Distribution
Capturing Margin in Complex Distribution Environments
Distribution businesses manage scale, volatility, and customer diversity that can quietly erode profitability. Large SKU portfolios, multiple channels, and frequent cost changes demand pricing strategies that protect margin while supporting growth.
Across wholesale, specialty, and aftermarket distribution, margin leakage often stems from undifferentiated pricing, inconsistent discounting, and limited visibility into customer- and product-level performance. Without a structured approach, distributors struggle to keep pace with market shifts while protecting EBITDA.
INSIGHT2PROFIT helps distributors navigate this complexity by aligning pricing strategy, discount execution, and analytics to the true value delivered—driving near-term margin improvement while building scalable, repeatable commercial capabilities.
Common Challenges
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Cost-Plus Pricing Limits Value Capture
Cost-plus pricing approaches fail to reflect differences in product value, service levels, availability, and customer willingness to pay, leading to missed margin opportunities.
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Limited Visibility Into Customer and Product Profitability
Profitability is often assessed only at a gross margin level, limiting the ability to design pricing and commercial strategies that maximize EBITDA.
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Managing Pricing at SKU Scale
Large and complex SKU portfolios require integrated pricing tools and dynamic price management to maintain consistency, accuracy, and speed of execution.
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Customer, Channel, and Regional Complexity
Differences across customer types, routes to market, and regional competitive dynamics create additional layers of pricing and execution complexity.
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Discounting Requires Ongoing Governance
Thousands of customer-specific discounts must be reviewed and managed regularly to ensure they support profitable growth rather than erode margin.
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Cross-Functional Coordination Gaps
Pricing decisions often lack alignment across commercial, pricing, procurement, and operations teams, increasing the risk of margin leakage.
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Channel Complexity Obscures Value
Multiple distribution paths—from manufacturers and suppliers through wholesalers, retailers, service providers, and end customers—make it difficult to align pricing consistently to value delivered.
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Pricing Compliance Is Hard to Enforce
Decentralized decision-making and limited oversight reduce confidence that pricing and discount policies are applied as intended.
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Pricing Processes Do Not Scale
Reliance on manual workflows and individual judgment prevents pricing strategies from scaling effectively as product catalogs and customer bases grow.
Navigating Pricing Complexity in Distribution
Sustainable profitability in distribution requires tailored strategies that address the unique dynamics of high-volume, high-complexity environments, accounting for thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of SKUs with varying value drivers, multiple customer types, channel-specific pricing pressures and rapid cost changes based on commodities, freight, labor, and supplier actions. INSIGHT2PROFIT works with distributors to bring structure and discipline to pricing decisions—ensuring consistency where needed and differentiation where value justifies it.
Automotive Aftermarket Distribution
- Large, complex SKU portfolios
- Multi-channel pricing pressure
- Rapid technology & mix shifts
- Discount & execution governance
Food & Beverage Distribution
- Thin margins, high volatility
- Frequent cost & price changes
- Channel-driven pricing differences
- Service-level profitability alignment
Specialty & Industrial Distribution
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Fragmented, competitive markets
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Value-based pricing challenges
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Customer-specific pricing complexity
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Scalable pricing governance
What Opportunities Exist in Your Distribution Business?
Select considerations for identifying and acting on margin opportunities.
Align Segments to Value
Pricing must reflect meaningful differences in customer value, product importance, and route to market.
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Differentiate margin targets by customer and product
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Account for service intensity and competitive pressure
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Move beyond uniform cost-plus pricing
Optimize Price Setting & Execution
Effective price setting requires structure, consistency, and the ability to respond quickly to change.
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Establish clear list-price logic and floors
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Identify and correct pricing outliers
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Keep pricing aligned to cost and market shifts
Strengthen Discount Governance
Discounts should drive profitable behavior, not become embedded entitlements.
- Align discounts to customer value and strategy
- Introduce structured tiers and guardrails
- Review discount levels regularly
Improve Visibility Into Profit Drivers
Sustainable margin improvement depends on understanding profitability beyond the surface level.
- Measure profitability by customer and SKU
- Incorporate cost-to-serve insights
- Focus commercial effort where value exists
Enable Scalable Decision-Making
As portfolios and customer bases grow, pricing decisions must scale with the business.
- Centralize pricing authority and standards
- Support decisions with tools and analytics
- Enable timely, consistent execution at scale
How Does INSIGHT2PROFIT Deliver Results?
Turning Complexity Into Cash Flow
Quick Wins, Foundation for Value, and Centralized, Sustainable Pricing Capability
Strategic, Market-Based Rate Setting to Drive Profit Growth
Meet Our Experts
With over 250 dedicated pricing and profitability experts, our team helps distribution businesses achieve profit and EBITDA growth through structured pricing strategies and commercial execution.
Andrew Boronka
Andrew is a Principal at INSIGHT2PROFIT. He has more than a decade of experience driving pricing excellence and enhancing client experiences across various sectors including manufacturing, industrial, B2B2C consumer, and distribution. He has led price transformation initiatives across more than 25 engagements contributing to over $200M in EBITDA impact through pricing transformation.
Examples of Andrew’s experience include:
- Implemented multiple quoting tools and pricing engines, achieving significant impact in the waste management service sector driving $1M of impact within the first 90 days of the pilot and $50M during the subsequent national rollout
- Execution of many value-based pricing frameworks within global industrial manufacturing resulting in over $70M of EBITDA generation over multiple years
- Reduced Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC) spend by $7M through A/B testing for a supplier of residential building materials
- Utilized competitive benchmarking through web-scraping within the ecommerce space to help drive $14.5M in margin improvement through price within the first 4 months
Andrew earned his B.S. in Accounting from The University of Akron and an A.A. in Business Administration from North Central State College.
Justin Seefeldt
Justin is a Managing Principal at INSIGHT2PROFIT and brings 15 years of experience as a management consultant focused on pricing, sales and marketing strategy. Over the past decade, Justin has spearheaded over 70 engagements across various industries concentrating on pricing and profit strategy, resulting in delivering clients more than $1B of value creation.
Prior to joining INSIGHT, he spent several years at a Fortune 500 wholesale distributor, focusing on strategic pricing, private brand management, and commercial analytics.
Examples of Justin’s experience include:
- Collaborated with an industrial holding company to develop a scalable pricing structure and process across more than 40 individual businesses, yielding over $30M of EBITDA impact and 500 basis points margin improvement
- Achieved over $10M of EBITDA impact for an omni-channel building products manufacturer by developing a gross-to-net waterfall that identified key areas of profit leakage and creating corresponding strategies to mitigate them
- Served as a centralized pricing function for a Fortune 500 multinational specialty manufacturer to coordinate pricing strategy and action plans across businesses, executing a $400M pricing action against downward margin pressures
Justin earned his MBA in Corporate Finance and Marketing Strategy & Planning from DePaul Driehaus College of Business, Kellstadt Graduate School of Business and a B.S. in Consumer Economics & Finance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Gerry Thomas
Gerry is a Managing Principal at INSIGHT2PROFIT. Gerry has 9 years of experience in pricing and commercial strategy across various roles, including consultant, manager, senior manager, and director. He specializes in B2B pricing, particularly for industrial equipment, heavy machinery, chemicals, and industrial manufacturers and distributors. He has also collaborated with several B2C clients in industries such as leather goods, white goods, face care, and consumer product goods.
Prior to joining INSIGHT, Gerry spent 8 years as part of the Accenture Strategy team in the Pricing and Commercial Strategy group. During his tenure at Accenture, Gerry worked in sales enablement, zero-based budgeting, and in pricing and commercial strategy.
Examples of Gerry’s experience include:
- Led a project contributing $80M in EBITDA improvement over 16 months by implementing a value-based pricing methodology across the portfolio for a heavy trucking OEM
- Achieved a 2.5% net price improvement during inflationary headwinds for a B2B valve and industrial equipment portfolio company encompassing over 30 distinct brands, implemented a configurable custom quoting tool and PowerBI KPI dashboard utilized across 15+ brands, providing ongoing support for continuous improvement over multiple years
- Delivered over $50M in EBITDA improvement as the pricing project lead for an industrial equipment manufacturer through value-based pricing strategy and implementation
Gerry earned his MBA from the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, M.Ed. in Secondary Education and Teaching from the University of Missouri-Saint Louis, and a BBA in International Business from the University of Georgia.
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