Issue link: https://pros.com/learn/i/1305838
AI is Essential in the New Digital Normal While materials distributors have traditionally been great at developing personal relationships with their customers, today, that's only one piece of the puzzle. The reality is that without a connected set of best-in-class, AI-enabled processes driving all the customer touchpoints across all channels, it's impossible to deliver a winning customer buying experience on a consistent basis. Only AI delivers the degree of accuracy and consistency, across huge volumes of data, fast enough to meet customer demands. The ideal solution pairs AI-based insight with human judgement and customer understanding to deliver an exceptional, personalized buying experience. GROW YOUR BUSINESS WITH REAL-TIME ACTIONABLE INSIGHT Keep your customers from your competition by providing pricing that considers and quickly responds to market insight such as competitive data, tariff data, commodity indexes, supply and demand, and other inputs relevant to your pricing strategy. Grow your existing portfolio by giving sales reps unprecedented insight into their markets, cross-sell/upsell recommendations, insight into high-priority customer targets, and product opportunities in specific sales territories. Extend the capabilities of your salesforce, regardless of their pricing and selling experience, through real-time guidance based on all available and relevant data, for ultimate effectiveness and confidence. The Right Solution The right solution for materials distributors is made up of three key elements: connected workflows, high-performance, and experienced AI. Materials distributors need a single set of connected workflows for all commerce interactions that affect the customer buying experience, a high-performance platform that delivers speed at scale and can handle the complexity of business, and experienced AI to deliver personalization and consistency. PROS Makes It Easy PROS provides a connected, AI-powered commerce platform for materials distributors to build lasting value-based relationships with customers, enabling them to make better decisions with the right data, deliver instant, personalized prices they have confidence in, and provide a frictionless buying experience both online and offline. Our platform provides best-in-class analytic, price optimization, price management, quoting, and digital selling solutions that seamlessly integrate with your existing systems. OPTIMIZE GROSS MARGIN AND MAXIMIZE PROFITABILITY Reduce manual discounting and offer the right price for the right product(s) at the right time, with dynamic price optimization based on your customer's willingness-to-pay. Manage, optimize, and update non-negotiated/online pricing across millions of different SKUs and hundreds of different product lines, channels, and customers, in real time, to ensure consistency and drive profitability. Generate pricing strategies for items in different areas of a life cycle based on inventory levels to ensure you've liquidated all product before it goes stagnant and kills your cash conversion cycle. IMPROVE WIN RATES AND SALES PROCESSES Optimize the digital buying/portal/ eCommerce experience throughout all channels and portals through catalog management, customized configurations, personalized recommendations, and online pricing that is consistent with their negotiated pricing. Quickly respond to quotes, large bids or RFPs, manual overrides, or other requests by accelerating the quote turnaround process through guided workflows and streamlined approvals. Automate creation, analysis, and management of proposals, rebates, sales agreements, product orders, renewals, and more through a harmonized platform EXECUTIVE BRIEF FOR MATERIALS DISTRIBUTION