Get a Quick Start on Agreement Management

For B2B companies, managing the customer price agreement process is complex and burdensome. The under-management of agreements, especially in times of inflation and market volatility, results in margin loss over time. It’s time to enable proactive price agreement management for improved profitability. With Zilliant’s Quick Start package for Agreement Management, B2B companies can deploy Zilliant Deal Manager™ in as few as four weeks.

The Fastest Path to Proactive Agreement Management

The Quick Start package for Agreement Management focuses on enabling sales reps to create, manage and renew customer price agreements more proactively to improve profitability.

Quick Start for Agreement Management enables customers to get started with Zilliant in as few as four weeks. This means Zilliant customers realize faster time to value and benefit from proactive management of customer price agreements, which are often under managed and an inadvertent source of margin loss.

When it comes to managing customer price agreements, many B2B companies run into these common challenges:

• Set-And-Forget: Sales reps often set agreement prices in net price terms, and the dollar amount is added directly into the ERP record with no end date. Therefore, prices never get updated and even knowing how many customer price agreements exist in your business – or measuring their margin impact – is an impossible task. 
• Margin Leakage: Sales reps set up agreements without guidance and rely on intuition. This often leads to over-discounting and pricing that doesn’t reflect the full value of products or services. Given that customer price agreements are often locked away in ERP systems, spreadsheets or even email, a company’s ability to react to volatility and update pricing is far too slow and results in margin loss over time. 
• Strategic Misalignment: The prices that salespeople set in agreements often don’t align with business strategy and are often set outside of centralized control. Ultimately, the gap between standardized pricing and customer price agreements widens over time.

In today’s era marked by inflation and cost volatility, companies need a proactive and scalable way to understand the profitability of agreements while providing sales reps with an intuitive solution that streamlines the creation, management and renewal of customer price agreements. Consider this:

“The management of customer price agreements in disparate systems or on spreadsheets makes executing timely price updates in response to cost changes or other market factors difficult and time consuming, resulting in lost margin over time,” said Zilliant Chief Executive Officer Pascal Yammine. “With upwards of 50 percent of revenue transacted on agreements in many businesses, this undermanaged pricing process is ripe for an overhaul. That’s why we’re thrilled to offer Quick Start for Agreement Management to enable our customers to take advantage of the rich functionality in Deal Manager™, accelerate their time to value, and enable their sales team to proactively set and manage more profitable customer price agreements.”

Quick Start for Agreement Management is the fastest path to halt margin loss in customer price agreements and empowers sales reps to actively set and manage agreements. The application also integrates seamlessly with Zilliant’s price optimization and management applications.

Read more: What’s Missing In CPQ: Intelligent Deal & Agreement Management

FAQ

What is the Zilliant Quick Start Program? 

The Zilliant Quick Start program consists of packaged solutions to specific pricing and sales challenges, each of which can be up and running within the span of three to eight weeks, work seamlessly with each other on the same platform, and are extensible to fit the needs of B2B companies. 

Quick Start pairs the flexibility and power of Zilliant’s cloud-native platform with out-of-the-box, packaged solutions that accelerate customers’ time to value and benefit from price and revenue optimization and management software. This means that our industry-leading software is now able to start delivering value for customers faster than any other vendor in the market. Power meets speed.  

Why should B2B companies consider agreement management?

Agreement management encompasses every aspect of the agreement lifecycle – from negotiation to creation to updates to renewals. Agreements exist in most B2B companies and can be managed in a variety of ways: everything from manual and ad-hoc to fully automated, centralized cloud-native systems. These processes are sometimes handled a configure price quote (CPQ) tool or managed directly in an ERP. But agreement management functionality is not a key focus or mature capability within the most CPQ solutions.

B2B manufacturers, distributors, and services companies are finding that status quo deal management processes are no longer feasible. Best-in-class deal management solutions can:

Centralize all agreements Ensure new agreements are created at prices that reflect the customer relationship and margin goals Provide a mechanism for mass updating agreement lines Facilitate seamless communication between pricing, sales, and end customers

What is Deal Manager™?

Zilliant Deal Manager is a one-stop shop for the creation, management, and approval of customer agreements and contracts that helps companies ensure these don’t become a source of margin leakage – now and in the future. The application can execute mass updates, deliver insights, streamline workflows and approvals, and allows for seamless data and ERP integration.