Help Your Sales Team Become Profit-focused

Do you know the most common complaints we hear price analysts make against their sales rep counterparts?

• Our sales reps give too much profit away
• Manual price overrides are killing us
• Certain reps get stuck on the last price they sold

Do any of those sound familiar? You’re not alone. But fortunately, there are ways for you to work with your sales team to help them become more profit aware.

Utilize a Distribution CRM System

Utilizing CRM data to understand a customer’s buying behavior is essential for sales reps to ensure that they are offering the optimal prices for their products or services. By analyzing past purchases and regular discounts, reps can better determine how much to discount without sacrificing profitability in each deal. This helps them maintain competitive market positioning while making sure they maximize their own profits as well. Additionally, analyzing customer purchasing history can help provide even more insight into the customer’s needs and expectations, further allowing the rep to make informed decisions that benefit both parties. SMP’s Distribution CRM system is fully integrated to your ERP system to make it easy for your reps to understand sales and product histories.

Schedule Time to Discuss Your Segmentation

Analyzing customer segmentation is a powerful tool that allows sales reps to gain valuable insight into the needs of their customers. By understanding the different segments, reps can create personalized offers and discount strategies based on customer preferences and buying patterns. This helps them minimize unnecessary discounting as they are better able to determine which discounts are truly justified to provide maximum value for both parties. Additionally, leveraging market intelligence tools can also help reps make informed decisions about discounts or promotional offers by gauging current industry trends and competitive pricing.

Unfortunately, the way a pricing analyst thinks of segmentation can be different from the way your sales and marketing teams think of segments. Pricing teams are looking at similar behavioral pattern, cost to serve, frequency, volume and more. Sales and marketing might be looking at simple demographic patterns like small electrical contractors, large contractors, builders, DIY, house accounts, and others. So, it is important to explain your methodology and help them identify your segments that exist within their segments.

One benefit of SMP’s powerful platform is that you can create new customer lists directly from your data visualizations in just a matter of clicks. So, you and your reps could explore new customer categories (e.g., large contractors with the top frequency of purchases) and immediately create a sales and marketing list inside of SMP. That allows you to quickly strategize on messaging for new customer segments that helps to preserve your profitability.

Get Proactive with Sales Initiatives

Just because you’re in pricing and not in sales doesn’t mean you can help with new sales initiatives. You can use predictive analytics to help your sales reps identify new opportunities for negotiation or value-adds or loyalty plays instead of reflexively discounting.

Recognize That Discounts are Sometimes Necessary

Help your sales reps understand that you aren’t just trying to eliminate all discounting behavior, but that you just want them to use data to be judicious in how they approach their discounts rather than entering manual overrides left and right.

Combining your use of SMP with your price optimization techniques allows you to create campaigns that target customers who are likely to respond positively to discounts. By utilizing data segmentation techniques, reps can pinpoint the customers who are more likely to respond favorably to discount offers and tailor their campaigns accordingly. Reps can personalize each offer based on the customer’s individual needs and buying patterns while also ensuring that they maintain maximum profitability in each deal. Additionally, leveraging business intelligence tools built into SMP can give reps invaluable insight into current industry trends and competitive pricing, allowing them to adjust their strategy as needed to stay competitive and profitable.