Methodology in practice
Cases
The engagements behind the method — the decisions that proved the approach before it was built into the engines.
Decisiums is the operational form of work developed across more than two decades of B2B pricing and decision-analysis engagements with global pharmaceutical, healthcare, industrial and software clients. The cases below are the engagements behind each engine. Clients are anonymised; outcomes are as documented at the time of the work.
The analytical foundation — McFadden discrete-choice modelling, Nash equilibrium, Raiffa decision analysis — is described on the How it works page.
Major strategic commitments
When the question is which way to go.
Case
Global specialty ingredients manufacturer
A producer of a high-margin specialty ingredient faced patent expiry and the prospect of generic competition from producers in Mexico and India. The strategic question carried three live alternatives: defend through patent litigation, accept generic competition and compete on cost and service, or forward-integrate into the downstream end-use category — placing the company in direct competition with one of its largest customers. Each path carried different probability-weighted outcomes and different irreversibility profiles.
Decision-tree analysis mapped the choice across competitive responses, regulatory contingencies and customer reactions, with risk profiles developed for the leadership team and contingency plans built behind each major branch. A second tree modelled the counterparty's own decision, which is where the decisive finding came from: the counterparty's best response was the same whatever the producer did on price or range, and the one variable that moved it was its belief about the strength of the patent.
The work surfaced a path that was not the highest expected-value option in isolation but produced the most defensible outcome under adverse competitor moves — and identified the conditions under which a different branch should be activated.
Documented eight-figure value creation.
Sales bids and deals
When you have to put a number on the page.
Three engagements at the methodological core of the engine, demonstrating bilateral value, scenario discipline and gain-sharing structure — on a single deal, across a global tender book, and on a hybrid product-plus-software offering.
Case · methodology demonstration
Global industrial services group — energy performance bid
An industrial services group submitted a multi-year energy performance bid to a major North American big-box retailer covering several thousand stores. The economics were structured at the per-store unit level — a base service fee plus performance pricing tied to delivered energy savings — with approximately $4.5 million in customer savings per store from each percentage point of efficiency improvement, and a deal scale that rolled up to several billion across the store base.
Twelve scenarios were built across three dimensions: the shape of the share-of-savings curve, the discount on the base fee, and the savings range over which that discount was recovered. Each was evaluated as a probability-weighted bilateral calculation — the customer’s expected ROI against the seller’s expected incremental revenue.
The structure chosen followed from the arithmetic rather than the rhetoric: a substantial discount on the base fee in exchange for a defined share of incremental savings. Twelve scenarios mapped a trade-off space between roughly twenty-seven and forty-seven percent customer ROI; the structure chosen was the point on that surface where both parties were materially better off than under the original proposal.
Customer ROI 27–47% across modelled scenarios on a multi-thousand-store, multi-billion-dollar deal; the chosen structure produced 47% customer ROI in the most likely savings band with corresponding seller upside under achievement.
Case · methodology at scale
US-based global healthcare group — 98-country tender system
A $2.3 billion global healthcare company responded to government and institutional tenders across 98 countries with no consistent bid framework. Response times were long, win rates uneven, and pricing decisions reflected local urgency more than coordinated strategy. Country managers had wide latitude and limited tools.
A structured bid system was developed combining country-level competitive calibration, value-based price anchoring, and a discount authority matrix that surfaced the trade-off between win probability and realised margin on every deal. It was designed for country-manager use rather than central command, on the principle that local judgment is the binding constraint on tender quality and the method's job is to organise that judgment, not replace it.
Bid response time 19→9 days; win rate 52%→64% with a 3.4% price lift; projected 4× ROI on the twelve-month beta and 15× ROI on the twenty-four-month global rollout.
Case · hybrid offering with gain sharing
Fortune 50 healthcare distributor — acute-care supplies and software
The acute-care division of a Fortune 50 healthcare distributor was third in a market dominated by two competitors each holding roughly forty percent share, against the company's twenty percent. A head-on volume contest against the two scale incumbents was structurally unwinnable. The strategic question was where to compete — which segment of the buyer base could be approached on differentiated value rather than on scale.
The segmentation thesis was sharp: mid-sized hospitals were the sweet spot. Large enough to gain meaningful benefit from the supplies-management software the company had recently acquired; small enough not to have deployed an equivalent system already. The pricing bundled supplies and software with a gain-sharing layer tying fees to documented savings — making the technology’s value legible to procurement teams who could not justify a capital purchase.
The same bilateral method as the energy bid, applied to a product-plus-software bundle, with gain sharing aligning the seller’s incentive to the customer’s realised outcome.
Bundled-pricing strategy and gain-sharing structure adopted across the acute-care division, targeted at the mid-size hospital segment as the differentiated growth lane.
Procurement
When you are on the buying side of the table.
Note on provenance
The procurement engine is the buyer-side counterpart to bid and deal. It applies the same Raiffa decision-analysis, McFadden discrete-choice and Nash bargaining apparatus to vendor selection, negotiation posture and decision realisation — with the directional flips that buyer-side analysis requires.
The engine is fully operational: structured criteria frameworks, risk-adjusted total cost of ownership, Nash-equilibrium negotiation posture and an independent second opinion. Documented client engagements will be published as they become available.
Pricing
What to charge, when to move and how to defend it — across three sub-decisions.
Adjusting a price under pressure
Case
Global agricultural seed producer — strategic pricing reset
A leading global producer of corn and soybean seed faced sustained share losses to a competitor with a stronger trait portfolio, alongside aggressive price competition from a third major and a long tail of regional suppliers. Internal opinion was divided on the diagnosis: was the business losing share because price was too high, because the trait portfolio was behind, or because the sales organisation had lost discipline on discount and exception pricing. Pricing had become an exception-management exercise rather than a strategy.
Internal hypotheses were formed across management, marketing, R&D and sales, then tested against blind interviews with twenty growers in five states. The gap was decisive: corporate believed it offered better value at a higher price; growers ranked the company below the price/value equilibrium and competitors at or above it. Yield dominated, then input traits — both areas where the competitor had moved ahead. Switching costs were negligible.
The finding: the business was product-driven, not price-driven. Cutting price would not win back a grower who had already switched, and would cap value capture once the trait portfolio caught up. The work produced a new-product pricing process, a lifecycle-aware price/value matrix, and exception protocols separating planning from adjustment.
Pricing strategy, method and process redesign adopted; framework subsequently applied to new-product introductions and ongoing list-price setting across the portfolio.
Case
North American building materials supplier — post-recession margin recovery
A building materials supplier emerged from the financial crisis with margin compression across the customer book, inconsistent pricing across regions, and a sales force trained to win volume rather than defend value. Demand had not recovered, price discipline had degraded, and several large accounts had been quietly migrated onto terms the business could not sustain.
The engagement produced a portfolio-wide reset: customer segmentation by economic value, identification of the value-based revenue layer given away through under-pricing, and a bid framework with floor prices and discount authority calibrated to the strategic importance of each account. It reframed the conversation from what discount will close this deal to what is the lowest price at which we still want this customer.
Target price / sales 7%→12%; value-based revenue +35%; +25% improvement in global price alignment; total profit nearly doubled in a contracting market.
Pricing an enhancement you have just built
Case · financial services
Australian payments and banking services provider — mobile banking introduction
An Australian payments and transactional banking services provider serving a network of credit unions and mutual financial institutions prepared to introduce a mobile banking offering across its tiered customer base. The pricing question was complicated by the company sitting in two roles — vendor to its member institutions for the new services, and party to supplier-customer relationships with financial institutions in the broader payments ecosystem needing access to its payment infrastructure. Two materially different buyer types required distinct frameworks.
A bilateral value method was applied to both. On the member side, the offering was quantified against core banking providers, in-house builds and independent mobile shops across functionality, interaction quality, business value and total cost of ownership. A value ratio of about 1.10 against core banking set a defensible maximum premium near 16% in total-cost terms.
The value of each customer tier to the company was quantified in parallel, producing tier-specific adjustments. The result was a three-tier structure with implementation and annual licence fees set to capture incremental value while reflecting the price sensitivity of smaller institutions.
Pricing method, three-tier structure and working pricing tool adopted; the bilateral framework was subsequently applied across additional service offerings and to access-seeker relationships in the payments ecosystem.
Case · enterprise software
Enterprise software provider — strategy management and compliance suite
An enterprise software company, subsequently acquired by a major industry consolidator, needed a pricing framework for a multi-module offering: a strategy management tool, a compliance suite covering documentation and testing, and a remediation module that was the company's principal differentiator. Each module had a different competitive set, a different value proposition and a different segment-specific economic logic.
A bilateral value-based method calculated, for each module and segment, both a premium reflecting the value of the offering to the customer — importance × probability of impact × dollar impact across operational, planning and strategic value chains — and a discount reflecting the value of that customer to the seller, covering follow-on revenue, reference value, product feedback, cross-sell opportunity and channel cost. Six segments were defined along functionality and user-count dimensions, each with its own price line. The same apparatus is in the engine now.
Module-level pricing architecture adopted; the method became the foundation for subsequent maintenance pricing and account-level negotiation.
Entering a new market
Case · sole-provider new technology
Global pharmaceutical group — DNA-based diagnostic platform launch
The diagnostics division of a global pharmaceutical group brought a new DNA-based test platform to market during the AIDS epidemic, offering fast and accurate viral identification at a moment when speed and accuracy carried unusually high clinical and economic weight. As sole provider of the underlying technology, the company faced a market-entry question without competitive price anchors: how to price a category-defining capability with no comparable offering to reference, and how to capture the differential value it created across very different clinical and institutional buyers.
For each of seven segments, the incremental clinical and economic benefit was calculated separately — the attributes mattered differently to academic centres, public health agencies and reference laboratories. The value of each segment to the company was calculated in parallel and used to adjust its price point. The method was then put into the field as price corridors, giving country teams calibrated discretion within defensible bounds.
Pricing architecture adopted across the launch and subsequently extended as the platform was applied to additional viral and clinical applications; the method became foundational for the division’s pricing across the platform’s expansion.
Case · multi-country therapeutic launch
International pharmaceutical group — Latin American therapeutic launch
A global pharmaceutical group prepared the launch of a new therapeutic across four Latin American markets, each with materially different reimbursement environments, payer dynamics, competitive sets and regulatory pathways. Launch pricing was known to be sticky — both within each country and across the regional reference network — so prices and sequence had to be set with explicit awareness of how each decision would propagate.
Country-specific pricing was developed using value-based positioning calibrated to local payer logic, with reference-pricing dynamics modelled across the four-country sequence. Launch order was treated as a decision variable rather than an operational detail. Comparable method has since been applied across European and fifteen-market international launches with similar reference-pricing structures.
Launch pricing strategy adopted across the four-country sequence; method subsequently applied to additional therapeutic launches in the same regional and reference-pricing structures.
The method shown in these engagements is now in operational form. The engines are how it travels.