Zilliant has announced enhancements to Zilliant CPQ. The solution now supports the automation of customer-specific pricing and negotiated sales agreements. The Agreements Management module enables organisations to efficiently negotiate and manage sales agreements to close more profitable deals. The announcement was made at the Zilliant Mindshare event, being held in Amsterdam this week.
The update is relevant for manufacturing and distribution industries, where negotiated pricing can represent up to 80% of annual revenue. Furthermore, if buyers consistently haggle for an additional 2% better price, an average distributor can lose half their profits.
Sellers often have inefficient manual processes to manage the thousands of commitments of contract terms. This means that price-optimized agreement quotes are generated with errors. To overcome this, many use a “set it and forget it” mindset at the risk of losing both revenues and profit margins. The approach also risks uncaptured revenues and potentially lost customers, who might validate pricing against competitors. Zilliant Agreements Management addresses this and enables sellers to streamline the whole quote creation process.
Kylie Fuentes, Chief Product & Marketing Officer at Zilliant, commented, “At Zilliant, we continue to innovate across the entire pricing lifecycle. By integrating our AI-driven pricing expertise with robust agreement management capabilities, including deal review and approval workflows, we enable sales teams to deliver the right customer-specific price through a streamlined user experience. This integration ensures companies can trust their prices while empowering sellers to close deals faster, leading to optimized revenue for our clients.”
What is Zilliant Agreements Management?
Ziliant Agreements Management supports the entire agreement lifecycle. The module, part of Zilliant CPQ, also integrates with Zilliant for Price Management or Price Optimization and guided selling capabilities. Sellers can create, amend, and renew customer price agreements with ease based on evolving business and customer conditions.
Zilliant’s AI pricing engine can evaluate and provide pricing recommendations at the individual line and overall deal level. The module also enables sellers to match quotes to customer-specific pricing deals. It will integrate with ERP solutions, such as SAP, to streamline the whole process. Through the selling process it provides guardrails for negotiations. Thus bringing greater transparency and control to the whole process, ensuring that margins are maintained.
The Key benefits
Agreements Management provides several key benefits for distributors and manufacturers, including the ability to:
- Capture additional margin: Proactively monitor, amend, and renew agreements based on business changes, such as volume commitments or Consumer Price Index, to reduce margin leakage.
- Data-driven pricing optimisation: It reduces instances of gut-feel pricing, lowering the risk by empowering sellers with real-time price guidance and necessary guardrails to maximize revenue. Where necessary, it provides streamlined approval processes for any exceptions.
- Simplify processes: With centralised agreement prices it streamlines the creation, negotiation and roll-out of customer-specific pricing to close deals faster. The modules help to reduce errors, enable better version control and maximise the time on selling rather than analysis and working on spreadsheets.
- Proactive monitoring: Sellers can amend and renew agreements based on business changes, such as volume commitments or Consumer Price Index, to ensure customer commitments and protect margins.
- Revenue and profit analysis: Better understand the financial impact of price changes in contracted pricing across key KPIs to make better decisions that increase margin and revenue.
- Improve customer experience: Streamlined negotiations with customer-specific pricing help improve the customer experience and can lead to an increased number of deals. Customers gain from a personalised experience, which modern B2B buyers expect.
Stephan Liozu, Vice President of Commercial Pricing Excellence at Zilliant, commented, “Customer-specific pricing is critical in B2B sales, yet it’s often managed through manual, error-prone processes. Our new solution brings transparency and control to sales processes that can significantly impact margin.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Anything that increases the efficiency and accuracy of the negotiation phase for distributors and manufacturers is welcome. With Agreements Management, Zilliant provides customers with an easy way to proactively manage agreements. It provides an optimal route between the set-and-forget mindset and the laborious negotiation of every purchase.
The Agreements management solution overcomes some of the key time and resource-wasting issues that beset agreement management processes. It makes the whole process more efficient, ultimately benefitting both seller and buyer.
