Own Your Future! Four Takeaways from MindShare 2023

Last week, Zilliant customers, partners, and prospective customers from around the world gathered in Austin, TX, for MindShare 2023. After last year’s exciting return to our first in-person MindShare since 2019, MindShare 2023 was perhaps our most successful ever as attendance soared past 2022 numbers. The energy of MindShare 2023 was palpable as Zilliant Engagement Manager Matt Knaggs kicked off day one with a raucous call-and-response exercise of, “Own Your Future!” In fact, “Own Your Future!” emerged as the prevailing theme of this year’s MindShare as many keynotes, customer success stories, and breakout sessions looked toward the future and how technology and software can unlock profitability by transforming the way we price and sell.

Here are four takeaways from MindShare 2023: 

Transforming Pricing and Selling is the Key to Profitable Growth

“Our goal is to help you grow profitability,” said Zilliant CEO Pascal Yammine during his MindShare 2023 opening remarks.

Yammine went on to explain that Zilliant is investing in three strategic three areas to help achieve that goal: integrated insights, platform, and expertise. We integrate Zilliant insights into companies’ business processes using our scalable, performant, and reliable platform, while bringing unmatched expertise from our team and our partners. This formula ensures we are ready to help companies across many industries transform their commercial approach.

As an example, a global pricing manager from a fuel and lubricants manufacturer shared how the company’s manual pricing processes were no match for increasing cost changes. After engaging Zilliant for a 12-week, region-specific trial run of our market-leading price optimization solution Price IQ®, executives signed a contract for global expansion after only week six. The manufacturer is now utilizing Price IQ® across its entire organization to bring more science into pricing processes, enable customer segmentation, and gain a better understanding of price elasticity.

Zilliant is Poised to Tackle Today’s Structural and Technological Shifts

Emerging and disruptive new technologies, such as AI, were major conversation points for this year’s MindShare. Futurist and bestselling author Byron Reese spoke at length about how industries undergoing dramatic changes can function and be successful. Technological advances may in fact open more doors than close them when it comes to the job market and innovation.

“Technology allows us to manifest uniquely human things that machines can’t do,” said Reese during his MindShare 2023 Friday morning keynote.

During the Power Intelligent Commerce with the Zilliant Platform presentation on day one, Zilliant Chief Product Officer Kyle Fuentes addressed emerging AI directly. “Zilliant has always been a pioneer in the AI space, and we are uniquely poised to lean into today’s structural shifts,” said Fuentes.

Zilliant’s product roadmap, vision and strategy will be shaped by the structural shifts of generative AI, application advancements, and human-centric interfaces. Expect more frictionless workflows and open ecosystems, more human-to-human interaction emulation, and less of a technology learning curve.

Change Management is Critical to Success

For many companies, implementing pricing and revenue management and optimization software is only half the battle. Perhaps even more important is driving true change across the organization to ensure adoption and buy-in.

When Zilliant SVP of Customer Success and Support Nathan Rabold took the stage at MindShare, he explained that truly knowing our customer is the top priority for Zilliant’s customer success and support teams. We partner with our customers to understand their business and needs, proactively meet with them to measure success, and identify and remove any obstacles in the way of customer value.

One of the major customer support initiatives recently made by Zilliant was the launch of our new Documentation Portal. This site is a powerful resource built in the spirit of self-service that gives our customers access to everything Zilliant – including user guides, configuration guides, and release notes.

But it wasn’t just Zilliant discussing the importance of change management. During one of the customer sessions, the senior director of pricing strategy at a global foodservice distributor discussed embarking on a sales enablement journey with Zilliant. A major challenge within the company was getting its large, seasoned sales team to adopt price guidance consistently.

The company launched a substantial organization-wide change management effort in which meaningful sales messaging was intertwined with the sale team’s core mission and their key objectives. In the end, the distributor’s rigorous sales enablement journey resulted in more than 80% above-floor adoption of Zilliant-generated guidance.

“Understanding and empathy is key when it comes to earning adoption,” said the distributor’s senior director of pricing strategy.

Enable Sales with Revenue Operations & Intelligence

Zilliant Director of Product Management Brian Hirt addressed this challenge of collaborating and influencing sales team behavior. Revenue operations and intelligence tools play an important part in enabling sales and executing revenue growth strategies.

Hirt walked through the traditional, manual process some companies might use to launch a new product line, which elicited knowing laughs from the MindShare attendees due to how overly convoluted and complex the process was. But solutions such as Zilliant Sales IQ™ and Campaign Manager™ offer a simplified and data-driven process that easily identifies winnable revenue growth opportunities, publishes account-specific actions to CRM systems, and tracks and measures campaign results. In short, revenue operations and intelligence is about rethinking sales collaboration by delivering bite-sized actions to sellers so they can better execute without time-consuming administrative or analysis work.

“Revenue operations and intelligence tools are critical for executing on sales strategies,” said Hirt. 

Thanks to all of our MindShare 2023 attendees and presenters for making it an overwhelming success!

Contact us for more pricing and sales insights.