collection & Customization

FormAssembly allows you to create highly customizable forms for collecting data on:

  • Customer Demographics: Easily gather information about your customers through personalized fields.
  • Behavioral Data: Use web forms to track customer interests, preferences, and interactions with your website.
  • Market Trends: Build forms to collect market research data through surveys and feedback forms to stay aware of changing trends.

With FormAssembly’s drag-and-drop interface, you can quickly design forms and reusable templates that integrate with your CRM and marketing automation systems, centralizing your data collection process and eliminating the need for shuffling between multiple platforms.

2. Automated Workflows for Pricing Adjustments

FormAssembly integrates smoothly with your pricing engines and CRM systems via powerful integrations. This allows your business to automate pricing adjustments in real time based on:

  • Customer Segmentation: Automatically apply different pricing options based on the customer data submitted via forms ex: plan type, business size, requirements.
  • Behavioral Data: Create triggers with conditional processing that adjust pricing in response to certain customer actions or attributes entered through your forms.
  • Inventory Levels: Set up your forms for specific inventory numbers based on real-time conditions.

Check out this case study to see how a small knitwear company automated inventory data across 17 locations using FormAssembly.

3. Efficient Data Flow & API Integration

FormAssembly’s advanced API integration capabilities allow for seamless, secure data transfer between your forms and your pricing engines, CRM, and other backend systems.

Real-Time Data Sync with Salesforce: When a customer submits a form, the data is instantly synced with Salesforce, thanks to our bidirectional connector. Whether you’re working with standard or custom fields, this seamless integration ensures your data is always up-to-date across both platforms. If you want to build your own connection to FormAssembly, get more information here.

4. Analytics and Reporting

FormAssembly’s robust reporting and analytics features can help you track how effective your dynamic pricing model is by collecting data on form submissions, user behavior, and pricing performance. By analyzing this data, you can:

  • Track conversion rates and adjust pricing strategies as needed.
  • Fine-tune the user experience by identifying pain points in the pricing process.
  • Leverage insights to continually improve your pricing strategies.

Conclusion

Creating an effective pricing model demands thoughtful planning, deep data analysis, and the right tools to make it all come together. By leveraging a powerful form builder like FormAssembly, you can simplify data collection, automate processes, and reduce engineering overhead, all while streamlining your workflows.

Ready to respond to your customers’ needs with speed and accuracy, and drive better results for your business?

Schedule a 1:1 demo, and bring your questions and your use case.

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