The ever-evolving rebate ecosystem is increasingly complex to comprehend and navigate. Rebates turn profitable for all the stakeholders only when supported by contextual insights on real-time data spanning the partner ecosystem. Manual extraction of such insights from voluminous data stored as excel sheets or pdf files tends to be tedious, error-prone, and not timely. While a manually intensive rebate management process works for emerging businesses in the short term, ensuring relevant insight generation for growing business requirements and an increasing trading partner ecosystem becomes challenging over time.
A smart and automated rebate management program can help effectively address these constraints. It allows buying group stakeholders to efficiently manage multi-product, multi-party, and multi-tiered rebate schemes. In fact, B2B organizations can realize 20 times the ROI in a short span of time by leveraging an intelligent rebate management program.
Is a smart rebate management program more rewarding than the traditional rebate management process?
Automating the rebate management process helps growing businesses address existing lacunae in the system while allowing them to focus on growth.
Lack of predictive analysis: Accurate and complex forecasts are rarely possible when using a manual rebate management process. One example from many we have observed is that not many buying group members are aware that spending an additional $200-$300 could result in rebate earnings of around $4,000. Such predictive analysis based on annual rebate projections, current purchases and historical seasonal purchasing behavior is possible only through a smart rebate management software.
Handling growing trade partner relationships: Imagine you are part of a buying group with over two hundred suppliers, each with ten or more rebate programs. How can you keep up?
It is nearly impossible to track this information manually, and more importantly, to gain contextual, timely insights that are actionable. The buying group may choose to instead focus on five to ten meaningful relationships to save time. In addition, manual efforts may fail to properly account for product exclusions or new product offerings. The result of such a compromise could be costly, in the form of missed rebate earnings.
An automated, AI-driven rebate management platform helps solve these issues by nurturing the relationships between manufacturers and suppliers based on historical data, past rebate programs and performance. It captures, tracks and analyzes data in real-time, thereby allowing users to focus on what matters: proactive and collaborative decision-making for driving business growth.
Automated rebate management transforms rebates into revenues
By bringing together disparate processes, an automated rebate management platform enhances visibility across multiple rebate programs and partners. The platform is built to scale quickly through automated processes, saving on time spent on managing infrastructure. It also facilitates optimized rebate interactions backed by actionable insights. The data-driven, decision intelligence mechanism profits all stakeholders of the ecosystem, including the buying group, member buyers and suppliers.
Prioritize opportunities by classifying rebate programs:
Automated rebate ecosystems use AI and ML to identify and categorize products within the industry and create an opportunity list of products and manufacturers to pinpoint product conversion opportunities. This paves the path for targeted marketing and deeper insights into metrics that matter, making it easier for users to work together more fluidly, communicate more effectively, and form mutually beneficial partnerships.
Further, with easy-to-navigate UI and category lists, such as rebate types, supplier groups, and attainment percentage, users can easily categorize and classify rebates.
Improve transparency with electronic rebate creation: In an automated rebate management platform, rebates are electronically managed. Information such as terms and conditions as well as product inclusions and exclusions are available at the click of a button. Customized data analytics allow for hyper- personalization of rebate programs. It also allows users to apply transactional data like time and date of transaction, quantity sold, and quantity shipped. Such enhanced automation capabilities aid in reducing dependency on experts and manual updates, and substantially elevate the standard of B2B business processes.
Track individual or group performance: Members’ and distributors’ purchases can be mapped to a specific rebate program. Whether it is a base or growth rebate, or rebates for specific months or products, users have the ability to monitor performance and identify top-performing rebate programs. By unlocking insights across the rebate ecosystem, the platform offers members hyper-personalized and predictive recommendations on high-return rebate programs using the central product catalog and information on standardized rebates.
Increase collaboration with a cloud-based user interface:
A rebate ecosystem needs to be collaborative to be truly successful. An intelligent rebate management platform offers a unified, cloud-based user interface that provides real-time access to data, in addition to reducing the time spent on managing infrastructure.
Bring rebates to the forefront of business and market share growth
Rebates have the potential to be a long-term, strategic growth driver. Utilizing automation and advanced analytics can empower every member in the ecosystem with insights that maximize the potential of rebate programs.
An efficient rebate management program is one that is agile, scalable and adept to deliver equitable growth. Rebate.ai does all this and more. Contextual features like decision intelligence, workflow automation, smart insights, competitive analysis, and missed opportunity identification make Rebate.ai the preferred platform for growth-driven rebate management. It is the way forward to make your business future-ready through a collaborative approach of all the stakeholders.
Schedule a demo with our experts to understand how to leverage rebate management for maximized revenue growth.
