How Three Key B2B Roles Benefit from Campaign Manager™

You may know Zilliant as the leading pricing and sales software vendor. While accurate, this impression is incomplete, especially since the early November release of Campaign Manager. While the new application works seamlessly with our suite of existing solutions to help pricing teams and sellers become more targeted and effective at their jobs, Campaign Manager also brings value to an expanded set of users within a B2B organization.  

Zilliant’s mission has always been to use data to empower smart decisions that drive revenue and margin growth. That mission can and should be accomplished by multiple departments of an organization, working in harmony to get the right products in front of the right customers at the right time, like legs on a centipede all moving in the same direction. A lofty goal in a large B2B company, to be sure, made more difficult by organizational silos and massive amounts of data. Shaping this information into coherent strategies and translating plans into action proves too challenging for most, as marketing goes one way and product management goes another, with sales lagging behind.  

With Campaign Manager, users from disparate departments get back on the same page. They are able to scope, refine, communicate, execute and track strategic commercial campaigns, all within the same platform. To illustrate this, we’ll take a look at three user bases and how Zilliant’s latest application helps them accomplish their mission, together. 

For Category Managers:

Category managers must have their fingers on the pulse of the market in order to make the right promotional and pricing decisions to maximize sales within a category. This means analyzing customer buying patterns and future needs, then turning those insights into strategies to make their product or service attractive to buyers. The discovery process yields product- and customer-specific campaign ideas that must be swiftly acted upon to beat competitors to the punch. They can’t afford for the time spent collecting and analyzing data to be wasted by lackluster execution. When pushed out effectively, these campaigns can bring tremendous return for the business. Campaign Manager’s out-of-the-box and custom actions help category managers accomplish the following to consistently make success a reality: 

• Win-Back: At a food service distributor, a category manager’s research determines that sales growth of parmesan cheese has been flagging and that three years ago 10% of its sales went to a single restaurant chain that no longer buys from them. The category manager can use Campaign Manager to transform this insight into a sales rep action with an effective win-back product pitch. 
• Whitespace/Prospecting: A Sales IQ™ user at an MRO distributor can match Jan/San prospects to their closest peer group in its customer database to uncover specific product category recommendations. This insight is invaluable to a category manager who is looking for a tailored pitch to whitespace accounts. Now with Campaign Manager, he or she can push a prospect-specific action out to a sales rep with the click of a button. 
• Inventory: A significant source of stress for electronic components distributors is aging or excess inventory that’s eating a hole in profitability and causing them to undershoot sales targets. To reverse this trend, a category manager can quickly activate an inventory campaign with insights generated from Sales IQ that highlight the customers most likely to buy the excess product, then scope, filter and prioritize targeted customer actions in Campaign Manager before publishing them out to sales or marketing. 
• Customer-Specific Product Promotions: A category manager at a specialty chemicals distributor wants to run a promotion to grow sales with a specific supplier, either because she wants to hit a year-end rebate or because the supplier is a cheaper alternative. With Campaign Manager, she can create a limited time promotional campaign targeting specific accounts likely to buy that supplier’s products, as identified by growth insights. 

For Marketing Managers:

The messaging bridge between a B2B company and its customers, marketing managers are charged with tailoring the right promotions across multiple channels to turn prospects into customers and existing accounts into longtime loyalty buyers. They leverage marketing automation tools to get messages out at scale and are constantly testing and refining promotions. They also must keep their sales team up-to-date with the latest flavor of the month campaigns. This requires seamless coordination with customer data providers like category managers to understand where opportunities lie and execution from their internal consumers - sales reps in the field. Here are some reasons why Zilliant Director, Product Management Brian Hirt says that “Campaign Manager is the tool I wish I had when I was a marketing manager at an electrical distributor”: 

• Communication and Accountability: Marketing managers at B2B companies spend an inordinate amount of time planning precise campaigns, including win-back, whitespace, product substitution, inventory and customer-specific product/price promotions.  
• For many, including Hirt in his past life, these carefully crafted campaigns were compiled in spreadsheets and sent out to large sales teams via email. That’s where their visibility into the campaign tends to end. Beyond badgering sales reps to 1) open their email, and 2) take action, they lack the ability to follow a campaign all the way through. 
• With Campaign Manager, marketing managers significantly cut down the time it takes to scope and push out campaigns, while closed-loop tracking provides real-time insight into sales rep behavior. Now, instead of a bunch of emails, reps have all the targeted customer actions in one place, be it their CRM platform or any other selling tool they use daily. 
• The same closed-loop tracking reports back the performance of campaigns that are sent out via marketing automation tools or to eCommerce sites. 
• Continuous Campaign Improvement: Another massive time suck for marketers is reporting. How many customers or sales rep took an action? What was the cost-per-lead? How much revenue can be tied back to my latest promotion? Campaign Manager’s tracking mechanism measures incremental sales resulting and provides rich, detailed visual analytics. 
• Campaign Manager doesn’t treat each promotion as a one-off. Instead, each marketing push is used to inform future campaigns. This is made possible by the closed-loop tracking and visual analytics that tell the story in no uncertain terms: did the campaign work or not, and why? These answers inform the prioritization and delivery of actions in each subsequent campaign cycle. 

For Sales Operations Managers:

Sales operations teams are the unsung heroes of the B2B sales organization. Like referees or offensive linemen, they are often only front and center when they’ve made a glaring mistake. This pressure can create undue stress and hamper the operations team’s goal of reducing friction in the sales process. In order to be successful, they must remove blockers for sales reps, build and track KPIs, ensure the tools used by sales reps are delivering the right information and all the while hold reps accountable to corporate sales strategies. Campaign Manager eases their burden significantly, as demonstrated by the following targeted actions delivered directly to the relevant sales-facing tools or direct channels: 

• Whitespace/Prospecting: An evergreen initiative for most specialty chemicals manufacturers is uncovering new prospects to sell to. Sales operations managers and their direct reports at these manufacturers can sink a ton of time into CRM deep dives and custom product pitches that amount to guesswork that gets handed off to sellers in the field. Campaign Manager consumes automated growth insights and customer profiles from Sales IQ that identify products to pitch to whitespace customers. It then solves the execution problem by allowing operations teams to push highly relevant whitespace actions to sales reps with full closed-loop tracking. 
• Growth/Recovery: Imagine you run sales operations at a distribution company with massive replenishment business. Customers are constantly defecting for unknown reasons to the competition and you know you could be selling more product categories to current customers. You can set up monthly growth and recovery campaigns in Campaign Manager that are informed by customer churn and account-specific growth insights from Sales IQ and regularly surface targeted actions to sales reps in an easy-to-use reporting interface. With a few clicks you can see which growth and recovery actions are being pursued, dismissed and won, all without picking up the phone to track down a single seller.