Explore Use Cases and Benefits

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Explain how sales, channel partners, and operations benefit from a unified incentive and sales process.
  
• Describe the challenges that various teams face when incentives aren’t tied into sales processes.
  
• List the different sales objects where you can make rebates available automatically.
  

Before You Start

Before you get started with this module, make sure you complete Rebate Management Basics. The work you do here builds on the concepts and work you do in that module. 

Business at Rayler Parts

Rayler Parts has been using Salesforce for some time now to manage its sales and operations. Recently, it also started using Rebate Management to design the best incentive programs for its partners and distributors.

As a manufacturing organization, Rayler Parts uses contracts to manage legal commitments for product pricing and quantities with its distributors. Account managers prepare contracts to detail the terms and conditions of a negotiation. The contracts record which products are sold, the duration of the commitment, the negotiated prices and discounts for each product, and so on.

Now, the company wants to incorporate incentive terms or rebate structures within the contract terms. Rayler Parts writes yearly or multi-year contracts with its channel partners and wants to define the rebate terms as part of the contract. Even better, the company wants to negotiate, approve, and sign the contract and rebate together to increase efficiency.

Currently, Rayler Parts tracks the B2B orders against each contract within its Salesforce application. Operation managers raise order line requests, but they don’t have any visibility into the incentives that the distributor is qualified to receive. This leads to uninformed discounting decisions. Not only that, even though Rayler Parts’ channel partners have access to a self-service channel to place, review, and edit their orders, they too lack visibility into the rebate programs, and are unaware of their current tier and how much quantity they must order to get to a higher payout level.

Capturing rebate terms as part of the contract would increase visibility and transparency for Rayler Parts sales and partners. If information such as rebate terms, tiered benefits, criteria for incentives, and payout details were captured within the contract terms, then account managers could view all available rebate terms while charting out a specific contract, making it simple to pick and craft the right contract for the partner.

What Do Sales Managers and Channel Partners Desire?

If you completed Rebate Management Basics, you might remember Rishi Chatterjee, the rebate program manager at Rayler Parts. A month back, he was crafting a strategy to understand all the aspects of the business that can benefit from rebate planning and visibility. He ran a survey to understand the common challenges that account managers, sales managers, and partners face with incentive structures.

Here are a few responses he gathered from the survey.

Rishi was keen to find answers. He reached out to Cindy, the admin at Rayler Parts, to see if there’s a solution that addresses these requirements.

Incentives in Context

Cindy informs Rishi that Rebate Management has just the functionality the company needs. Rayler Parts can use the Rebate Management app to seamlessly tie rebates into the sales process. With this functionality, account managers, dealers, distributors, operation managers, and sales managers can negotiate better on orders, entitlements, opportunities, contracts, quotes, and sales agreements because all applicable incentives are visible in context.

Cindy notes that organizations are using this feature to bring incentive visibility across the sales and partner chain. And it’s been getting a lot of attention in the industry. This definitely piques Rishi’s interest.

Cindy mentions that you can tie in this Rebate Management functionality with any standard or custom object that you use in the sales process. To name a few:

• Order
  
• Contract
  
• Account
  
• Opportunity
  
• Quote
  
• B2B Commerce Cart
  
• CPQ Quote
  
• Sales Agreement
  
• Service Order
  
• Entitlement
  

In this module, you learn how you can seamlessly add rebate information to standard sales and configure, price, and quote (CPQ) processes for the manufacturing industry. But you can also tailor this feature and implement it for automotive, consumer goods and retail, hi-tech, med-device sales, and other industries. For example, with incentives and offers available on opportunities, automotive dealers can easily craft deals and negotiate terms with customers. 

Here, we are referring to the CPQ business processes that are typical in most manufacturing, high-tech, automotive, consumer goods, and other industries. You don’t need the Salesforce CPQ application to use the Rebate Management functionality in your org.

By integrating rebates with its sales process, Rayler Parts can address some of the struggles documented in Rishi’s survey.

Here are the primary benefits of adding rebates to standard sales processes.

• View eligible rebates and incentives on a customer quote, contract, or account.
  
• Make an informed decision, and directly apply the rebate to a contract or opportunity, and negotiate the benefits in the same context.
  
• Track the projected rebate amounts for partner accounts and see how close they are to reaching the next benefit tier.
  
• Run a single approval process for a contract along with the rebate program.
  
• Contextually view rebates that the customer is eligible for and have an informed conversation on the net order price with the discount and rebates, or choose the right discount, to prevent offering a high discount on top of rebates.
  
• Help the partner understand the true value of the deal and the net price inclusive of discounts and backend rebates.
  

What does this look like in your Salesforce org? Users see Eligible and Applied rebates and incentives on the chosen object. For example, an account manager creating a contract can see the eligible rebate types on the contract record.

With the highly configurable integration, companies can create a unified experience for sales teams and partners.

But My Sales Process Is Different...

Do you use quotes to track and negotiate large deals? Or, do you use custom objects to manage your sales processes? Or maybe you’re an automotive dealer managing customer negotiations with opportunities. We have good news for you. 

Just like Rayler Parts, you can weave rebate programs into your quoting process, or surface the right incentives on opportunities or custom objects. The steps and the configuration are similar to what the team at Rayler Parts accomplishes in this module. 

Let’s follow along as Rayler Parts gets started by gathering requirements and creating rebate types in the next unit.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Manage Rebates and Incentives Within Sales Processes
• Salesforce Help: View the Rebates and Incentives Attainment Snapshot on Accounts