Deal Manager use cases
  • 23 Jan 2024
  • 5 Minutes to read
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Deal Manager use cases

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Article summary

Explore the common business challenges that Deal Manager helps you solve.

Create customer discounts (on-invoice or off-invoice)

Scenario 1: To stay competitive, your sales reps offer customer-specific discounts to their accounts. Often, these discounts are captured and maintained inconsistently, and they may not be reflected in your management or invoicing systems. This creates a dependency on manual price overrides during order pricing, which can result in incorrect invoicing and dissatisfied customers.

Scenario 2: Your current application creates discounts only at the product level. You want to apply discounts at the family or category level to minimize the burden on time and resources.

Scenario 3: Your current application for capturing customer discounts doesn't show discount-impacted metrics relevant to the company. Your sales reps lack context about key discounts, such as current customer price, guidance, and historic purchase volume.

SolutionActions to takeLearn how
  • Create and maintain customer-specific discount lines in an application that displays supporting data from any source, and that calculates key metrics for your organization.
  • Employ robust integration capabilities with multiple technology options for sending discounts to ERP and order management systems
  • Add, edit, and delete discount lines at any level of your product hierarchy.
  • Import customer-specific discount lines.
  • Filter available products by account, sales rep, or other attribute related to an agreement header.
  • Define a declarative configuration of line fields, fields displayed, and calculated metrics. Incorporate supporting data from other applications, such as discount guidance, product and shipping costs, transaction history, or current customer price or discount.
  • Use API, flat file, queue-based, or API application integration.

Create customer discounts with predefined settings

Your business maintains a large catalog of products. You sell to numerous and varied accounts that are segmented by multiple dimensions, including industry, company size, and geography. It is difficult and time-consuming for your sales reps to create agreements "from scratch" that include all products and price settings that are applicable to an account in a certain segment.

SolutionActions to takeLearn how
  • The pricing team creates agreement “starting points”—pre-defined lines and discount settings—for each price segment.
  • When creating a new agreement for a new or existing account, the sales agent selects one of the templates available to them for that account’s segment.
  • The sales rep can create a new agreement for an account by copying the discounts from an existing account.
  • Author an agreement template and assign it to segments.
  • Define configuration logic to determine which templates are available for an account agreement. Determine whether applying a template is optional or required for a new agreement.
  • Create configurable options to control which fields are copied to the new agreement, and which are populated based on specific attributes of the new agreement and associated account.
  • Copy all discount lines from an existing agreement to a new agreement in a different account.

Understand the financial implications of customer discounts

Scenario 1: Your sales reps provide discounts to their accounts to drive business. However, they have no visibility into how those discounts affect your prioritized business metrics.

Scenario 2: Approvers are asked to approve or reject customer agreements, but lack visibility into how discounts affect prioritized business metrics.

SolutionActions to take
  • As your sales reps enter proposed customer discounts, the application informs them in real time of the business impact, in the metrics that are applicable to the business.
  • Access account or agreement header-level metrics that roll up the financial impact of all agreement lines for that account or agreement header.
  • Create fields to retrieve business data needed to calculate the financial implication of agreement lines, including costs, past transaction volume, current discount or price, and discount guidance.
  • Create entry fields for sales reps to enter new data needed to calculate the financial implication of agreement lines, including expected or required volume, discount values, rebates, and unit of measure.
  • Create calculation fields to calculate the financial implication of agreement lines, including margin, revenue, margin %, and line score.
  • Provide visual indicators in fields to signal the relative merit of values.
  • Create metrics at the header or account level to roll up line-level values and calculate metrics.

Create tiered discount schedules for customers

As a sales organization, you want to reward your customers with higher on-invoice discounts and off-invoice rebates based on their purchase volume. Discounts or rebates might apply to individual orders or all orders over a period of time. You need a way to easily capture discount tiers and their associated product mix.

SolutionActions to takeLearn how
  • Sales reps can add discount tiers and populate fields needed for the organization at each tier level.
  • Sales reps can designate a discount as being on- or off-invoice.
  • Create configurable discount tier lines.
  • Designate which products and product categories or families can have tiered discounts.
  • Create an integration framework and data model to send tiers, associated fields, and products to ERP, OM, or rebate accrual systems

Create and compare customer discount scenarios

When creating a discount schedule for an account, your sales rep may take variable approaches for on-invoice and off-invoice discounts, non-discount settings, and product mix. Each of these approaches may yield different trade-offs that impact financial and other metrics for the agreement. Often, it is difficult to compare approaches and select the best one.

SolutionActions to takeLearn how
  • Sales reps can create multiple scenarios for an account’s agreement by creating a copy of an agreement.
  • Reps can then compare the metrics across the scenarios and choose a primary scenario.
  • When reviewing the primary scenario, approvers can also review alternatIve scenarios.
  • Create a scenario.
  • Perform a side-by-side comparison of selected metrics for two scenarios.
  • Change the selected scenario to primary.

Capture non-discount settings in an agreement

When creating an agreement for an account, your sales rep may set header-level terms that can make the deal more or less favorable. Non-discount variables differ across industries, but examples include fuel surcharges, shipping terms, and payment terms. You want to ensure that their financial impact is captured in overall agreement metrics.

What to doHow to do it
Set agreement header-level metrics that consider the financial implication of non-discount line settings.
  • Create fields that capture all header-level options that create contract conditions and affect the profitability of orders with a customer.
  • Create metrics that capture financial values associated with header-level settings.
  • Employ a formula calculation capability that retrieves non-agreement data based on header level settings, uses that data for financial and agreement score calculations, and then uses the same data to set approval thresholds.

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