Making Price a Customer Satisfaction Driver

MindShare Europe, the leading B2B pricing and sales conference, is taking place on 13 November in Paris, France. One of the main reasons B2B professionals attend is to watch their peers on stage discussing how they overcame complex business challenges with innovative technology and by changing the way they work. As part of a series of presentation previews, here’s a peek at what one of our customers, a Medical Consumables Distributor, will be sharing on the main stage.

We want to lead our industry in customer service, but we found pricing and quoting to be one area that consistently hampered the customer experience. Since we serve such a wide range of customers across different industries and we supply millions of products, the right price depends on order size, frequency, customer size, and many other factors. Without a way to handle this complexity, we tended to sell based on ad-hoc and cost-plus pricing strategies.

Given the scale of our business and lack of a cohesive pricing strategy, it was possible to call us at five different times of the day and get five different prices from three different people. Not only was this unpleasant for the customer, it also turned our sales and pricing teams into a quote machine, in which many man-hours and resources went into creating more than 100,000 quotes daily with little governance or guidance.

Zilliant helped us understand the scope of the problem and the possibilities for future-state pricing practices that would drive customer satisfaction. An analysis performed by Zilliant revealed price inconsistency ran rampant, i.e. large customers often received higher prices than smaller customers, tiny orders carried the same discount as large orders, market prices were misaligned, and it all resulted in a low quote conversion rate.

Attend the session to learn why we chose to trust Zilliant as a price optimization partner in a wide-ranging project that began in France and Germany before being rolled out to a total of 19 countries in Europe. An effort of this scope meant communication, training and change management had to be as much a focus as the new technology we were adopting. In this presentation will walk through our experience, lessons learned and plans for further reliance on intelligent pricing and sales solutions.