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The average B2B company transacts 50% or more of its revenue via customer price agreements, many of which are negotiated and managed by the sales team. Unfortunately, sellers often lack deal guidance, automated approval workflows, and a centralized view of active agreements, which generally reside in siloed systems of record. Chronic under-management of agreements leads to margin loss and tedious manual work for sales reps. This day-in-the-life highlights the trouble with the status quo and introduces a better way to manage agreements across the business in as few as four weeks.
How Do Under-managed Agreements Negatively Impact Sales Personnel?
If you are a B2B sales professional, the following scenario is likely a familiar one:
As you go about your day visiting customers and trying to close deals, your phone lights up. You’re getting emails, pings, or CRM alerts from your corporate pricing office telling you, “Costs are going up, so please review all your customer agreements. We need to take price up ASAP, do you have the latest file documenting that agreement? What’s the end date on that?”
You’re busier than ever trying to keep pace with a highly volatile market, so these communiques are left unread and sometimes you never get around to answering them. After all, these aren’t simple requests. Your customer-specific price agreements aren’t centrally filed, some have been set and forgotten years before, and you don’t have time to analyze spreadsheets or Salesforce reports.
The two things you probably dread the most when you have quota to fill: administrative busywork and backtracking to deals you’ve already closed to have the difficult conversation to increase your customer’s agreement price.
Even if you take the time to run reports, track down the latest agreements, compare the new pricing guidance against what you have in market, and identify each agreement line that needs a price change, are you confident in that impending conversation? Does it feel more like a confrontation, one that you are less than prepared to meet head on?
For many field sellers, this is the unfortunate reality. Any price guidance you do receive lacks context and transparency. This further reduces your motivation to jeopardize a long-standing relationship that was important enough to warrant customer-specific pricing in the first place.
Yet the pings keep coming, especially in a time of cost and market volatility, when price changes are the norm and every point of margin counts.
