Book a demo Contact

At a glance

The client
A renowned UK-based tea and coffee company
The objective
A UK tea & coffee supplier worked with Acumen to create a streamlined, defensible, and profitable pricing and trade term structure. This included introducing a clear and consistent structure across channels, improving control over promotional investments, and establishing a robust list price and trade terms model to drive profitable growth.

Challenges

  1. Complex legacy pricing structures and imbalances in cross channel pricing
  2. Net Price agreements with limited opportunity to influence customer behaviour
  3. Margins were overly generous to some customers
  4. Multiple investment structures that are hard to manage

Solution

Acumen had 5 key deliverables for this project:
1. Establish fact base by capturing the latest pricing and terms data in Acumen Radar
2. Define a new list price and customer trade terms model
3. Review the recommended retail prices for in-scope products
4. Full economic assessment of the new structure through a detailed ‘scale of change’ analysis​
5. Implementation planning & selling story development to support a successful execution with customers​​

Client journey

  • Initial Planning: Resource setup, stakeholder interviews, and data collection
  • Design Phase: Workshops to establish criteria and trade terms structure
  • Implementation Planning: Involving customer sell-in strategies, negotiation training, and data scale adjustments
  • Execution and Go-Live: Customer deployment began in October, with the full launch set for March 2025

Project outcomes

  • Checkmark
    Defensible pricing between channels and customers
  • Checkmark
    Greater clarity and control of promotional investments and activity plans
  • Checkmark
    A clear and consistent pricing and trade terms model across all channels
  • Checkmark
    A terms structure that is suitable for future brand acquisitions (if required)
  • Checkmark
    Excellent feedback, with a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 10/10
  • Checkmark
    A more rigorous pricing and terms governance process (internal)

Acumen also developed new list prices, which offered several benefits when creating a new trade terms model

A consistent starting point for making investment decisions for each customer
Having a robust methodology for pricing new products
A consistent basis for cross channel pricing
A consistent calculation base for measuring investment levels
Defensibility and transparency which builds customer trust