Manufacturers & distributors are facing unprecedented disruption and competition. Organizations like Amazon are rapidly moving into these sectors with new business models which are eroding revenue, profit & margins. In fact, the #1 area companies said they are affected by Amazon was ‘Price & Margin’. To achieve their revenue growth goals, most companies focus on traditional areas of customer support, marketing & competitive pricing with manufacturers also investing an average of 5-12% of company revenues back into R&D to drive product innovation. These traditional areas influence less than half of all customers buying decisions and companies who are ignoring the overall customer experience are losing revenue. Research shows that more than half of repeat purchases are driven by the customer experience with buyers demanding an easy & frictionless experience. Being a leader in AI & machine learning, Amazon Business is optimizing their customer experience and, of course, pricing, already surpassing $1bn in sales (growing over 20% month-on-month) and currently offering over 10 million products in the industrial space. In addition to these competitive pressures, new trends like IoT & Industry 4.0 and business models such as Product-as-a-Service are making it increasingly difficult for manufacturers & distributors to realize revenue & profit from their traditional processes and sales approach. They are struggling to leverage the vast amounts of data now available to them and not being able to optimize their experience and price, distributors continue to lose on average 200-300 base points of margin with manufacturers continuing lose revenue through low (average 25%) win-rates.
Most companies are implementing ‘digitization’ strategies, however, these are multiple year initiatives and industrial organizations must harness technology quickly to enable new digital business models. Today, there are manufacturers and distributors using AI & machine learning to deliver a modern customer experience. By embedding dynamic pricing and leveraging AI they are tracking & analyzing hundreds and thousands of internal and external factors to ensure speed, precision and consistency across all channels. This improves revenue and margin by offering the right product at the right price at the right time.
PROS is a leader in this technology with over 30 years leadership working with companies across many industries delivering AI driven margin & revenue. Processing over 24 billion transactions a month it has an unrivalled experience and expertise in helping manufacturers and distributors optimize their customer experience. Through its cloud-based platform manufacturers and distributors are able to deliver dynamically personalized prices and offerings consistently across all sales & eCommerce channels. By implementing this technology and managing change, distributors are improving margin over 300 base points within days and realizing millions of dollars of incremental revenue. Manufacturers are increasing sales efficiency, reducing quote times and improving profit, also realizing millions of dollars of incremental revenue. Leverage the data you have available now and build your ‘moat’ to compete with the Amazons of this world and exceed this year’s revenue targets. Be future proof and give a modern customer experience with PROS