Distributor Partners with Zilliant for Future-Proof Pricing and Sales Transformation

A global plastics distributor with more than 4,000 customers and 9,500 products needed to transform and modernize its pricing and sales approach. The company sold to more than 60 countries and used spreadsheets to manage purchase prices, deliveries, and warehousing costs. Manual pricing was slow and inconsistent. This created complexity and put the distributor at a competitive disadvantage when it came to time-to-quote.

Additionally, the distributor found that its sellers needed timely and accurate price guidance. The company’s sales reps typically used cost-plus pricing instead of focusing on the needs of the market, which resulted in “best guess” pricing and predictably uneven profitability. Sellers would also often lose deals because they were slow to calculate prices by hand when costs changed.

Plastics Industry from a Distributor’s Perspective

• Traditional Person-to-Person Business
• Limited Integrated Supply Chain Technologies
• Spreadsheets for Everything
• Speed is Critical

Beginning a Zilliant-Powered Pricing Transformation

In 2020, the distributor partnered with Zilliant and launched an effort to improve control over profitability and empower sellers. The company implemented Zilliant Price Management, which streamlines pricing tasks and gives commercial teams control over the pricing process, as the pricing team’s central database. Now, price updates based on market indicators could be made in hours rather than monthly and differentiated pricing for end markets and regions was enabled.

The distributor also leveraged Zilliant Agreements Management, a one-stop-shop to manage customer price agreements, to simplify quoting processes and improve speed to serve. Agreements Management enabled auto-approval for above-floor quotes, resulting in more than 5,000 approved quotes per month. Control over profitability increased as target and floor price guidance was now provided to the sales team at the time of quote. Sellers were now empowered to set their own prices according to the market, which helped to maximize profitability.

With the purchasing side of the company now more connected to the sales side, the distributor can better service local market needs.

Zilliant Solutions Helped:

• Connect Purchasing & Sales
• Improve Profitability Control
• Empower the Sales Teams

Evolving into the Future

The distributor is now able to update prices as markets change. Its sales team is now integrated into its purchase price system, ensuring control over profits. But this is just the first step in a longer transformational journey. The distributor is working to implement a new B2B eCommerce platform that is powered by Zilliant pricing. The goal is to use data from Zilliant Agreements Management to serve up actual pricing from customer-specific quotes over the web and manage general eCommerce list prices in Zilliant Price Management. Despite the plastics industry’s hesitancy to break out of the traditional status quo, this distributor is on a path to true digital transformation and becoming future proof with Zilliant as a trusted partner

2023 and Beyond

• New pricing available at the beginning of the month.
• Sales prices backward integrated into the purchase price system, ensuring control over profits
• Always updated, the distributor can always sell
• Forward integration into B2B eCommerce web platform