Jul 16, 2021 Strategic Advantages of Market Averages

By Ryan Keintz

Dear mover,

What if your pricing team could be more strategic with their time, and leverage market average pricing on the lanes that probably will never come to be?

Your time has value. Every bid, every RFP response, costs time and money to you and your team. A typical RFP can include 20,000 data points. For key client lanes, there’s Mover2Mover, a precise pricing engine fueled by your partners’ live pricing. But what about pricing requests for moves that are unlikely to occur? Do you need to bother your origin and destination agents to get specific pricing? Or perhaps, is it more strategic to use PricePoint market averages as your secret weapon?

PricePoint’s market averages are created from the “wholesale” rates offered for movers providing services to other movers, as well as to recurring move buyers and corporate business. With over 1M active tariffs available, this information can benefit our moving partners.

It starts with good data. Calculating meaningful market averages is only possible through quality participants producing quality data. There has always been a natural filter for inclusion in our market, in that movers are invited by their network to file rates. It’s not an open door for any random mover to participate. This ‘velvet rope’ approach is the foundation of PricePoint, and ensures the data collected has integrity and value to our partners.

Maintaining data quality and integrity is equally important. We periodically review outliers to keep the data clean and constantly scrub data that has expired or is no longer relevant. In order to calculate a market average, we have a minimum threshold of five active tariffs. Where there are fewer than five tariffs, we do not create a market average for that location.

Now that we’ve covered what market averages are and how PricePoint creates them, let’s discuss how they can be applied and used.

As an analysis tool

PricePoint subscribers can compare their rates and their partners’ rates to evaluate pricing performance in the broader marketplace. Simply knowing a rate or being able to see three or four other rates using our Calculator solution doesn’t provide the full context. Our Market Average tool includes a much larger data set and brings different factors into consideration to help you and your partners be more strategic.

Benchmark your partnerships

You’ve got relationships and reciprocity agreements with great partners in your network. Are they being fair with you?

Prepare RFP responses and pricing requests

A quick check on PricePoint market averages will indicate whether your pricing is competitive in a legacy RFP bid environment. Market averages are dynamic and give you visibility to overall pricing outside of your supplier pool.

“While we know that price isn’t everything – trust is.”
— Edgar Arias, Director of Operations

Being confident that your pricing is competitive enables trust and transparency with your customers. For all those bid situations where you don’t have clear data, PricePoint market averages can help fill in the blanks – saving valuable time for you and your partners and allowing you to price with confidence.

Want to discuss how you can achieve better results utilizing market average data? We’d love to show you.

Let's Connect!

Happy pricing!
 

Ryan Keintz

Founder and President. After a career pricing for the largest international movers, Ryan observed that price manipulation was a more critical success factor than customer service or logistical expertise. He created PricePoint to fix a broken system.