Build Better Campaigns for the Aftermarket

Last week we announced the release of our newest application – Zilliant Campaign Manager™. The solution expands the possibilities for B2B revenue and margin growth by giving users the ability to scope, prioritize and refine desired campaign actions fueled by AI or custom user-defined actions.

Customers can generate these actions from Zilliant IQ engines (Sales IQ™, Price IQ®, Cart IQ™) or Zilliant Price Manager™ or upload custom-defined actions from any source and publish those actions into any business system, including Zilliant Deal Manager™ and Sales Planner™. Common campaign action types include recovery and growth, win-back, excess inventory, product substitution, whitespace/prospecting and contract compliance, to name a few.

Let’s dive into two of these action types in the context of auto parts manufacturing to put the value into tangible perspective.

Campaign Manager Action: Win-Back

In a cutthroat business with high turnover like aftermarket parts, suppliers are very familiar with the pains of losing large chunks of customer business over time. Compounding that pain is the tendency for sales teams to eschew win-back efforts in favor of chasing down new business, often a costly and competitive proposition.

For aftermarket suppliers with massive customer and parts lists, it can be daunting to pinpoint what business you’ve lost and even more cumbersome to turn that intelligence into an actionable campaign. To make win-backs more achievable, you need a data-driven underpinning.

Sales IQ analyzes historical customer spend data and highlights product categories to specifically target when trying to reclaim that lost business. This insight is then seamlessly transformed into a sales rep action by Campaign Manager. With Campaign Manager’s intuitive user interface, marketing and sales operations managers can customize and target their campaigns in a fully self-service experience.

What used to take days can now be accomplished in minutes. Simply scope by region, customer type or any other relevant variable and run the campaign based on thresholds you’ve set to identify all the potential actions you want to send out. Finally, review the actions to validate what you want to go after and publish them out to the sales team.

The actionable guidance is easy for sales to understand and directs them to offer the right pitch that gives them the best chance at winning back the lost business. Reps in the field will get alerted that Customer X used to buy a lot of Product Y, but hasn’t in years, so they should pitch that product with a competitive price to get the business back.

With Campaign Manager, B2B parts suppliers can bring dead business back to life and continue to nurture it for years to come.

Campaign Manager Action: Agreement Price / Last Price

As engineering costs go up, aftermarket suppliers face the prospect of constantly shrinking margins. That is, unless they can push through price increases systematically. Easier said than done, as there are thousands of price agreements to sift through and sales reps tend to have the final word on price. Rather than being resigned to the fate of shrinking profits, though, parts manufacturers can now take action by interweaving Zilliant pricing solutions and Campaign Manager.

By using Price IQ® and Price Manager™ you can set new prices when agreement lines need to be mass updated. This takes care of half the battle. Now, instead of emailing your sales reps large spreadsheets containing price changes to review, you can drive the mass update process through Campaign Manager, which creates an action for sales reps to complete.

Campaign Manager allows users to filter to impacted agreement lines and push actions into Deal Manager™ or any CPQ system that reps use to update agreements. Then, Campaign Manager tracks the effectiveness and adoption of the price campaign. The result is a faster, easier way to communicate and close the loop on price agreement changes to sales across thousands of agreements.

For non-agreement, “transactional” customers, the same tools can be applied. Users can direct Campaign Manager to identify customer/product combinations recently priced below the target price, and then run a campaign that sends out actions for sales reps to update price on the next sale.