Solution Overview

Zilliant’s new features include:

• Pricing Analytics, which reportedly enable rapid insights into the full impact of pricing details for products/customers;
• Pricing Guidance, a deep integration between price optimization and configure, price and quote (CPQ) solutions; and
• Self-Service AI Assistant to configure the right deal through multiple channels like sales, partners and self-service.

Back Of The Box Details

With GenAI Pricing Analytics, customers can receive AI-generated insights to quickly take action, create meaningful reports for users and set up alerts to drive proactive price management.

For its part, Pricing Guidance helps ensure quotes are in line with revenue targets and reduce price discrepancies. Within the quoting process in Zilliant CPQ, a sales representative can immediately see a red, yellow or green light next to the price for every line item in the quote. Prices that fall within the price range will automatically be approved, while those that do not serve as a reminder to the sales rep that this quote will need to go through approval workflows.

Finally, Zilliant CPQ Self-Service AI Assistant allows users to configure the right deal through multiple channels like sales, partners and self-service. In the self-service experience, users will be able to have conversations with an AI assistant to help them find what they’re looking for.

What Makes It Special

Pricing is a C-suite priority as companies grapple with a new global economic environment. As a core strategic process that affects brand, buying experience and financials, pricing involves multiple departments such as sales and finance, but it’s often managed in disconnected spreadsheets and siloed. According to Zilliant, companies can infuse AI throughout the lifecycle to augment and automate critical pricing processes.

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The average B2B customer is also a digital consumer in their personal life and is used to the convenience of a B2C E-commerce experience. Customers now expect the same level of seamlessness from any B2B company they give their business to. Additionally, the newest generation of both buyers and sellers have high expectations for the modern digital shopping experience.

To reach today’s tech-savvy customers, convenience and technical prowess throughout the buying experience are no longer preferred but required. B2B practitioners must find the elements of B2C E-commerce that can be borrowed to create an effortless customer experience while also providing customers with competitive prices, product recommendations and real-time sales support.

Striking A Balance Between B2B & B2C

There are many aspects of the E-commerce experience that B2B sellers can borrow from B2C. However, it’s also important to acknowledge that the goal is not for B2B sellers to perfectly replicate a B2C experience, as there are inherent differences between B2B and B2C buyer expectations and needs. For example, B2B purchases are typically complex, with a drawn-out buying process that involves multiple stakeholders.

From a customer experience perspective, B2B sellers must figure out where it makes sense to bring in consumer-like elements of the purchasing experience. At the same time, there will always be customers that want to talk to a sales rep directly.

The ideal B2B customer journey is nuanced, and while some elements can be borrowed from B2C, there will always be needs that are unique to the B2B buying experience.

Powering Omnichannel Success

To power a seamless customer experience throughout the buyer journey, B2B companies must master the art of a smooth cross-channel handoff. Suppose a customer starts in a self-service environment but then wants to speak to a sales rep on the phone. In that case, the transition should be seamless, and the sales rep should acknowledge the upfront work the customer completed when browsing online. If there is dissonance between the customer’s experience in one channel versus the other, it can create friction in the buying process.

Sales reps in B2B must also recognize the unique needs of each account and match them across multiple touch points throughout the buying experience. B2B businesses actually have a unique advantage over B2C here: Since B2B transactions are typically more long-term partnerships, sellers often have a better sense of who their customers are and their unique expectations.

Customers want to pay for what they use, and every business is thinking about recurring revenue models to deliver value to customers. The key is continually earning customers’ trust every week, month or however long their subscription cadence is. Every time a customer’s subscription is up for renewal, it creates an opportunity to either lose or win back a customer.

The challenge (and opportunity) for B2B businesses is ensuring they deliver premium customer experiences throughout every point of interaction. Retaining existing customers is always cheaper than getting new ones, and customer loyalty and experience must be central to the B2B journey.

Defining The B2B Buying Journey

It is also important to acknowledge that strategies for creating an ideal purchasing experience can and should vary greatly depending on the nature of the product, even within the realm of B2B. For example, with a product that’s low complexity and higher volume, you likely want most customer interactions to be self-service since customers know what they want and expect immediate responses.

On the other hand, if you have a complex product that requires more guidance for customers, there might be a bigger emphasis on interactions with sales reps. With complex products and big-ticket items, customers often have difficulty choosing the right solution and need more guidance throughout the purchasing process. So, the buying experience for new customers must be carefully mapped out along with the experience for secondary purchases. Defining the buying journey based on your go-to-market motion and brand position is of the utmost importance.

The Future Of B2B E-Commerce

As technology continues to progress, customer experience standards will only keep rising. Transparency around the pricing process is no longer a preference but a demand. Additionally, we live in an age of instant gratification. Customers expect instant access to the product once purchased, and companies must adjust their strategy to ensure that’s possible.

The advancement of generative AI and machine learning is also revolutionizing how companies operate. These new technologies can reduce the burden of manual tasks for employees and allow them to focus on setting goals and bringing visions to life. Leveraging these new technologies to optimize workflows and maximize employee productivity will be essential to stay afloat in the new era of B2B E-commerce.

B2B and B2C customers alike want to feel understood, appreciated and valued. As businesses of every variety face tighter budget constraints and an increasingly demanding audience, flexibility and the ability to adapt to the ever-changing customer landscape will be the key to long-term success.

Kylie Fuentes is the Chief Product Officer of Zilliant, a B2B sales and pricing software.

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Salespeople, operating on little more than intuition, will sometimes quote prices that benefit their client relationships more than the company’s finances. No amount of thoroughly analyzed pricing reports, massive spreadsheets, business intelligence tools or strategic financial goals can override gut-feel pricing.

This isn’t due to some intrinsic flaw in our sales teams — it’s due to misaligned incentives. Pricing teams can’t provide market-aligned, updated pricing for each unique scenario salespeople face, which causes a lack of contextual rationale as to why prices need to change and, more importantly, why the new prices are justified given a complex set of circumstances. So, salespeople shot from the hip, pricing in their own unique way. I have witnessed this problem grow so profound that pricing was referred to in jest as “sales prevention.”

The growth of E-commerce and the impacts of Covid-19 exacerbated the pricing-sales challenge, as the majority of transactions shifted to digital channels and presented new, difficult-to-tackle pricing considerations. Only by standardizing and digitizing pricing processes will businesses operate at an internet-fast speed and scale. When deployed thoughtfully, these new processes can fix the long-standing misalignment between sales and finance and lay the foundation for future competitive success.

A Quickening Evolution

The disruptions of 2020 forced many businesses to operate almost entirely online and adhere to a new set of rules. Interactions grew less personal, and clients expected faster response times and tailored pricing/product recommendations — if those instantaneous recommendations don’t meet customers’ expectations, they can (and will) jump to a competitor’s site.

By forcing most transactions to occur remotely, E-commerce quickly became the most essential sales channel. In the process, the pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities of the low-tech model, particularly with respect to the advanced pricing, product and other commercial recommendations that customers expect. Additionally, sales teams themselves had to quickly adapt to life without in-person customer visits, pivoting to teleconferencing and videoconferencing to interact with customers.

Given this abrupt shift, it’s more critical than ever to have dynamic solutions that can quickly ingest new data and information and produce tailored insights such as the right price to quote, the right product to pitch, at the right moment and in the right channel.

Humans & Technology, Working Together

Data science and software have evolved to solve these complex issues, “eating” spreadsheets to provide updated, market-aligned pricing for every possible scenario a salesperson might face. The internet has a greater memory capacity than teams of humans; it operates at a speed and scale that is computed in nanoseconds and zettabytes. Attempting to capture the scale and scope of E-commerce sales on a spreadsheet becomes an exercise in futility.

The next step involves the people in the organization. Change begins with the pricing team, who are closest to the new data-driven tools. Pricing analysts spend less time reviewing and approving pricing exception requests from sales and more time deploying margin- and revenue-driving pricing strategies across the business and across channels. The pricing role thus elevates from the blocking and tackling to be much more strategic. As the company’s strategy evolves, pricing managers quickly adapt their campaigns accordingly.

Out in the field (or on the phone), salespeople can proactively offer prices that are competitive within their target markets instead of asking for pricing approval. They respond faster to customers and ultimately close more profitable deals. With embedded pricing analytics, it’s easy for them to dig into the rationale behind each price and see that price recommendations are in-step with similar customer, product, geographic, competitive or other circumstances, allowing them to quote with confidence.

The State Of B2B Sales

Traditional B2B sales practices, such as in-person sales and “seat of your pants” pricing, are now obsolete. The online competitive field is increasing quickly, becoming crowded by new, born-in-the-cloud competitors as well as traditional competitors that are rapidly enhancing their digital capabilities. Not to mention the elephant in the B2B room: With five million products and frictionless service, Amazon Business is an ever-growing threat.

In isolation, the occasional missed margin opportunity, commoditized product or sale lost to the competition does not pose an existential threat. But there’s a nagging (and correct) instinct that small improvements can lead to big gains. In time, these small improvements will not only digitally transform your B2B sales team to keep up with trends in E-commerce but prepare it for a data-intensive future.

Greg Peters is the Chairman, CEO and President of Zilliant. Under Peters’ leadership, Zilliant has grown into one of the leading providers in predictive B2B sales guidance and pioneered new approaches for companies to harness the power of big data. Prior to Zilliant, Peters served as president and CEO of Vignette. He also served as president and chief executive officer of Logic Works, Inc. and controller and chief financial officer for Micrografx, Inc. Greg sits on the board of directors at LiquidFrameworks and Rhodes College, and is an accomplished industry speaker who has appeared at numerous leading industry events.

The post Pricing Has Evolved. So Must Your Sales Team. appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Campaign Manager is designed to provide sellers with customer-specific pricing and product recommendations, informing them of what product/solution needs to be sold, when the best time to sell is and how to best market it to buyers. Its capabilities include:

• The ability to drive buyer action based on insights from any source integrated with Zilliant or uploaded into the app;
• Administrator functions for prioritizing and refining actions, such as setting time boundaries for campaigns, adding talk tracks and publishing in desired channels;
• Providing data and analytics at the account level; and
• The ability to deliver actions from the app to other systems such as CRMs, marketing automation tools, E-commerce sites and more.

Zilliant’s AI-based engine, Sales IQ, is designed to provide predictive sales analytics to generate customer insights and drive buyer action. The engine’s expansion will enhance analytics capabilities, allowing marketers to take new sales campaign actions, including:

• Prospecting and whitespace actions for determining best-fit products for prospects;
• Win-back actions designed to generate tailored product pitches; and
• Product substitution actions that assist with targeted selling of preferred brands or substitutes.

“Even with significant investments in sales, mobile and E-commerce technology, it’s still incredibly challenging for companies to execute their evolving growth and profit strategies with speed and consistency, particularly in environments with expansive customer counts, prospect databases and product catalogs,” said Pete Eppele, SVP of Products and Science at Zilliant, in a statement. “Sales IQ and Campaign Manager provide a unique, best-in-class capability to turn data into actionable insights that align sales teams to corporate strategy in a way that simply hasn’t been possible before. With this combination, companies are consistently seeing millions of dollars of impact to revenue, profit, wallet-share and customer value.”

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