Podcast
October 7, 2026
5 min read
When Simon Pohlen and Jessica Venning-Bryan started showing Factor to energy pricing teams, they expected pushback. These are people who have spent years building sophisticated pricing logic in spreadsheets, often working around the limitations of tools that were never really designed for the job. Introducing something new into that workflow felt like it could be a hard sell.
The reaction they got was the opposite.
The response, almost universally, was relief. Not resistance.
Pricing managers across different markets and different businesses said the same thing: the tools they are working with can do the job, but they can no longer do it fast enough. Complex contract calculations that take several hours or a full day in a spreadsheet are holding teams back, not because the people are not capable of doing the work, but because the time it takes to do it properly means there is never enough runway to do anything else.
One pricing professional put it plainly in a recent conversation with the Factor team. Excel is never going away. There will always be weird edge cases that need it. But with Factor, the work that currently goes into Excel gets done twice as fast, and that time adds up in a day.
There is a moment that happens consistently in every Factor demo. Someone on the call notices that every action taken in the platform generates a unique identifier. That means every part of pricing a contract is fully traceable, and anyone can go back later and see exactly how a price was derived for a specific customer at a specific point in time.
In a world where pricing is predominantly done in spreadsheets or home-built tools, that kind of traceability simply does not exist. It is a small detail in isolation, but it lands every time. Pricing teams, who operate at a level of precision where 90% right is not good enough, recognise immediately what it means to have that auditability built into the platform.
Pricing teams in energy businesses are not just technically capable. They are deeply informed about how the energy system works, how costs are structured across it, and how those costs will shift as new technologies come online. They understand the problem they are solving at a level most people in the business do not.
What they often cannot do is act on that knowledge at the pace the market now demands. The manual overhead of complex calculations means teams are spending their time getting the next price out the door rather than revisiting whether the pricing from three months ago still makes sense. There is rarely time to go back and check, let alone to experiment with new product ideas.
And that is where the real opportunity sits. Pricing teams have an enormous amount of creative thinking about what future energy products could look like, for customers and for the business. Products that reflect new technologies, new customer behaviours, and new commercial structures. They just cannot mobilise those ideas yet, because doing so would create too much additional manual work and too much additional risk.
Factor does not replace the expertise of a pricing team. It creates the conditions for that expertise to go much further.
When the calculations that used to take hours can be run in a minute or two, time opens up. When pricing logic is traceable and auditable inside the platform, the risk of something quietly going wrong in a spreadsheet disappears. When new product ideas can be configured and tested without months of development work, the gap between what pricing teams imagine and what they can actually build starts to close.
Pricing teams are, as Simon put it, some of the most extraordinary people in an energy business. They are clever, creative, forward-thinking, and deeply informed. The energy transition is going to need everything they have. They just need tools that are built for the job they are actually doing.
That is what Factor is.
Pricing teams really are the most extraordinary people.
Excel is great, but actually it can no longer deliver me the answers quickly enough that I need.
It's this tiny detail, but someone on the call will always spot it and get excited about it.
The reaction we got was the opposite.
Huge attention to detail — because you can't just get a little bit right, you can't get 90% right. You've got to get it 100% right.
...and they have so many ideas about what the products of the future could look like in a way that is great for the customer and great for their business. They just need better tools to do the job that they do.
Hi, I'm Jess, Go to Market Lead at Factor. Factor is an API driven forecasting and pricing engine for teams leading through the energy transition. Today we're chatting with co-founders Jessica Venning-Bryan, and Simon Pohlen about how Factor supports pricing teams to do smarter, more efficient work.
When you first showed Factor to pricing teams, what was the reaction you had? And did it surprise you?
One that really excited me and was unexpected, and that I really love, is — we started demoing, and somebody always notices that each action that we're taking in the demo is generating a unique identifier. And so what that means in practice is that all parts of pricing a contract are traceable. And someone can go back and have a look at how a price was derived for a particular contract. And that's really different from today, where things are being done predominantly in spreadsheets, or perhaps with some sort of apps that have been home built — which are absolutely doing the task, but they don't enable that full traceability, which is so important and so valuable. And so, you know, it's this tiny detail, but someone on the call will always spot it and get excited about it.
How do you balance building a product like this for people who know the problem you're trying to solve so intimately? They're doing it every day. How are you making sure that you're meeting the needs of those end users, as well as the broader business?
Look, I think what's really great about getting in front of these, you know, pricing managers, as well as other people from the business, is actually hearing about the problems that they have. And that really helps guide, you know, what we build. And their problems are — there's a lot of commonality. There's a lot of "we can do the thing, but we can't do the thing in a way that enables us to redo it quickly enough." You know, we can't go back and look at the pricing we gave for a customer three months ago and see if it's still the right pricing, because we're too busy trying to get the pricing out for the next customer. And so I think, you know, the clear sort of themes there are that it's about being able to do stuff quickly, and being able to do those complex calculations. And instead of it taking them several hours or a day on a spreadsheet, that they can just run that in a minute or two. And I think it's those kind of things that really guide what we're building.
And I imagine you're talking to those teams all the time.
Yeah, we're talking to them all the time. They'll share with us how they're doing stuff in spreadsheets today, or doing stuff in other ways. And so we do get that sort of visibility into it. I think it was funny when Jess and I first got in front of these teams, we thought they'd be sort of resistant to the idea of a new tool — resistant to something that, you know, replaces what they're doing today. But actually, this is my biggest surprise, the reaction we got was the opposite. It was kind of like, "I spend all my time in Excel. Excel is great, but actually it can no longer deliver me the answers quickly enough that I need. And so I'm really open to the idea of getting some better tooling in place." We had a good conversation with a pricing person a couple of weeks ago, and he said, look, Excel is never going to go away. There's always going to be really weird cases that we need to do. But with Factor, you know, I can get the stuff that I do in Excel, I can get that done twice as fast. So that means that's freeing up time in my day.
And they're obviously really technically capable and smart people that want to be doing high value work.
Hugely capable, hugely, you know, huge attention to detail — because you can't just get a little bit right, you can't get 90% right. You've got to get it 100% right. Yeah. So they really know what they're doing, and they're just looking for better ways to do it. So, you know, they're the kind of people that are really going to help retailers build products and pricing that are going to work for future customers in this future energy world. They're the people that are kind of going to be the unsung heroes, but they need better tools to do their job, so they can do more, better, faster, if you like.
I think our experience too is that they have so many ideas — they are really creative, and they have so many ideas about what the products of the future could look like in a way that is great for the customer and great for their business — and they just can't mobilise those yet, because it would create too much extra manual work and too much extra manual risk. And then they look at Factor, and they go, "wow, okay, you guys could enable me to do all the stuff that I'm doing today so much faster" that I could A) free up my time to do this more creative stuff, and B) the way the software is designed would allow me to consider all these extra factors in my pricing design.
Yeah. I mean, I think the thing that people may not, you know, immediately get is that these pricing people deeply understand how the energy industry works. They deeply understand the costs in that system — all of them — and they deeply understand how those costs are going to change as new technologies come on. It's just a matter of enabling them to be able to deal with all that new dynamism. Pricing teams really are the most extraordinary people. Like, they're so clever and very creative, and very forward thinking, and hugely, hugely informed. They just need better tools to do the job that they do.
Sounds like Factor is the tool for that job.
It's a great start in enabling these sorts of, you know, technical experts to do the work they want to be doing. So it's really exciting to see what they're going to do when you give people this capable a tool like this, to see where they take it.
To learn more about Factor, head to our website usefactor.com
