In the modern supply chain where digital platforms and data-sharing reign, collaborating with partners is becoming an increasingly critical part of many businesses’ trading strategy. Why? Collaboration makes for stronger trading relationships based on trust and mutual growth. When you work with your partners to develop a symbiotic trading strategy, both businesses are committed to making it work. This type of proactive trading collaboration is particularly important when it comes to managing your B2B rebates effectively.

Companies that collaborate with their trading partners enjoy many benefits, such as:

• Driving trust and loyalty
• Building stronger trading relationships
• Establishing a single source of truth
• Avoiding costly errors, conflict, confusion or disputes
• Reducing admin overhead

However, some collaborative strategies can present almost as many problems as they purport to solve. Collaboration can be slowed or hindered by inefficient manual processes, incompatible systems, inconsistent data and many other problems.

Companies attempting to collaborate manually face many challenges, including:  

Delays During Approval/Signoff

Some of the most significant delays in the rebate management process occur during approval or signoff. This critical stage is often handled with an abundance of caution, which can slow the process to a crawl. For sales teams hoping to move deals along the pipeline, this can be a frustrating experience.

Too Much Manual Work

For teams using spreadsheets or ERPs to manage their rebates, the number of manual tasks you must perform by hand can quickly pile up. This takes valuable time away from your team to perform redundant tasks that could be completed quickly and accurately by an automated system.

Collaboration is Complicated

Working with partners can be tough, especially when information is siloed between teams. Miscommunications, technical errors, discrepancies in data, incompatible systems or formats, and other troubles abound to make the rebate collaboration process more complicated than necessary.

Lack of Insight

Foregoing automated and intelligent rebate management tools may leave you blind to crucial aspects of your deals’ performance data. Any time you need a thorough report on your deals, you’ll need to have members of your team perform the analysis and generate a report. When this could be done with the touch of a button, it may not be the most productive way to use your team’s time, energy or skills.

Lack of Transparency

When collaborating with partners, transparency is key to building trust and loyalty. Confusion and ambiguity surrounding your trading agreements can actually serve to weaken and damage your relationship, leading to unnecessary friction and preventable disputes.

Discrepancies in Data

Discrepancies in data and calculations are one of the most common causes of disputes in the deal management process. When trading partners work from different sets of data, ambiguity and conflict are inevitable. However, working from the same set of data allows you to maintain a trusting and productive relationship with your trading partners.

In order to resolve many of these common struggles, Enable created the Collaborator platform. Packed full of features supporting streamlined digital collaboration, Collaborator is the simplest and most productive way to manage your B2B rebates collaboratively.

Collaborator Features:

View and Sign Off Trading Agreements

Within Collaborator, you can easily view the details of each trading agreement. This includes the terms of the agreement, any comments or negotiations that have taken place, and the current status of the agreement. When you're ready to approve an agreement, Collaborator simplifies the process by allowing you to sign off on agreements digitally, directly within the platform. This feature not only streamlines the approval process but also ensures that all parties have a clear and immediate confirmation of the agreement's terms and acceptance.

Read this article to learn how to view and sign off your trading agreements.

Approval Workflows

With a collaborative rebate management platform, the typically tedious process of signing off on agreements is simplified to a single click of a button. Enable’s Collaborator platform features automated approval workflows to simplify and streamline the signoff process as much as possible.

Activity Log & Audit Trail

Never get left behind on a contract again with Collaborator’s thorough activity log, detailing any changes or updates made to a contract (as well as who made the changes and when they were made). This allows you to catch up on the status of a contract instantly rather than seeking out a lengthy briefing from someone in the loop.  

In the event of an audit, maintaining a detailed paper trail is essential. You should have a clear understanding of where all of your contracts (including payments and debts) stand. To this end, Collaborator’s activity log and audit trail is an indispensable addition to any team’s deal management process.

Transaction Data

Transactions within Collaborator provides an overview of the latest transactions, along with access to partner information and logs of transaction imports. Additionally, your trading partner has the capability to grant you permissions to upload your transaction data through Collaborator, enabling the calculation of your earnings from agreements based on the data you provide.

Follow this article on how to upload your transaction data.

Partner Dashboard & Progress Tracker

Working with your trading partners has never been easier with Collaborator’s Partner Dashboard. One of the Partner Dashboard’s most useful features, the Progress Tracker, allows you to view the up-to-date status of any of your deals instantly and share the data with your trading partners. You can maintain transparency and alignment by keeping your trading partners informed on the progress of relevant deals.  

Automated Reporting

Why waste your team’s time on tasks that a computer can perform twice as fast (and often with greater accuracy)? With Collaborator’s automated reporting features, your team has access to a wide range of insights and analyses at the touch of a button. Make use of advanced filters and views to get a clear picture of the data you need, at the level of detail that you need it.

Need a broad-strokes overview of your deal performance? The Collaborator platform can quickly generate the wide-ranging report you need. If you’d prefer a more narrow, in-depth view of specific deals, Collaborator has you covered with granular views and detailed reports.

Streamlined UI

Collaborating with your partners should be an easy, seamless experience. With Collaborator, we’re tearing down the barriers and straightening out the learning curves with a simple, easy-to-use user interface. That way, your team will never lose their way around a dashboard or waste time rewatching tutorials again.

Intelligent Forecasting

When it comes to forecasting for the future of your deals’ performance, educated guesswork just isn’t going to cut it. The Collaborator platform’s intelligent forecasting features provide unique and valuable insights into your deals’ performance data to help your team stay prepared and get ahead of the curve.  

Reshape Your B2B Rebate Strategy with Collaborator  

Collaborator offers rebate managers the chance to take a whole new approach to their strategy. By enabling high-level collaboration between trading partners, the Collaborator platform serves as an essential nexus for mutual growth. If your team is running B2B rebates in a vacuum, consider the hidden costs to your trading relationships that you may be incurring and the myriad benefits that you may be missing out on. Collaborator can reshape the way your team and trading partners work together to manage your B2B rebates.

Interested in learning more about how collaboration is reshaping modern rebate strategy? Check out our blog, Collaborator: Work Together to Boost Your Rebate Earnings.