Global staffing services company optimizes rate markup and accelerates time-to-quote with Zilliant

The overarching goal for a staffing services company is to identify the right talent as quickly as possible and match that talent to its customer’s need, at the right rate. Yet, many staffing agencies default to sales rep experience and gutfeel to calculate their bill rates which consists of the temp worker’s pay rate plus a markup. Salespeople are crunched for quote turnaround time in a competitive environment, and generally have no mechanism to quickly consider outside factors which leads to under- and over-pricing, resulting in lost markup percentage and outright lost business in some cases.

A large global staffing services company was dealing with these very issues and set its sights on a solution that would optimize bill rates and shorten the average quote turnaround time for its sellers.

Sales and Revenue Challenges

Experiencing margin pressures in its North American temporary staffing business, commercial leaders realized their current platforms were too complex and lacked the right level of visibility into the rate setting process. Some of the challenges included:

• Duplication of efforts wherein the highly manual process resulted in the duplication of account, contract, and rate sheet records
• A cumbersome and delayed quoting process without a centralized means to view, update, create and manage these records
• A total lack of pricing strategy that could be implemented to support the sales reps
• Slow and manual processes which could take up to 90 minutes to submit a proposal for net-new clients
• Overworked sales reps that commonly tackled 20 customer meetings and 8 proposals per week who end up relying on gutfeel prices due to time constraints

Transformation Goals

As the company positioned itself for rapid growth, it became apparent that a common platform to create and swiftly deliver an optimal bill rate for each staffing request was necessary. The first step was to fully understand the cost of the challenges, as well the potential opportunity to improve rates. The staffing company partnered with Zilliant to diagnose inefficiencies and missed opportunities inherent in the status quo. Together, the research found that the company needed a solution that could:

• Minimize excessive rate variation
• Better align prices with the market
• Limit the arbitrary rounding of prices
• Capture additional margin

Zilliant brings optimal rates to market faster

The company chose Zilliant price optimization and agreements management solutions to empower its sellers to use optimized bill rates. Rather than toggling between a complex spreadsheet and a quoting tool, Zilliant can present the price in a simple format that includes the optimal bill rate, a range to negotiate within, and embedded analytics to provide a detailed rate rationale to sales reps.

Zilliant was selected for its ability to account for all the factors that drive bill rates for each unique staffing request and deliver simplified rate guidance. Through precise segmentation of candidate, transaction and customer attributes, Zilliant could replace the sales rep gutfeel paradigm. Successful price elasticity measurement transforms the markup process from a best-guess effort to an optimized one, preventing under- and over-pricing at scale across the business.

It was important for the solution to still allow for a level of sales rep autonomy in rate-setting, but with visibility into the impact of each rate decision and a streamlined approval workflow built in. With Zilliant, if a rate is entered that falls outside of optimized deal envelope, an instant alert will compel the rep to seek approval from management before finalizing the quote.

Achieving success for global expansion

A combination of best-of-breed technology, dedicated partnership and disciplined change management led to a highly successful rollout of the new pricing system. Today, less than 25 percent of bill rates that are approved in Zilliant’s solution are produced with below-floor markup levels, which represents a 30 percent improvement over historical rates, in just one year. Overall, markup has risen 4 percent versus the pre-Zilliant average.

The simplified delivery of bill rates has eliminated manual spreadsheet analysis for branch sales reps, while giving them the freedom to negotiate with visibility into margin and revenue impact. The Zilliant solution acts as a force multiplier for salespeople, helping them turn around quotes for net-new prospects in 11 minutes on average — a vast improvement from the 90-minute pre-Zilliant process — and focus on their customers’ needs, rather than rate administration.

Branch managers now have powerful data at their fingertips to help them coach their teams and make informed decisions. Much as setting bill rates was a guessing game for reps, approving rates often came down to gutfeel for managers prior to the Zilliant implementation. They now have insight into the financial impact of each rate exception request before deciding whether to approve it. This has significantly decreased the number of below-floor rates.

The momentum achieved in North America is leading to pricing improvements across the company. The staffing company’s European headquarters is now rolling out Zilliant with plans to expand to more countries.