For many industries, pricing can be a key competitive advantage - for example, in retail or e-commerce, having a lower price than a competitor can be crucial.
But it’s not always about being cheaper than a competitor, it’s about ensuring customers know what they’re getting for the cost of the product or service.
Even if your goal isn’t to undercut a competitor on price, knowing the price that they’re selling a product or service for can help lead sales conversations and ensure that you’re up to date with key pricing information. The last thing you want in sales is to be told that the competitor has slashed their prices and you had no idea.
With this in mind, you might need to find a way of tracking competitor prices - it might even be something you already do manually. This of course is time consuming and can be a frustrating process.
Will it automate?
The key question: can you automate the tracking of competitive price monitoring?
Yes - Robotic Process Automation (RPA) allows you to automatically observe your competition’s product and pricing moves in real-time.
Intelligent software robots can automatically collect, process and deliver competitive product and pricing intelligence from the web. This can be set-up to run on demand or every so often depending on your preference.
By obtaining this real-time pricing information, it’s possible to take data-driven actions and give your company a competitive edge. This might include decreasing prices inline with competitors or it might be arming your sales team with the knowledge they need to have meaningful conversations with prospects.
Further still, it might be that you're already selling at a cheaper cost than your competitors and you want to automatically run price checks to stay at a lower price.
The great thing about being able to automate this process is that it allows your team to concentrate on more important business processes and tasks, such as the selling itself, rather than spending valuable time keeping on top of competitive prices.