Never let an outdated contract cost you margin again

By: Vendavo

Recent months have proven we’re dealing with business NOT as usual. Rising inflation and a global trade war have companies on edge, made even more tenuous by falling U.S. consumer sentiment figures. Economists paint a grim picture for now, but in the absence of a crystal ball, only time will tell.

Rather than wait out the volatility or, worse, spin up reactive responses to the changing news of the day, savvy manufacturers and distributors recognize that now is the time to reassess current practices while keeping focus on long-term profitability. One promising strategy is to align long-term deal negotiations and agreements with bottom-line goals. At Vendavo, we help our customers do exactly that with Intelligent Agreements.

The need for Intelligent Agreements

Contracts that fail to evolve with changing market conditions are easy to overlook but expensive to ignore. Essential in any economy but particularly in today’s market, long-term agreements must be built to maximize every deal and allow for rapid course-correction when needed.

Static contracts can drain profitability. Take tariffs, for example. Protecting your margin through fluctuating market costs requires timely price adjustments of existing contracts and proposals across specific product lines and customer segments. Yet keeping every quote and agreement aligned with new costs and pricing structures is a major operational challenge. Manual updates are slow, error-prone, and drain your team's focus.

Industry analysts agree. Gartner recognizes long-term deal negotiation as critical for B2B success. Vendavo leads the way with a comprehensive solution that ensures pricing agility, compliance, and profitability.

Vendavo Intelligent Agreements help you monitor, adjust, and enforce deal pricing, protecting your margins while keeping your contracts profitable and compliant. What makes an agreement intelligent is shared collaboration and insights from every internal stakeholder group, including sales, pricing, finance, product, marketing, and the C-suite at the start of a negotiation, and a unified framework to create, scale, monitor, and adapt the agreement.

Shared insights and a unified framework

Intelligent Agreements start with guided selling tools that identify relevant offerings and recommendations for the deal. In this way, even junior salespeople can configure and present good-fit options. Customer-specific pricing based on AI-powered pricing logic that ingests costs, profitability targets, and the maximum amount the customer is willing to pay is included and paired with appropriate performance-based incentives and discounts. This is promptly input to a sophisticated, branded quote with a workflow that enables quick review and approval by the appropriate roles and departments before sending it to the customer.

Once the quote is approved, this framework generates an agreement that includes upfront discounts, volume-based discounts, rebates, shipping terms, and MDF. It connects with your ERP and/or CRM for easy deal compliance checks and revenue and margin contributions. It can also be used to create highly personalized cross-sell recommendations for your sellers via Vendavo Sales Optimizer. You can easily automate and track incentives by integrating it with Vendavo Rebate & Channel Manager.  

Delivering measurable impact

The gains from Intelligent Agreements are not soft or theoretical. They are measurable and immediate.

Sales teams see faster deal cycles, higher win rates, and fewer bottlenecks. Pricing teams gain real control over strategy and execution, building stronger pricing discipline across every agreement. Finance leaders achieve more predictable revenue, better risk management, and higher profitability. These outcomes are not reserved for companies that have completed massive transformations. They often begin in the early stages of adopting Intelligent Agreements.

You do not have to overhaul your entire commercial process to start seeing results. Many customers start small, focusing on a single agreement type, region, or product line, and expand from there as momentum grows.

Intelligent Agreements help you capture more margin, close deals faster, improve compliance, and strengthen customer engagement. Just as important, they give your teams something harder to measure but even more valuable: confidence. Confidence that pricing is enforceable, aligned to strategy, and producing reliable outcomes across thousands of customer relationships.

Informed, agile contract lifecycle

Most manufacturers and distributors operate under multi-year pricing contracts, volume-based discounts, and complex rebate structures. Intelligent Agreements power fluid pricing adjustments as material costs change, provide real-time visibility into rebate eligibility, and protect margins with AI-driven price optimization.

Intelligent agreements protect margins during economic hardships and help companies flourish once the volatility subsides. Do not let outdated processes drain your revenue or erode your market share. Now is the time to take control of your agreements — and with them, your outcomes. Meanwhile, your competitors will be stuck renegotiating the past. You will be building the future.