If your company manages rebates, promotions or other incentive programs, you know just how arduous and time-consuming the process can be. From creating and tracking these complicated deals to reporting and accruing for them at year end, managing rebates and promotions can leave your team struggling to keep up with the tangle of responsibilities associated with them. Many businesses work hard to overcome these challenges, but a lack of efficient management processes or tools is one of the most significant roadblocks to the success of any incentive program.

It's Time to Streamline

Take promotions, for example. Teams rolling out promotions can face challenges at every stage of the process, from inception to approval. Delays during sign-off, disagreements between departments on the terms of the rollout and a lack of automated tracking and reporting capabilities can hinder the efficiency of your team and the performance of your promotions. These time-consuming distractions can also cause you to miss out on valuable opportunities, whether due to divided focus or cumbersome processes that are too slow to capitalize on fast-moving trends. 

Businesses need a better way to manage high-quantity, stand-alone, lump sums for marketing, events and promotional funds that are not part of their yearly rebate contracts. For these unique and complex deals, spreadsheets accompanied by lengthy email chains are not going to cut it.

Stay on the Same Page

Anyone running a business knows that what’s good for one team is not always best for another. Conflicting needs and priorities in promotion management can lead to increased friction and decreased efficiency between departments. 

For example, let’s say that your sales and pricing teams want to create more flexible and complex deals without increasing the risk of errors or manual admin work. At the same time, your finance and accounting teams want to limit complex deals to ensure ease of tracking and sign-off. Neither team has a mutually beneficial solution. Further complicating the situation are clunky software, massive and complex spreadsheets, knowledge silos and endless email chains. When you add in the delicate nature of deal approvals and customer negotiations, everything becomes even more complicated and difficult for teams hoping to manage promotions in a timely manner. 

A promotion management tool provides your team and trading partners with a secure, centralized space to collaborate on deals and share information freely. This also means that everyone involved with your promotions shares a single source of truth that is always up to date, avoiding time-consuming confusion and knowledge silos between teams.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Many businesses simply don’t realize how many manual tasks could be offloaded to an automated promotion management platform. Manually tracking and analyzing the performance of your promotions and funds more than likely costs your team a significant amount of time and attention that could better be spent building your business. Fortunately, automation can now handle many of these tasks for you.

Still, many cling to the familiarity of spreadsheets and manual calculations, hesitant to uproot their long-standing processes. Businesses need a promotion management solution that not only meets the wide-ranging needs of their teams but saves more time than it takes to learn and integrate. According to Workato, more than 90% of enterprise professionals would prefer a centralized and integrative system to multiple disconnected platforms.

Simplifying Promotion Management

Managing promotions is a challenge for many businesses, but it doesn’t need to be. If your teams are struggling to run effective promotions in an efficient way, make sure they have the right tools at their disposal. A capable incentive management platform - such as Enable’s new Promotions feature – can help you regain control of your promotions and drive efficiency, organization and collaboration between your teams and trading partners. Manufacturers using rebate management software to automate month-end calculations typically spend 35% less time on month-end processes.

Enable’s Promotions platform provides:

Performance Tracking

• Automated tracking allows you to keep a close eye on your promotions and receive reports directly in your email, saving time for you and your team.
• Get a new perspective on the performance of your promotions and funds with both at-a-glance and granular dashboards, so you understand your deals inside and out.

Automated Calculations and Reporting

• Calculating performance manually increases your workload and the risk of human error. Automation can handle the math and generate clear, detailed reports.
• Access to automated calculations that support flexibility can arm your sales and pricing teams with true negotiating power.

Collaboration Portal

• Save time and reduce friction between departments by using approval workflows to sign off on promotions with ease.
• Say goodbye to email chains: invite your partners onto the Enable platform to easily collaborate on any type of promotion - big or small - in one centralized platform. 

Payment History and Audit Trail

• Stay in the know with a comprehensive audit trail, allowing you to track who made changes and when.
• A detailed payment history can help you to avoid disputes and confusion, providing a trustworthy source of truth for you and your trading partners.

With Promotions, Enable is proving just how simple managing complex deals can be. Schedule a demo today.

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