6 Ways To Become An Industry Leader with Zilliant
By Zilliant
Jun 11, 2019
Table of Contents
Leading an industry transformation from the pricing desk may sound like a far-off dream, particularly for old-school businesses with limited pricing staff and hundreds of thousands of products to manage. However, a heavy-duty truck parts dealer is defying the odds thanks to a focus on pricing and sales growth optimization with Zilliant as its technology partner.
This distributor has managed to drive innovation in the industry with a prescriptive, strategic approach to pricing and data science. This has helped the pricing team meet some heavy obstacles with confidence; stop us if any of these issues sound familiar… Reactive pricing that simply mirrored the programs each Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) rolled out. Parts not categorized and customers not segmented. The only reporting that could be done on a given account was whether its revenue was up or down year over year. Heavily relationship-based selling, so much so that if a sales rep left, they’d take up to 90 percent of their book of business with them. Cutthroat battle for market share in a very fragmented industry. Price exceptions with no expiration date. Customer churn and capturing too little share of customer spend.
Distribution and manufacturing pricing and sales managers likely identify with most, if not all, of the above. How do we empower our sellers to be proactive within their existing accounts, beyond just dropping off some donuts and maybe a new marketing flyer at the corporate office? How can our pricing analysts rein in price exceptions and over-discounting in the field while ensuring we’re still competitive enough to win deals?
It’s possible. It’s happening now for this truck parts distributor and others, helping them become leaders in their industry through technology adoption and data-driven cultural transformation. In fact, this customer wants the rest of the industry to emulate their approach to pricing optimization. As they shared on stage at MindShare 2019, “We want rational competitors. We want everyone to know that we’re doing this. If we have irrational competitors out there, we have to sink down to whatever level they’re selling at and that is a tough business to be in.”
Call it the rising-tide-lifts-all-boats attitude. Here are some ways that Zilliant is helping customers bring in that high tide for their industries, regardless of whether they have limited pricing staff and/or massive sales teams.
Apply Deep Industry Knowledge
Zilliant focuses on 12 plus industries, serving distributors, manufacturers and service providers within those verticals. Customers consistently report that a key differentiator is that we know their specific market and understand the intricacies that make them different from related organizations. Pricing and selling practices vary greatly depending on the market, and Zilliant brings relevant thought leadership to your industry.
Ease of Integration
Our SaaS platform is unmatched in its ability to integrate with key systems and data sources.
“Zilliant has become the backbone for all of our data science. Every system that we have in the company is plugged into Zilliant,” said the truck parts dealer.
Zilliant’s Real-Time Pricing Engine creates consistent, on-demand communication points between our AI engines and your ERP, CRM, CPQ and eCommerce applications, at 99.99% guaranteed uptime. We navigate all the different touchpoints to give your pricers and sales reps a seamless view of your customers.
Mathematical Approach
Customers report incredible benefit when they throw away “cost-plus” and OEM pricing promotions in favor of our AI-derived pricing guidance. Through our data science and highly-intuitive user interfaces, sales reps get a better look at their customer’s health and specific actions to take to increase their next sale.
This truck parts distributor now views its business as one large math problem that can be solved by relying on optimization and data science to make intelligent commercial decisions. Zilliant is the catalyst for this successful mathematical approach.
Speed to Value
Many Zilliant customers realize benefits before we even go live, thanks to our intensive data diagnostic services. Right when we got started with the truck parts dealer, we helped them discover and shut off about seven million price exceptions that didn’t have an expiration date tied to them. The Strategy Interface in Zilliant Price IQ quickly and clearly reveals all the prices you have in play that are in a negative territory. That gets the executives’ attention right away and allows pricing analysts to take immediate action to rectify.
On the sales side, it used to take this distributor about a year and a half for a new sales rep to bring in an ROI. Thanks to Zilliant’s intelligent Sales Growth Solutions, newly-hired reps are now paying for themselves in nine months.
Flexible Support
We maintain a constant line of communication with clients through our proactive and responsive Customer Success program. Our services organization is quick to adapt when we find an issue and takes consistent feedback on how we can improve our products.
“We don’t have a robust data science department,” said the truck parts distributor. “How do you handle 350K part numbers, where we get monthly cost updates, and try to put any kind of rational pricing out into the market? Zilliant is helping us do that.”
The fact that we’ve decided to build our products on a 100 percent multi-tenant SaaS platform means you don’t need an army of folks babysitting the system.
Quantifiable Results
The great thing about optimizing your pricing and sales processes is the direct, quantifiable impact on your top and bottom lines. Zilliant customers see the positive business impact in six months or less. A sampling of the real dollars the distributor we’ve been discussing has seen come back in six months:
Positive ROI prior to launch of the pricing project thanks to data insights. 130 basis points (and increasing) of margin lift with Price IQ. Over $12M in incremental revenue with Sales IQ. Price overrides/exceptions down 50 percent.
