Revenue Optics launched a pricing and revenue growth management practice this week aimed at private-equity-backed distributors, and I think it is a quiet admission about the CPQ and rebate-management software those same distributors have already bought. The tooling is not the problem. What those distributors are missing is someone who will tell them their price list itself is wrong, and no CPQ platform is built to do that.
The Obvious Objection
The easy read here is that this is just a consulting firm doing what consulting firms do: finding a services upsell and wrapping it in a press release about “leaking margin.” Revenue Optics already sells sales transformation and talent placement to the same distributor customers, so a fourth practice line looks like portfolio expansion first and market insight second. If that is all this is, it says nothing about the software category.
I do not think that objection survives contact with what founder Ali Hasham and new practice lead Shafohi Alamgir actually said about why now. Hasham described the sequence plainly: “many of our clients asked us a version of the same question this year: you fixed how we cover our accounts, can you do the same for how we price them.” That is a client base that already has account coverage, and by extension almost certainly already has CPQ and quoting software, coming back to ask for something the software did not give them. Alamgir, who has spent twenty years running pricing functions at industrial distributors before this, was blunter: “most distributors are not under-earning. They are leaking. The margin is already in the business.”
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What CPQ Software Actually Optimizes
CPQ vendors have kept shipping real improvements this year, faster quote generation, better approval routing, partner-specific pricing rules. Vendavo’s own August announcement of a High-Tech Revenue Management product folded pricing, rebate settlement, and channel data reconciliation into one workflow for semiconductor and electronics manufacturers, which is a genuine step past simple quote-and-approve tooling. None of that is nothing. But look at what every one of those improvements is actually optimizing: speed and consistency of the quote that goes out the door. Faster is good. Consistent is good. Neither one asks whether the number in that quote is the right number, and a distributor can be fast, consistent, and still leaving margin on every deal if the underlying price logic, discount bands, and rebate terms were never rebuilt around what the business actually costs to serve today.
That is the gap Alamgir’s diagnostic is built to find: price variance, cost pass-through latency, discount leakage, and governance holes, the four places margin disappears between a correct quote and a wrong one. A CPQ system will enforce whatever pricing logic a distributor loads into it with total consistency. It has no opinion on whether that logic is stale, and most of it is, because pricing structures at industrial distributors tend to get set once during an ERP migration and then survive a decade of cost and channel changes untouched.
What It Means for the Revenue Leader
If you run revenue or pricing for a distributor and you already own CPQ or rebate software, the uncomfortable question this raises is not whether to buy more tooling. It is whether anyone has actually re-derived your pricing logic since the system that enforces it went live. The same failure pattern shows up in revenue planning more broadly: teams blame reps and process for numbers that were wrong at the design stage, long before execution had a chance to matter. Pricing is the sharpest version of that problem because the dollars are visible in every single deal, not just in a missed quarterly plan.
My own judgment, and the reason I think this practice launch is worth more than a press-release skim: CPQ vendors will not fix this themselves, because doing so would mean admitting their product optimizes the wrong metric. Quote velocity is easy to demo and easy to sell against. Margin governance requires a vendor to tell a customer their pricing strategy is broken, which is a much harder conversation to have from inside a software sales cycle. That conversation is exactly what a fixed-scope outside diagnostic is built for, and it is why I expect more pricing-specific practices like this one to show up wherever CPQ adoption is already mature and margin pressure has not eased.
Source: Revenue Optics (PR Newswire)
