Accelerate Price Performance with Campaign Manager™

Pricing strategies, when not fully actionable by the sales team, often fail to meet their objectives. This inconvenient truth in B2B is felt from the pricing analyst’s desk all the way up to the office of the CFO. A dedicated pricing team may have been assembled, ample due diligence paid to data collection and price setting processes, and ambitious goals set with intentions of accountability to those KPIs. Yet, prices drift further and further from target over time and, without a means to systematically update pricing when needed, customer agreements fall below the pricing floor. 

There are many reasons for this. Often the available tools such as cumbersome, bulky spreadsheets can’t keep up with frequently changing market conditions or thousands of customer/product combinations. Perhaps sales reps have the power to discount at their discretion, locking in low-margin pricing agreements with no end date. Whatever the cause, the effect is a declining rate of profit and a lot of time and money wasted in developing a corporate pricing strategy. 

In order to sustain success in B2B, companies need to be able to be realize consistently excellent pricing performance. Companies struggle to translate pricing goals into clear actions for sales teams in a way that is fully governable and transparent. For businesses with large sales teams, account lists and customer-specific agreements, this task can feel impossible.  

The reason? Companies still lack a centralized, connected solution to quickly get information to sales teams when there are opportunities to improve pricing across their vast books of business. That is no longer the case, however. We’ve developed Campaign Manager™ with this B2B strategy-execution gap specifically in mind. In addition to the extensive product and sales actions enabled by the new application, Campaign Manager also enhances B2B companies’ ability to execute price actions with confidence.  

How it Works

Campaign Manager works hand-in-hand with Price IQ® and Price Manager™ by consuming insights and strategic input from these leading pricing tools and allowing users to create highly targeted campaign actions, which are then published to teams in the field or to direct channels. The closed-loop system tracks price performance and sales rep behavior, constantly providing feedback on which prices are working and which aren’t, as well as which reps may need nudging to comply to the pricing strategy. Campaigns are delivered into any business system that salespeople use every day. This seamless, trackable price delivery mechanism eliminates the guessing game: no more mass emailing spreadsheets, merely hoping sales reps will open them. 

Campaign Manager Pricing Use Cases

Last Price and Agreement Price Actions:

Most B2B companies recognize the need for a faster, easier way to communicate price agreement changes to sales across thousands of agreements. Price IQ and Price Manager work in tandem to first identify problem agreements and then mass update agreement lines to target prices. Campaign Manager provides the final, crucial piece: execution. It allows you to direct sales reps to follow-up on specific agreements with clear, targeted price updates.  

For non-agreement, “transaction” customers, Price IQ surfaces items whose price needs to be raised based on the last price that customer paid, or an average of the last prices paid over any user-defined time period. Campaign Manager then passes the baton over to sales to update prices on the next transaction. 

eCommerce Pricing Actions:

Taking advantage of the significant customer data collected through digital interactions and analyzed by Price IQ, Campaign Manager can publish timebound customer-specific, highly personalized promotional pricing recommendations on your eCommerce site.  

Promotional Pricing:

Scenario: An electronic components distributor wants to grow sales with a certain supplier, in order to trigger a year-end rebate and strengthen its partnership with the supplier. The distributor is a Zilliant customer, so its commercial team takes the following action: 

• Use Price Manager to apply a discount to a product category or set of SKUs they source from this supplier.  
• Use Sales IQ™ to identify growth actions specific to those products.  
• Use Campaign Manager to create a limited time promotional campaign targeting specific accounts identified by those growth actions.  

These actions can be published to an eCommerce site via Zilliant's Real-Time Pricing Engine, or to any selling tool for sales reps to act upon. 

Retention Pricing:

Scenario: An MRO distributor wants to reduce customer churn and reach out to customers who aren’t buying as much as they used to with special pricing to retain their business. Turning to their Zilliant toolset, the company: 

• Uses Sales IQ to identify “at-risk” customers that are showing early signs of defection in one or more product categories. 
• Use Price Manager to determine the appropriate discount to apply to a product category or set of SKUs. 
• Use Campaign Manager to create a recovery campaign identifying special pricing for targeted accounts, filtering out any customers who are currently paying below floor for those SKUs. 

Raise Below-Floor Prices:

Scenario: A building products manufacturer is taking a margin hit because its sales reps have a lot of discretion in setting prices for customers and they routinely set up special customer price exceptions. The pricing team addresses this by: 

• Using Price Manager to identify those customer-product combinations that are priced below floor.  
• Using Campaign Manager to move prices to floor or target and distribute price insights and guidance for sales reps to act on. 

Custom Actions

In addition to out-of-the-box pricing actions in Campaign Manager and the many use cases solved by combining Campaign Manager with another Zilliant solution, customers can also upload any user-defined custom actions. The product’s flexibility in this regard creates countless opportunities for targeted pricing campaigns. For example, one customer has come to us with the idea to use lost-quote data to inform a promotional pricing campaign targeted to those customers who did not ultimately buy. By loading its own custom quote data into Campaign Manager, the company will be able to aggressively re-engage prior lost business. 

Campaign Manager actions, whether out-of-the-box or custom, can be delivered anywhere they’re needed: Zilliant Sales Planner™, Deal Manager™ or any other system, such as a CRM, marketing automation tool, order entry system, or eCommerce site, via Zilliant's Real-Time Pricing Engine. 

We’re incredibly excited to offer these expanded pricing capabilities to the market while opening up our leading data science and management applications to new user types. Learn more below: 

Check out our brand-new Campaign Manager page and get in touch with us to brainstorm better campaign execution. 

Learn more by watching our on-demand webinar, "How to Translate Business Strategy Into Sales Action"