New Product Alert: Zilliant Campaign Manager™

Yesterday we announced the release of Zilliant Campaign Manager™, the newest product in our portfolio of data-driven, cloud-native SaaS offerings. This landmark release embodies Zilliant’s foundational mission: Analyze huge amounts of data and do something smart with it.  

Campaign Manager enables countless smart decisions and closes the strategy-to-execution gap. For nearly a decade Zilliant Sales IQ™ has helped sales teams identify and execute on recovery and growth opportunities in their business. Campaign Manager takes these concepts to the next level. Using the Sales IQ engine as the brains behind the scenes, Campaign Manager delivers a host of out-of-the-box action types and offers intuitive self-service for customers to scope, prioritize, refine and execute campaigns. 

Let’s define exactly what we are talking about when we say “campaign.” At any given time, a B2B marketing or sales operations department has a portfolio of initiatives that they want to push out to their field sellers. They may want to unload distressed inventory, ward off a competitive threat in a specific region, capture a whitespace opportunity or any number of other potential campaigns.  

We’ve heard from our customers many times how difficult it is to pin down the most effective strategies to drive margin and revenue growth, and then translate those strategies into timely guidance and actions for sales teams. Simply capturing the attention of the sales team with each “flavor-of-the-month” campaign is daunting, and it’s even more challenging to track the effectiveness of campaigns.  

Campaign Manager gives teams the ability to execute this process systematically – from data analysis to scoping to sales delivery to closed-loop tracking of results. No longer do operations teams need to email out a spreadsheet of customer and product combinations to 100 sales reps and cross their fingers that it gets opened. Campaign Manager actions make life easier on the sales team, as well. Instead of a million emails, a salesperson receives targeted actions all in one place, with clearly defined marching orders and potential financial impact. 

Campaign Manager Action Types

With actions inside Campaign Manager, B2B companies gain the ability to create and manage pricing, sales and product campaigns that inform sellers what to sell, when to sell it, and how to sell it, as well as publish customer-specific pricing and product recommendations to eCommerce channels. New out-of-the-box action types include:   

• Win-Back - Generate tailored actions for recapturing lost business
• Contract Compliance - Track and rectify contracts not meeting volume commitments
• Inventory - Target excess inventory and get it off the shelves
• Whitespace/Prospecting - Determine the best fit products for net-new prospects
• Product Substitution - Target the sale of preferred brands or substitutes
• Agreement Price - Identify customer-specific agreement prices that need to be updated
• Last Price - Identify non-agreement customers whose price needs to be updated based on an average of previous prices paid 

Custom Actions

In addition to out-of-the-box actions generated by Zilliant’s IQ engines, customers can upload any user-defined custom actions into Campaign Manager and execute all the same. The product’s flexibility in this regard creates countless opportunities for targeted selling campaigns. For example, one use case that a customer is exploring is a systematic follow-up campaign on quotes that didn’t close over the last 12 months. 

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. 

Closed-Loop Tracking and Continuous Campaign Improvement

Consider this scenario: you spend multiple hours collecting inventory data and cross-checking it with procurement plans and sales data to reach the conclusion that 25 discrete product categories are in distress and must be moved as soon as possible. You carefully craft a spreadsheet for each sales rep full of potential regions and customers who can take this discounted inventory off your hands. Then you email these out and... wait and wonder. 

Unfortunately, this is the reality for too many B2B marketing and sales operations managers. Without a sense of who is taking action, how aggressively they’re pursuing opportunities and the resulting customer feedback, there is little sense of how the campaign is performing or how to improve it. We’ve heard these laments from many customers, which is why we’ve built Campaign Manager with a closed-loop mechanism to measure campaign results and sales rep behavior. Now it’s possible to know in real-time if they are pursuing, dismissing and/or winning business based on customer insights. This feedback informs the prioritization and delivery of actions in each subsequent campaign cycle. 

Detailed data and rich visual analytics are available at an account-level for each action. This is extremely important to sales reps who want to understand the revenue impact and profitability of requested actions being served up and be able to immediately – and confidently – start a highly tailored conversation with a customer. 

Informing Direct Channels

Insights gathered from executed campaigns in Campaign Manager can become the source of intelligence that feeds into marketing automation systems, eCommerce or anywhere that direct digital communication with customers is taking place. Decisions like “Which products am I going to promote with which customers?” and “What’s the call-to-action in my marketing drip campaign?” are made easier with campaign data and the seamless integration of Campaign Manager with any customer-facing system. 

We’re incredibly excited to offer these expanded selling 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.