The exchange volatility and cost fluctuations in Latin America are opening up opportunities for the sophisticated tools offered by Zilliant, which recently opened an office in the region to help mid-size and large firms better manage sales and pricing.
“For the last seven years, we focused on North America and Europe," Greg Howe, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Zilliant, recently told Latin Business Daily. "But we see bigger opportunities in Latin America for our solutions and this is why we expanded."
Founded in 1999, Zilliant uses technology-driven tools such as algorithms to help identify the best prices. The company's tools help companies adjust prices much more rapidly not just to reflect the exchange rate variations but also fluctuation in costs.
“Today our revenues in Latin America are less than 5 percent of our total," Howe added. "Our goal will be to more than double that within the next three years."
Zilliant initially will focus its biggest efforts on Brazil and Mexico, Carlos Fernandez, the company´s vice president of sales for Latin America, said.
Construction as well as manufacturing and consumer product companies will be the first to be offered Zilliant support.
The support includes identifying opportunities for “up sell and cross sell” as well as help companies overcome “customer retention challenges” all done through software applications. Once data is entered, the software can provide guidance to questions such as which companies should be called or what products should receive more attention.
The software can help executives design the right pricing strategy by using more sophisticated tools as opposed to common situations where pricing depends on executives following the costs, often not having time to react, especially when there are many products.
Faced with this volatility, Latin American companies can be “much more rapidly reactive if they have an automated data-driven tool,” Howe said.
Pricing support helps a company's sales force avoid discounting too much and helps keep a logical pricing system in place. For companies that may have thousands of products and hundreds of sales people this can be a challenge, he added.
Most companies will agree that pricing is one of the most important aspects, yet “pricing is done today in a very unsophisticated manner,” Howe said. Company executives are still relying on “gut intuition” or basing their decision on simple cost and margins related calculations.
Taking a much more “granular” approach can result in massive opportunities, he added.
As for the sales support, “that is our fastest growing product segment,” he said. It helps companies take action to increase penetration, steal business from competitors and identify where sales could increase.
“We like to target companies with $200 to 250 million in sales, the mid-size and larger businesses," Howe said. "They have the complexity and the scale."
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