It’s hard for a distribution sales team to keep their momentum going after the excitement of the first quarter wears off. Maybe your managers held a great kickoff at the beginning of the year, but now that we’re in the thick of the second quarter sales reps have forgotten some of that motivation. Your company might be in-between busy seasons as we run through springtime. Sales reps might be exhausted after starting the year fresh and hitting the ground running. Your customers might have been working bigger jobs at the beginning of the year, but now economic uncertainty is stalling their business.

There are ways that a distribution pricing team can help keep sales momentum going all year long.

Sales Incentives Tied to Profitability

Work with your sales managers to create sales incentives tied to profitability goals. These incentives are powerful tools for maintaining sales momentum throughout the year and you can lead the momentum with the profitability analysis you are already doing daily. When you offer sales incentives around profitability targets, it keeps your reps thinking about the overall health of the business and not just pounding away on new sales. If there is a slowdown, they can still focus on raising profitability and steer customers toward higher margin items. This keeps your reps aligned with the long-term success and profitability of your company, but it also keeps them engaged even when the market is harder to penetrate.

It is important that you have a distribution CRM system to help you define specific goals and activities and track progress on a regular basis. Plus, a little healthy competition amongst your sales reps can be a good thing. Analytics and data from both your profit and pricing solution and your sales management solution helps reps see the bigger picture. CRM drives accountability and ownership that helps your sales team operate at a higher level.

Lead Them to New Opportunities

Pricing managers are in a unique situation to help sales reps find new opportunities. You understand the behavioral triggers that lie behind your customer segmentation. You can help them understand which customer segments are buying more, increasing their behavior or seem less price sensitive. You can help your sales reps by running product scorecards from a distribution CRM system like SMP. These scorecards show your reps which customers are buying product A, but not a complementary product B. Tied into your pricing data, customer segmentation and demand data, you can lead your sales team to opportunities they may not have considered without data.

Focus on Loyalty and Account Penetration

When sales are a little bit harder because of economic uncertainty or down times, focusing more on customer loyalty and account penetration can help you maintain sales momentum. Existing customers are always easier and less expensive to work with than finding new customers. Use your data to help them understand which of their customers might be ready to increase their purchasing frequency or are less price sensitive. Help your reps customize their outreach based on data that will build trust with their customers through targeted offers and tailored proposals.

Two things happen when you help a customer increase their spend with you. First, that customer becomes more profitable for you in a few ways. Every increase in lines per order is a direct increase in the profitability of that order. Second, it helps the customer reduce costs as well. They would usually prefer to work with one distributor and consolidate their purchasing. So cross-selling and increasing account penetration increases customer satisfaction, loyalty and even word of mouth.

Help With Sales Training

Most pricing managers don’t realize the many interesting elements they can add to a sales training program. Pricing experts in any company are close to real-time data that can help your sales team successfully price and sell your products and services. Sales reps sometimes see pricing managers as the team making their sales more difficult by raising prices. By offering training and data, you can instead be seen as a sales ally.

• Pricing Guidance: Pricing should not be governed by a gut feel in each deal, it should be governed by data. Pricing managers have real insight into strategies that lead to higher close rates. You have data to share that demonstrates demand patterns, customer segmentation behavior and even competitive pricing.
• Training Materials: You probably work on price books, e-commerce data and catalog pricing in some fashion already. Have you considered taking your published pricing information a step further with cheat sheets for reps that have strategic pricing plays, pricing models and negotiation tactics? You can develop playbooks, case studies and even video coaching that can help your sales reps help you reach your profitability goals while increasing sales momentum.
• Help with Individual Analysis: You are already conducting analysis of different segments and strategies for profitability and volume. This fosters success with the greatest number of customers through data. What if you offered to help with targeted pricing data and pricing for large opportunities, bids, quotes and jobs? Your data could help each sales rep understand the best pricing they need to win large deals.

Pricing managers can be a valuable partner to sales teams by providing pricing guidance, developing pricing training materials, conducting pricing analysis, fostering communication, and tracking pricing metrics. Take the initiative to work closely with your sales team and together you will be more effective and efficient all year long.