The importance of pricing strategy used for products and services plays a vital role in business growth. For instance, discounts and rebates are powerful pricing tools for generating more revenue, increase the reliability and consistency of sales. Therefore, businesses apply deals and incentive programs to maximize their productivity.
Running deals on qualifying terms and monitoring promotion calculations can be a complex and tedious process. Thus for promotions and deals to incent sales, an effective program should be executed.
If you are looking for a way to increase profitability in deal and rebate management and implement the right resource for it, you might want to consider Vistex’s solutions.
About Vistex
Vistex, founded in 1999, develops and implements software solutions. The company is also a SAP solution extension partner.
Vistex solutions are embedded in SAP ERP and S4HANA systems, utilizing SAP core elements such as master and transactional data; configuration and development tools; workflow and approvals; integration tools; reporting and analysis tools. This integration paves the way for efficient management of supported business processes.
Many industries are supported through Vistex from agriculture to automotive, music to consumer goods, and wholesale distribution.
Vistex helps businesses manage their go-to-market programs such as pricing, incentive administration, paybacks, and more to leverage SAP usage by maximizing customers’ ERP investment.
This blog elaborates on business revenue enhancer: Vistex deal and promotions management.
How Does Vistex Enhance Sales Performance?
One of the solutions Vistex offers to increase sales efficiently is Deal Management and Promotions Management. They allow for structuring flexible deals and determining program eligibility and benefits. It also helps manage the entire trade lifecycle and provides full visibility into the promotion process, allowing your team to run efficient promotional programs.
Here are the Prominent Advantages of Vistex Deals and Promotions:
- Flexibility: managing any type of promotions (discount, voucher, add-ons, etc) and incentives (target rebates, paybacks, chargebacks, incentives, etc).
- Integration: approval process, applied on sales document or triggering credit memo.
- Simplicity: user-friendly usage of deals or agreements through eligibility, qualification, and benefit.
More details for each functionality are described below separately in two parts, deal management, and promotions management.
Outstanding Features of Vistex Deal Management
Vistex deal management is a feature for creating, executing, and tracking special pricing offers such as discounts or free goods (add-on deal process). Deals are documents created for customers who buy a certain quantity or combination of qualifying products within a period time.
Deal benefits can be applied automatically or manually on the customer’s current (standard deal process) or future sales order (rebuy deal process). Thus there is an integration between deals and sales order pricing in the SAP environment. Moreover, the other strength of Vistex in deal management is the ability to automatically use or block different deals together on the sales order.
Standard Deal Process
Managing flexible and complex deal scenarios and its ease of use are powerful functionalities of Vistex. For example, a deal can be created accordingly: to give 10 % discount on the sales order, the customer should buy a minimum of 5 pieces from product A, OR a minimum of 1 piece from material group XYZ, AND the total amount of these purchases must be minimum of 500 $, AND customer must purchase at least 5 different products. All of these conditions: eligibilities, qualifications, and benefits like the previous example are inserted in deals.
- Eligibility signifies the subject that is applicable for the deal or rebates. This can be a customer, a group of customers, or a flexible group.
- Qualification corresponds to a condition in the agreements at product dimension level, to identify the products relevant for the calculation of the deals or rebates.
- Benefits answer the question ‘What will be received/discounted after meeting the eligibility/qualification (special price, free good, discount, terms)?’.
Flexible Groups
Flexible groups provide a functionality of combining groups using the inclusion and exclusion of categories and linking them with AND or OR conditions. For instance, customer group ABC can be included AND material XXX can be included but customer B can be excluded in a flexible group. Then a deal eligible for this flexible group can be created.
Flexible groups, eligibility, qualifications, and benefits serve as a flexible, user-friendly front end to create pricing condition records to manage deals effectively in Vistex.
Driving Behavior Through Vistex Promotion Management
Vistex Incentive Administration enables users to manage, track and analyze incentive programs, rebates, royalties, and commission programs. Sales Incentive is the commission paid to personnel, including internal sales employees and non-employees such as dealers, distributors, contract sales representatives, brokers, and so on.
These promotional programs are intended to increase customer loyalty and drive customer purchasing behavior.
The scope of these programs;
– Target Rebate: payments made to the customer in cash when the targeted purchasing activities are realized within a certain period.
– Incentives: Sales representatives earn % or $ commission on products or services sold.
– Performance Objectives: payments are made to the representatives when predetermined target sales forecasts are reached.
Vistex provides Composite Process used to manage complex performance-based incentive programs. It combines and compares data to the target to qualify for an incentive.
Sample for Vistex Incentives Composite Model
In this model, Revision document, Approval process and Master Agreement document may be used optionally for Agreements to be created. Revision document can be used to create and change the Master Agreement document along the approval process. Master Agreement allows to maintain different types of agreements.
Agreement contains details of who, what, how, and when incentives are being paid (eligibility, qualifications and benefits). Calculation bucket aggregates and stores the eligible data from source documents (e.g, customer invoices). Calculation of benefit happens using the Business Scripts. Accrual and settlement is done based on the conditions inserted in Agreement. When intended, Calculation Run documents can be created and posted for settlement of benefits to the partner. Settlement is posted automatically via Credit Memo. This process summarizes one of the composite incentive scenarios where sales rebates can be successfully monitored and executed.
To sum up, Vistex offers a powerful solution that can help you raise your sales performance by offering attractive and flexible deals and promotion management to your customers. Whether you want to maximize your sales volume, revenue, margin, or customer loyalty, Vistex deal and promotion management can help you achieve your goals.
If you are interested in learning more about Vistex deal and promotion solutions or want to see a demo of how it works, you can contact Solvia Digital Solutions through their website www.solviads.com.
Sources
Lawrence, Pam. “Top 10 Benefits of Using Promotion Platforms for Incentive Management.” 6 April. 2020, https://www.vistex.com/blog/high-tech/promotion-platforms-for-incentive-management/
Lavalle, Elizabeth. “Rebates vs Discounts: The Key Differences.”https://enable.com/blog/rebate-vs-discount-what-are-the-differences
“Managing Deals and Promotions.” https://pages.vistex.com/Promotions_Deals_Data_Maintenance_Overview.html
“Managing Deals and Promotions.” https://assets.vistex.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/19084225/Vistex-Solutions-Brochure-Deals-and-Promotions.pdf
Tuğba Ergül
SAP SD Consultant
