Pricing Approvals and Requests

Pricing Approvals Just Got Easier

Pricing approvals and requests can become both a choke point and a risk factor as your organization grows more complex.

Pricing Request Choke Points

Anytime a salesperson wants to offer a prospect a discount and requests a pricing approval the process can stagnate for a variety of reasons:

• The salesperson doesn’t know the correct process and instead sends emails around to find out what to do.

• The actual approver is overloaded, out sick, on vacation, etc. and the request sits for days.

• The request doesn’t contain all the information needed, leading to a series of back and forth emails and phone calls.

• The process is more complex and requires several approval steps, all of which are manually-handled.

All these roadblocks can lead to a delayed answer, and in the worst case, a prospect being given time to change their mind or go to a competitor that has their act together.

Risk Factors

When the idea of an improperly-approved pricing request comes up, many sales leaders might wish there had been a choke point to prevent it.

When there is no consistent, audited process, policies are useless. Salespeople tend to look for the least amount of resistance when it comes to getting approval for discounts. They want to close the deal. By making the discount process opaque and manual, you risk salespeople sidestepping policies.

What is the risk of an improperly-approved pricing request? Since discounts hit gross revenue the risk can be significant and eat into corporate profits. Imagine a 10% discount getting “approved” by the wrong person in the chain when the policy states that the maximum allowed discount is 5%. How much lost revenue does that represent in your environment?

Reduce Risk and Speed Approval Time at the Same Time

Approval processes, especially your pricing approval request process. Responding to pricing requests in an efficient and timely manner is critical to meeting customers’ needs and to grow your customer base. Maybe your offices span several locations. Employees send pricing requests by email, phone, and various other means, creating confusion. Sales support teams then must evaluate and forward the request to the right group. Each location may have a unique set of service offerings, making pricing requests difficult to assign to the proper party. The process is slow, inefficient, prone to mistakes, and hard to track.

When there’s revenue on the line, an outmoded workflow for marketing and sales means poorly processing requests can jeopardize the level of service provided to the customer. These time pressures from deadlines and bottom lines can be alleviated when Nutrient Workflow accounts for every process and customer need.

We have an app for that! Check out our pre-built Pricing Discount Request process app. Get up and running with your new process quickly.

Workflow Automation for Pricing Approval Processes

With a dedicated approval management system running behind the scenes to manage discount approval processes:

• Salespeople log into a portal where they can submit approval requests and track progress.

• Approvers can easily review and make discount form approvals online or by clicking on an email link.

• Managers can track departmental performance and record approval steps and manage approval history.

• Auditors have a complete record of who, what, when, where, and why discount allowances were made.

• Approval information and documents can be pushed to document management systems for filing.

Interested in Automating Your Price/Discount Workflow?

We have a variety of resources to help you on your journey to an automated pricing approval workflow.

• Workflow Tools and eBooks

• Workflow Ideas Weekly eMail Newsletter

• Recorded Demonstration of our Workflow Automation Software

• Request a Live Demonstration