Does the supplier benefit when you promote their product? You bet he does. That’s why it’s unfair when you pay alone. This is why distribution contracts increasingly include clauses that allow you to reclaim marketing costs from your supplier, so called supplier kick-backs.
But with thousands of products and potentially hundreds of suppliers, marketing in tandem is more than a little complicated.
Step forward IBS Marketing Support software, a system that manages supplier agreements, calculates rebates and handles the admin for you.
Distribution Supplier Management
Manufacturers like it when you promote their products because often you have better customer relationships. You may specialize in a particular market sector, or in dealing with companies of a particular size or type. This is one of the areas where you add value: understanding the needs of your special brand of customer.
Distribution marketing agreements
Suppliers may offer to pay a share of the marketing in a variety of ways: discounts on the price, rebates on each item you sell, average costing. They may also offer your customers a discount as part of a marketing exercise and you need to make sure that you pass on the discount.
When you are already operating to tight margins, tinkering with costs and prices for marketing can seem like a dangerous exercise.
IBS Marketing Support makes it all straightforward:
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It automatically applies marketing agreements and tags product lines.
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It calculates rebates and communicates with payment software to optimize cashflow.
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It ensures that discounts are applied to sales planning, quotes, orders and invoices.
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It creates reports so that you can analyze the effectiveness of marketing.
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It checks the impact on margins and calculates the true margin on products by including the supplier’s rebate/kick-back.
And if you or your suppliers come up with a new business model for joint marketing, Supplier Marketing Support is ready. It will map any reclaim system into the supplier and sales communication processes.
Supplier Marketing Support is fully integrated with your financial software so that the changes to invoicing and book-keeping are automatic. If there is a mistake or a disagreement about a deal, the system also lets you reverse a rebate claim to keep the paperwork up to date.