Distributors operate in complex pricing environments with thousands of customers and SKUs. Unsurprisingly, in these situations, many companies struggle to maintain optimal margins on each individual transaction. After all, how can salespeople be expected to price each opportunity correctly to preserve margin? It’s virtually impossible without proper guidance on where to quote each specific customer and product combination.
We’ve recently integrated our data-driven pricing guidance into the WebPresented CRM (WPCRM) quoting interface to help companies address these important challenges.
Pricing Guidance for Salespeople
Many distributor sales teams enter orders and generate quotes every day without the help of researched pricing recommendations. Not only does this leave money on the table, it highlights a need for improvement in pricing consistency. How consistent are the pricing habits throughout your sales team?
That’s why we’re excited to introduce SPARXiQ Price Bands™. Price Bands™ is a plugin that provides WebPresented users with real-time pricing guidance based on customer and product information. The quoting interface provides recommended red (good), yellow (better) and green (best) price points for each line item. While green price points are ideal, the red and yellow levels are still acceptable and provide control over overrides to ensure that salespeople don’t generate unprofitable quotes or orders.
With intelligent pricing guardrails, it’s possible to provide flexibility and discipline at the same time.
Streamline the Price Quoting Process
Distributor sales teams may have to go to one of several different sources for pricing information. I’m talking about the numerous calls made to inside sales, branch managers and sales leaders that are sometimes necessary to acquire pricing approvals and guidance.
Price Bands™, delivered in WPCRM, automates the intel gathering process for distributor sales reps by providing pre-approved pricing on the spot. And, as distributors know too well, quote turnaround speed determines success in many cases.
Equip Salespeople for Negotiation
A SellingBrew study showed that 65% of buyers have been formally trained in negotiation, and today’s buyers have more competitive information available than ever before. With this in mind, sales teams must be equipped with the right resources and data to negotiate with these customers.
In addition to recommended price points, Price Bands™ shows B/E (Break Even) calculations to help sellers negotiate better terms during the quoting process. The customer insight this tool provides, such as a haggle barometer, gives your salespeople knowledge and leverage to work better with their clients.
Create Better Pricing Decisions
In addition to allowing your sales team to build optimized quotes, Price Bands™ informs users why a price point is being recommended. The dashboard shows some of the metrics and analytics that determine the target price point. Your sales team can create a quote, based on price banding analysis, while also gaining a better understanding that helps them make smarter pricing decisions on an ongoing basis.
As your sales team makes pricing decisions using Price Bands™, you’ll start to see patterns that reveal how effective your company’s price setting is. Some companies even take things a step further and tie sales commission to the margin resulting from pricing decisions. This approach can increase overall profit margin for your company, while encouraging your sales team to secure the best price possible.
Gain Sales Insight While Boosting Profits
By focusing on Green-Yellow-Red price banding, companies can start building a culture of pricing behavior around target price points rather than cost-plus or gross margin percent. As we’ve seen through our work with hundreds of distributors, selling at the right price is the most effective way to boost the bottom line. Adding Price Bands™ directly into the quoting process is one of the easiest ways to accomplish this and discover profit gains of 1 to 2 percent of affected sales.
We’re excited to help distributors empower sales reps with optimized pricing recommendations using SPARXiQ Price Bands™, directly integrated into WebPresented Full Box CRM. This easy-to-use CRM plugin saves valuable time in developing quotes, ensures quotes are profitable, and helps your sales team understand what factors determine a target price point.
Webinar Recording
Delivering Effective Pricing Guidance to Your Salespeople with WPCRM and SPARXiQ Price Bands
Gregory Smith and James Gerdes from WebPresented explore the WPCRM platform and how the latest features, including SPARXiQ Price Bands, can help distributor sales reps maximize efficiency.
