Contract Intelligence Objective
Enable field sales to execute contracts directly from Salesforce with pre-approved templates that ensure strong margins on every deal.
Solution Highlights
- $600,000 in incentive double dipping eliminated
- Salesforce integration drives strong uptake of pre-approved, high-margin sales agreements
- 100% commercial compliance for contracts managed on Icertis
Business Challenge
This American food distributor is the trusted supplier for thousands of restaurants across the United States—from mom-and-pop diners to large national chains. The leading distributor’s partnerships with these customers are built on agreements that define the commercial terms of the relationship, including volume, pricing, and incentives. The terms agreed to between sales and restaurants directly impact the profitability of its operations.
As the company digitally transformed, revenue operations recognized an opportunity to reinvent its contract process to gain better control and visibility into these agreements. At the time, the company was managing contracts manually, making it difficult for headquarters to monitor and enforce commercial compliance with agreements executed in the field.
The department’s ambitions went well beyond reducing contract cycle times or enabling e-signature. Instead, it wanted to empower field sales to craft competitive deals that met margin requirements while reducing the burden on legal and finance to review every agreement. The company also wanted a system that could generate data to surface opportunities for continued improvements.
Project leaders realized that transforming how they managed customer agreements could drastically improve business performance and stay out in front in an industry defined by tight margins and fierce competition.
The Solution
The organization chose the Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform to meet these goals. Working with Icertis, the company designed an ambitious project that not only digitally transformed contracting but served as a catalyst for digital transformation across the systems and processes contracts touch.
Icertis offered the power and flexibility it needed to model complex commercial deals on the back end while providing an easy-to-use front-end interface for sales. Critically, Icertis integrates seamlessly into Salesforce, meaning sales can initiate agreements directly from the CRM they use every day.
In addition to Salesforce, Icertis is integrated directly into the company’s incentive and pricing systems, eliminating incentive “double dipping” by customers and data entry errors.
“In the first phase, we were able to migrate 34% of our local agreements onto Icertis. It was a huge win,” said the company’s Senior Director of Revenue Management.
The next phase addressed deals that allow for more customization. These deals allow field sales to negotiate deals while remaining compliant with internal controls.
The Results
Today, the company enjoys enterprise-wide visibility and control over deals governing more than half of its local sales agreement volume. Field sellers can be in and out of restaurants within minutes with signed agreements. In fact, the “incentive-only” deals have proven so popular with sellers that the percentage of deals leveraging these agreements has risen by 5% since ICI was deployed.
This is a win for the company since the precalculated deals have a higher-than-average contribution to margin. Meanwhile, the incentive system integration is credited with eliminating $600,000 dollars in incentive double dipping. With Icertis, they have transformed their customer agreements into strategic assets that improve revenue and drive compliance across the enterprise.
