Clarity Ventures' Vice-President of Sales and Marketing Ron Halversen demonstrates how multi-tier, customer-specific pricing works in real-time.

Part 5 of a 6-part series (Return to Part 4)

RON: So the last thing I wanted to do is, I'm going to just briefly talk about it, and I thought we'd change things up a little bit today. We talk a lot about these different things and really go into depth. But what I thought we might want to walk through one of these buying group platforms that we did and show you this in action in real time. And I'm hoping this comes through real clearly. If it doesn't, I'll go back in postproduction and I'll clean it up a little bit. But I'm going to try to walk through this. So I'm going to pull this screen up here. 

what is hipaa

RON: This is Brick Packaging. And brick packaging is a buying group for wineries and anybody that mass produces wine. They sell the barrels and the bottles in the carriers and things to liquor stores, entire chains, and it might be wineries and things like that. 

I'm going to go through just a real quick example. One of the things that I'm going to talk about and showcase is the multiple cart option that we have. We actually have a checkout cart, represented by, obviously, the shopping cart. We have a quote cart, and then we have a sample basket. And there are reasons that we have three separate carts I'm going to walk through. 
 
I'm just going to rip this example out real quick. I'm going to go into wine. One of the things the integration did, you can see here, this bottle is out of stock, that bottle’s in stock. So very quickly, the integration with their back-end ERP—which in this case happens to be Dynamics GP—we've already gone in and calculated all of the retail uplifts. 
 
I'm not logged into this group purchasing website yet, so all of these prices are auto-calculated based on an uplift of retail price since I'm not logged in. And we've also determined whether it's in stock or not. You can see this one's maroon, ii's in stock, out of stock before I even click on it. So I'm going to come over here, I'm going to go to color, I'm going to pick cobalt blue, and I'm going to go grab this bottle right here. 

what is hipaa

RON: Now, as you can see, there's a couple of images missing; this is a copy of their buyers group site when it was in development. So I can go in and do these dummy orders and stuff. This isn't the live site. You can actually visit their live site at BrickPackaging.com if you want to walk through their actual live website. 
 
So I'm going to click on this bottle. One of the other things pulled from their live ERP integration is the real-time stock count. So there's 5,312 bottles in stock. I can see a bunch of information, and then I have all the specifications of the bottle here available to me. 
 
What I'm going to do is, I'm going to the B2B shopping cart. I'm going to Add a Quote, and I'm going to Request a Sample Bottle. Now, the reason I did that is so that I could populate one in each of the three carts up here. So, as we walk through this experience and pick which checkout we do, you can see how it's affected by this. 

what is hipaa

RON: So if I click on Checkout it's going to go in and run the custom routines that we've built into their group buying platform, because this order now is going to go to the warehouse. The warehouse is not in a position to crack open a case and ship one bottle or provide a sample.

So the reason we have these workflows is, if Chris and I wanted to buy 10,001 bottles, we would put 10,001 bottles, we would—this is convert a shopping cart to a quote cart—so we could type in here 10,001, we could update that cart, convert that to a quote, it would pop them in here, we would click on that and it would send that to the sales team and the sales team would come back and go, “Okay, Ron and Chris, if you're buying that many, here's your price.” That would be a quote, right? So we can convert that to a quote. 

what is hipaa

RON: In this particular case, this comes back and says, “Hey, I'm sorry, this comes 16 bottles per case. You have to buy in lots of 16.” We're not cracking open a case because this is the warehouse. “Oh, okay, great. So let's buy 4200 bottles.” We'll update. So now I'm at $44,226. Now I may say, “Oh, I wonder if they'll give me a quantity break instead of the %10.53 unit price. I wonder if they'll give me a quantity break. I could click convert quote it would automatically populate that into this secure shopping cart, and then it would send it to the sales team and they could come back and give me a quote. But remember, I haven't logged in yet to check out. 

 So we're at $10.53 and  $44,000. I'm going to go ahead and log in, it's going to look me up in the ERP and go, “Oh, hey, Lee from Black Star Farms. we know who you are. So you can see here, because of the quantity one, at quantity one, the price per bottle went from $10.53 down to $9.81 and my $44,000 order just dropped to $37,422, because that's the price now that I'm going to be given at that bottle. Now I'm not sure exactly what that quantity break is. I could go back to this cart and it would tell me exactly what that is, but I'm going to show you at the tail end.  

The next step I'm going to do, I'm going to go ahead and just check out real quickly. So the great thing about this is, we did integrations with eight different trucking companies, so we can pick trucking companies. We can tell you exactly how many pallets those 4200 bottles are going to cost because it has to be shipped LTL, so we've got 37 full pallets with seven layers of bottles and a 38 pallet that's four layers. Obviously in this particular case, the primary location I'm shipping to is within a hundred miles. So I offer local delivery and I'm not charging a pallet fee. 
 
If I actually flip that and said, “No, I want to go to the Indy warehouse,” it's going to recalculate, and now you can see each pallet is a $750 core charge, and Free Local Delivery disappeared because I'm no longer within 100-mile radius of free delivery. And if I pick the different carriers, you can see, if I go with Vitran a lift gate’s $24. If I flip over to Dayton, it's $23.25. If I go to UPS it's $300 for a straight truck. So sometimes accessorials can be expensive.  

So now I'm going to continue the next step, and here's where I can actually go pay by credit card or PO. Confirm my purchase and order. I can view and print my receipt in real time or I can go to my user dashboard and go to the dashboard ID. You can see, here is the PO that I just typed in. Here's my order, and you can see that's cleared out the shopping cart.

what is hipaa

RON: So now what I'm going to do is, I'm going to go to view that order and you can see that at retail it was $10.53, at quantity 1 it was $9.81, and at quantity 4200 it discounted me to $8.91.  

So that right there is customer-specific pricing in action in real time. I went in, in retail it showed me the tiered pricing for retail uplift. I logged in and at the quantity 1 to whatever that is in the table—I don't see the database probably like quantities one to ten—the went to $9.81. If I would have put, instead of 4200 probably down to 110, instead of that $8.91 or $9.81 it probably would have been like $9.60 or $9.70. 

Continue to Part 6 to discover the easiest way to retain customers.