Turbocharge Revenue by Connecting Sales with Pricing

Buying & Selling Is More Complex Than Ever

The burden on sales operations is huge – the market continues to evolve, but the pressures to deliver on revenue and profit remains. 

For sales, sales ops, and rev ops leaders, that means navigating the ups and downs of the market and competition, while having a growing number of channels to serve, including your own sellers, resellers and partners. Your customers are expecting B2C buying experiences even in the world of B2B manufacturing and distribution. 

And most of all – to win deals – to get the best quotes out, with the right price and products – sales needs to wade through internal approvals, price lists, and either too much or too little data. 

At the root of many sales challenges is a broken pricing process. For many B2B companies, pricing is fractured and siloed across multiple systems or spreadsheets. Without a central source of pricing truth, there’s a lack of control and flexibility to manage pricing and efficiently deliver that pricing to sellers. 

Here are some major pain points for today’s sales teams that stem from problematic pricing: 

• Slow time to quote resulting in lost deals and missed opportunities: The first to submit a market-priced quote tends to win the deal, but with long approval workflows and inaccurate quotes, deals are lost to your competitors. 
• Margin leakage from inconsistent pricing and lack of discount management: Whether it is complex configurations that are error-prone, over discounting, pricing based on stale costs, or lack of pricing transparency, it all adds up. 
• Inconsistent customer experiences across channels and inability for customers to self-serve: Even in manufacturing, customers are looking for B2C buying experiences in a B2B environment. Without a frictionless, ecommerce-driven buying experience, customers will turn to other suppliers.
• Lack of intelligence for sellers to get the right products, at the right price, to the right customer: It’s easy to leave money on the table when sellers are dealing with information overload and can’t operationalize customer-specific insights fast enough. Valuable data is locked in ERPs while sales works predominately in your CRM.

Effective selling is challenging because operations is struggling to balance multiple channels with little transparency into what each channel is doing. There aren’t enough guardrails to help guide sellers or create seamless self-service portals for customers. On the back end, sellers are slowed down by spreadsheets and manual processes and layers of approvals that lead to long turnaround times. Scaling the business becomes impossible, and there’s very little real-time transparency into margins or profitability.

Sales Investments Continue to Underwhelm

Businesses are spending millions of dollars on CPQ projects - they must consider costs not only of the software itself, but also the costs for integrations, change management, and ongoing maintenance and updates. 

At the end of the day, businesses won’t be able to overcome some of these hurdles because of the disconnect with pricing data. If your CPQ selection doesn’t include accurate pricing with the right guardrails in place, your sales team will still be handcuffed. 

Without the intelligence to know what sales actions and opportunities to take, sales is at a significant disadvantage when it comes to growing market share.

Buying & Selling Must Connected to Pricing

“When there’s a business problem – say too much inventory becoming distressed and getting written off – the common reflex is to throw more spreadsheets at it. But the reality is that manual tools create bottlenecks when it comes to getting sellers what they need to successfully execute deals.” said Rob Pedigo, senior director of pricing strategy at Dawn Foods. “When you connect your sales process with pricing, you can accelerate revenue growth by empowering sales teams to confidently close deals and quickly deliver quotes with the right price strategies and sales motions.” 

By effectively managing the entire pricing lifecycle, finance and sales leaders can ensure the right price and intelligence is delivered to sellers where and when they need it the most. 

But pricing doesn’t stop at finance. While they can effectively manage and optimize pricing, it’s up to sales and rev ops leaders to then deliver that data to sellers, resellers, and customers and influence sales decisions across the business while keeping a pulse on revenue metrics. The key is to connect finance and pricing, and also leverage capabilities that are agile enough for the manufacturing and distribution space. 

The ideal solution for sales would be something purpose-built for the industry but also brings together finance and sales data to connect silos across the organization. With the right revenue optimization and sales acceleration tools, companies reap the benefits. Sales leaders can better work with their pricing counterparts; while ensuring they are delivering the right price to the right customer at the right time with the confidence and transparency needed to win the deal. 

When you integrate pricing and sales intelligence into the entire selling process you can tap into: 

• Seamless configuration and quoting of complex products and services
• Full pricing transparency 
• Data intelligence that enables sellers to close deals faster
• Seamless approvals, where finance doesn’t slow down sales cycles
• More time for sales reps to focus on what they do best: sell

This is part of a series on the Pricing Lifecycle. Read our previous blog posts to learn what the pricing lifecycle is, discover the 10 most common signs of a broken pricing process, why pricing is more important than ever, and five challenges pricing leaders cannot ignore.