Industrials

INSIGHT is your partner for sustainable EBITDA growth.
From manufacturing to distribution, aerospace to packaging, INSIGHT holds a wealth of knowledge and experience across a broad range of industrial businesses. We’ve been delivering significant EBITDA growth to industrial clients for almost two decades.
One of the most impactful and immediate outcomes of our partnership is the high level of visibility and granularity you will have into business performance. Our data engineering and powerful analytics capabilities enable never-seen-before views of your business and surface unrealized growth opportunities from differentiated pricing to mix management to sales incentives.
Beyond newfound insights, INSIGHT brings the necessary tools and processes to transform and centralize your pricing strategy. We learn your business in and out through qualitative interviews, granular data analysis, and market intelligence to collaboratively craft a custom pricing strategy that supports your unique business, customer, and competitive dynamics. We leverage our longstanding AI/ML competencies to develop your pricing engine that can be delivered through one of our many technology solutions—whatever best suits your needs.
Because we believe strategy and technology alone aren’t enough to produce sustainable outcomes, we lead hand-in-hand change management, partnering to support pricing strategy rollouts, build centralization, drive momentum, and transform buy-in with sales and commercial teams. Whether you need a large-scale integrated quoting solution or need help understanding how to approach volume decline, INSIGHT is your partner in developing and implementing sustainable EBITDA growth solutions.
Common Challenges
-
Stale & Misaligned Pricing
Pricing should be based on data and business objectives, not gut feelings, anecdotes, or out-of-date catalogues. This leads to unwarranted discounts, unnecessary price concessions, and margin degradation.
-
Cost-Plus Pricing
Cost-plus pricing may be simple, but it’s likely costing you profit dollars. This pricing method doesn’t consider the consumer, the competition, or product positioning enough to capture the full value of your business.
-
Price Leaks
Every item on the price waterfall—discounts, rebates, payment terms, freight—should be managed on a regular basis for price optimization. If not, your business may face margin decline due to unknown price leaks.
-
Price Realization
Whether conducting flat price adjustments or handing out exceptions to important customers, many businesses face lower-than-expected price realization. Price changes should consider the unique segmentation of your customers, products, and market.
-
Data & Governance
Granular visibility to business performance from customer profitability to product mix enables smarter pricing decisions. Centralized policies, guardrails, and best practices ensure commercial success.
-
Misaligned Incentives
Sales incentive structures should consider profitability, not just top-line volume or revenue. Cost-to-serve elements, such as rebates, are best structured to incentivize account growth. These types of internal and external pricing policies need to be governed and measured regularly.
What Our Clients Are Saying
President & CEO, Equipment, Machinery, and Parts
Chief Operating Officer, Metals, Mining, and Materials
President & CEO, Chemicals Manufacturer
Meet Our Experts
With over 250 dedicated pricing strategy experts, our team helps businesses achieve profit and EBITDA growth through our process proven on over 800 engagements since our founding in 2006.
Alex Hagreen
Alex is a Principal at INSIGHT2PROFIT with 10 years of experience as a pricing consultant. He excels in defining pricing strategy, developing pricing excellence roadmaps, enhancing salesforce effectiveness, providing negotiation training, and delivering targeted high-yield price increases with our partners.
Examples of Alex’s experience include:
- Launched pricing process for a protein distributor with revenues exceeding $4B, providing profit-maximizing weekly price recommendations to approximately 80 buyers across 12 branches, resulting in a $7M pricing impact over 18 months
- Developed contract negotiation package, timeline, and best practices for a $700M industrial firm, including terms and conditions, scorecard, competitive scorecard, optimal timeline with stakeholder inclusion, and price scenario calculator
- Created $1M lift on $30M of revenue through a target price incentive program at a mid-size eCommerce company; secured management buy in, leveraged dashboard reporting, and aligned incentives to deliver results
- Identified $4M in discounting leakage leveraging a percentile-based peer benchmark model at a manufacturer with revenues exceeding $250M; built a recommendation engine to capture the price leakage and realign price positioning
Alex earned his MBA in Finance with a focus in Pricing from the University of Rochester, Simon Business School and a B.S. in Finance from Penn State University.
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.
Bradley Van Hulle
Brad is a Senior Manager at INSIGHT2PROFIT, with over 5 years of consulting experience, specializing in price and profitability strategies, revenue management, and the implementation and execution of quote applications. Brad has led and contributed to over 10 client engagements throughout his time at INSIGHT. His expertise spans more than 10 industries, including home security, medical supplies, life sciences, industrials, food and beverage, automation, energy sustainability, facility services, and global contract manufacturing. He is well-versed in various pricing strategies, such as target pricing, margin targeting, list plus discount, list price setting, among others.
Examples of Brad’s experience include:
- Led a pricing application and strategic price implementation for a flow manufacturing and distribution organization with over $1.6B in revenue and 90+ independent business units, resulting in margin improvement exceeding $25M
- Led a strategic pricing initiative for a flooring company with revenue surpassing $400M, implementing price level setting strategies and increases across three distinct business divisions
Brad earned a B.S. in Neuroscience from the University of Michigan.
Chris Donnelly
Chris is the Vice President of Sales at INSIGHT2PROFIT, bringing over 25 years of leadership experience focused on organizational growth, sustainable change management, and project leadership. He collaborates with both corporate entities and private equity firms to uncover business potential, leveraging strategic and operational improvements to enhance existing pricing methods. Chris’s expertise in pricing and change management helps clients identify and capitalize on often overlooked opportunities for margin enhancement, demonstrating how even slight price improvements can significantly boost their EBITDA.
Chris is well-versed in various aspects of the business landscape, specializing in Price Management, Pricing Strategy, Price Leaks, Software Development, Change Management, Project Management, B2B, and Private Equity.
Chris earned his B.S. in Finance from John Carroll University.
Chris Gougler
Chris is a Director of Private Equity at INSIGHT2PROFIT, with 9 years of professional experience with the company. He began as a Business Analyst and has progressed through roles including Associate, Consultant, and Manager of Business Development.
Chris specializes in pricing and profit strategy, account leadership, and generating new sales opportunities. His track record demonstrates his exceptional talent for relationship building, leveraging advanced analytics and strong interpersonal skills to drive client success.
Prior to joining INSIGHT, Chris worked for the State of Illinois where he managed State and local political campaigns.
Chris earned his MBA in Marketing and Statistics from George Washington University and his B.A. in Political Science from DePauw University.
Christopher Welch
Christopher is a Director at INSIGHT2PROFIT with over 15 years of industry and consulting experience in strategy, pricing, finance, and commercial leadership roles serving companies in chemicals, manufacturing, industrial distribution, and education.
Prior to joining INSIGHT, Christopher led commercial, marketing, pricing, and strategy teams at PPG Industries. In addition, he served for four years as a U.S . Army officer.
Examples of Christopher’s experience include:
- Led an engagement with a large U.S. B2B manufacturer that involved identifying and allocating significant cost-to-serve elements such as purchase price variance, freight, rebates, and payment terms
- Led an engagement with a large HVAC distributor that aligned pricing processes among multiple recent acquisitions and identified multiple areas of profit leakage resulting in a margin increase of over 10%
- Drove an engagement focused on aligning costing processes between a large multinational supplier to the metalworking industry; identifying several crucial disconnects due to acquisitions and ERPs, enabling consistent costing and pricing capture.
- Spearheaded marketing, pricing, business development, and Canadian sales for large protective coatings supplier.
- Held multiple finance roles, including corporate FP&A, finance manager for a large, flat glass producer, and internal auditor; experienced in analytics, costing, forecasting, and budgeting
Christopher earned his MBA in Finance and a BBA in Accounting from the University of Notre Dame.
Damian Ventresca
Damian is a Director with INSIGHT2PROFIT with over 12 years of commercial and operational experience. His background includes roles in Sales, Corporate FP&A, and 7 years dedicated to Pricing Consulting. Damian specializes in B2B pricing strategy and execution, as well as demand planning and inventory management. He has led numerous engagements globally with manufacturing, distribution, and service clients, serving as a subject matter expert in price measurement for INSIGHT.
Prior to joining INSIGHT, Damian spent 3 years in corporate FP&A as a Senior Analyst for a large private equity owned business, contributing to profit improvement efforts. He also served 2 years in mortgage banking as an originator.
Examples of Damian’s experience include:
- Developed a dynamic pricing model for a global aerospace distributor that balances cash creation for excess inventory (20 percentage point reduction in excess), and price and margin expansion for high running parts (resulting in an 11% increase in incremental margin)
- Implemented demand planning process changes including model changes for statistical and machine-learning models, defining demand planning process, and refining optimal forecast selection tool that generated 11% improvement in forecast accuracy
- Established a war room operations for new go-to-market strategy for veterinary distributor, involving the definition of end-to-end commercial processes, customer prioritization, assessment of total addressable market opportunity, and evaluation of conversion impact on margin and capacity
Damian earned his B.S. in Business, Finance, and International Business from Indiana University, Kelley School of Business and is a Level 3 CFA candidate.
Danielle Cisler
Danielle is a Principal at INSIGHT2PROFIT. Danielle has more than 15 years of professional experience including 10 years as a pricing consultant. She has served in various capacities in commercial analytics, e-business, and project management roles.
Specializing in B2B pricing for manufacturers, distributors, and service providers, she leads pricing engagements to ensure long-term sustainable impact. Her leadership extends beyond client engagements to include her previous role as the lead of INSIGHT’s Summer Analyst Program.
Prior to joining INSIGHT, Danielle spent 7 years at Simonton Windows.
Examples of Danielle’s pricing experiences include:
- Drove a 4% improvement in return on sales (ROS) for an industrial configured products manufacturer by shifting from cost-plus to value-based pricing, introducing an integrated quoting solution, holding the sales organization accountable for driving price, and implementing weekly price monitoring
- Led a 2.5% improvement in return on recurring revenue for a professional services provider through a new pricing strategy and infrastructure, differentiated pricing, and emphasis on price adoption and win rate
- Delivered a 30% margin improvement in Year 1 for a manufacturer of electrical equipment by implementing a pricing algorithm and tool to provide differentiated freight rates; continued success includes increasing freight revenue and margin through identification of leakage such as carrier compliance, additional charges, and process changes
Danielle earned her MBA from The Ohio State University, Fisher School of Business, and a M.S. in Quantitative Psychology, from the University of Notre Dame, specializing in finite factor mixture modeling. She also holds a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.A. in Psychology from Marietta College.
Gerry Thomas
Gerry is a 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.
Jake Simmons
Jake is a Director with INSIGHT2PROFIT. Jake has more than 10 years of experience as a pricing professional, supply chain analyst, and B2B consultant. He leads a variety of pricing engagements with a focus on developing customer-specific custom applications and driving long-term profit optimization for clients.
Prior to joining INSIGHT, Jake spent 2 years in supply chain and demand planning for the Service Parts Supply Chain within the Advanced Molecular Imaging team at Philips Healthcare in Cleveland. There he managed demand forecasting and coordination of materials with the procurement and engineering teams. Jake was also a marketing and global pricing analyst with A. Schulman, where he assisted in establishing a global pricing center of excellence, including leading change management activities and training sales leaders on pricing scorecards.
Examples of Jake’s experience include:
- Drove a 5 percentage point net price contribution to the bottom line of a value-add chemical distributor through managing price adjustments, establishing a culture of value-selling/pricing, and delivering price and margin transparency
- Led the development and implementation of a custom quoting solution at a multi-billion-dollar technology manufacturer to drive price optimization at time of quote, resulting in improved pricing controls and achievement of price realization budget
- Delivered a 4.5 percentage point annual price increase for a rubber and plastics manufacturer through the construction of a price adjustment model, sales workshops and communication training with reps, and driving accountability to results
Jake earned his MBA in Economics from Kent State University, College of Business Administration, and a B.S. in Marketing from Miami University, with a Minor in Decision Sciences.
James Padget
James is a Director at INSIGHT2PROFIT. He has 10 years of experience in strategy consulting, pricing and commercial strategy consulting, and corporate & commercial strategy roles. He specializes in pricing strategy & commercial excellence with a diverse industry background spanning both B2B and B2C sectors, both as a consultant and industry leader. James takes the lead on several projects within INSIGHT’s portfolio, with typical client engagements ranging greater than 1 year.
Prior to joining INSIGHT, James served as a Director of Pricing Strategy at The Home Depot and Consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. Additionally, he worked in Corporate Strategy & Business Development at ADP and Strategy & Analytics Consulting at IBM.
Examples of James’s experience include:
- Led a project for a B2C graduation supplies company, achieving $10M EBITDA improvement in 6 months through value-based pricing, market surveys, competitor web price scrapes, and transaction data
- Directed a $30M pricing excellence strategy for a $1.5B B2B seller of uniform and facilities supplies, addressing margin leakage, price variance, cost headwinds, and commercial gaps
James earned his MBA in Decision Sciences from Duke University, Fuqua School of Business, and a B.S. from Georgia Institute of Technology, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude.
Kevin Mulligan
Kevin is a Director at INSIGHT2PROFIT. Kevin has more than 10 years of professional pricing experience and specializes in B2B pricing for distributors, manufacturers, and service providers. He leads pricing engagements by providing guidance and direction for Engagement Leads and the overall project team, ensuring quality is consistently delivered.
Prior to joining INSIGHT, Kevin spent ten years in the international container shipping industry. He held various roles across Operations and Pricing. His last role was Director of Yield Management for all North America where he was responsible for pricing strategy for trade lanes with annual revenues over $100M.
Examples of Kevin’s experience include:
- Led an engagement that drove 120 basis points improvement (~$20M) for a client in the rigid packaging distribution industry, involved developing a detailed peer group outlier model to reprice existing business and develop a quoting tool to leverage the pricing model for new business quoting
- Delivered over $6M in price impact for a leading North American customs brokerage through a complex outlier model employing linear multivariate regression to identify target pricing, created Salesforce enablement tools to provide the relatively new commercial team visibility into customer performance and opportunities to increase revenue
- Created a dynamic pricing model to optimize pricing on a weekly basis for an aftermarket auto parts distributor, complemented with a robust reporting suite to identify pricing opportunity for a newly established Pricing Department
Kevin earned his MBA from the Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management, and a B.S. in Industrial Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan, where he graduated with honors.
Lucian Morar
Luci is a Principal at INSIGHT2PROFIT, bringing over 20 years of specialized B2C and B2B pricing experience, with 17 years dedicated to leading pricing teams. Serving as a trusted advisor to C-suite executives and Private Equity Managing Directors, Luci focuses on pricing excellence within the manufacturing, distribution, and service provider sectors.
Prior to joining INSIGHT, Luci spent 11 years in Accenture’s Pricing and Commercial Strategy practice, managing engagements in pricing strategy, analytics, execution, governance, and software configuration. His B2B pricing experience covers industries such as appliances, automotive, construction equipment, medical devices, chemicals, and professional services. He also spent 3 years in B2C at Jewel Osco managing pricing from general merchandise, health & beauty to grocery, deli, produce &bakery.
Examples of Luci’s experience include:
- Led the development and implementation of a dynamic model optimizing 320,000 weekly prices for an aftermarket auto parts distributor, achieving 400 basis points year-over-year gross margin improvement in the first year, implemented a robust reporting suite to sustain performance
- Generated over $100M in additional revenue for a multinational industrial company by developing a pricing engine that drove regular price increases for contracted and non-contracted customers, and to support a quoting tool integration with clients Salesforce, led the establishment of a Pricing Center of Excellence (CoE) and enhanced client team skills in negotiation best practices during their contract renewals
- Identified 12% in additional revenue for a professional services client through differentiated rate card modelling, price realization measurement, and leveraging cross sell/upsell opportunities; achieved through a swift assessment of existing price variability across personas and peer groups, informed by their purchasing behaviors
Luci earned his MBA in Marketing & Operations Management from Loyola University Chicago, Quinlan School of Business, a B.S. in Economics and a BA in European Studies from Babes-Bolyai University in Romania.
Do You Have a Reliable And Profitable Discounting Strategy in Place?
We helped this manufacturer tackle unwarranted discounting and incentivize salespeople to discount within target recommendations.
Cost-plus pricing is as easy as it is low risk, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t costing your business thousands in profits.
Discover if discounts, promotions, and sales lead to long-term profit loss or profit gain.
A Comprehensive Guide to Optimizing Rebate Design, Implementation, and Review for Enhanced Profitability.
Uncover why volume declines are occurring in your business and the best way to respond to support your strategic pricing goals.
Identify pricing actions your business can implement to profitably navigate market volatility.
You need to be nimble enough to adapt your pricing methods in the face of economic and market changes.
Because each product and customer has a different profit margin, this mix will impact your overall profitability.