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B2B commerce technology firm Logik.io raises $16 million

Paul Demery — Tue, 23 May 2023 17:30:35 +0000

Logik.io provides technology designed to “consumerize B2B buying experiences” through guided product discovery, product configuration and a recommendation engine.

Christopher Shutts, CEO, Logik.io

The company will expand its market strategy with $16 million in a Series A funding round, Logik.io announced today.

“Many B2B companies struggle to deliver the low-touch consumerized experiences customers demand today,” co-founder and CEO Christopher Shutts said. “But the businesses who are leading their industries understand that no matter how complex your products are, buyers seek out businesses who make it simple to find, configure, and augment purchases across any channel.”

Logik.io’s clients include Keysight Technologies and Club Car

Logik says its Commerce Logic Engine technology is designed to help B2B buyers find and configure complex products and services from manufacturers, SaaS software providers and service companies. Logik’s customer base includes electric testing equipment manufacturer Keysight Technologies and Club Car, a maker of golf carts and utility vehicles.

The $16 million funding was led by Emergence Capital and joined by ServiceNow Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. Logik.io has now raised a total $26 million since Shutts and Logik.io chairman Godard Abel co-founded the company in 2021. Santi Subotovsky, general partner at Emergence Capital, will join the Logik.io board.

Prior to Logik.io, Shutts and Abel co-founded BigMachines, a configure-price-quote software provider they sold in 2013 to Oracle Corp., which renamed it Oracle CPQ.

Abel also developed Steelbrick, a CPQ software firm now part of Salesforce Inc. In addition, Abel is co-founder and CEO of G2.com, an AI- and ChatGTP-backed online information resource for business software.

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‘Visual commerce’ — a sharp new focus on B2B

Kathleen Lewarchick — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 17:05:09 +0000

Kathleen Lewarchick

“Visual commerce,” or online buying that uses 360-degree image views, interactive 3D models, and in some cases, augmented reality, has made the jump to B2B ecommerce. Introduced by the gaming world, visual commerce became more mainstream when B2C brands began offering enhanced visual experiences. Think eyewear retailing, where consumers “try on” frames, or furniture buying, where buyers preview products in their virtual home. It was only a matter of time before those experiences appeared in B2B.

How visual commerce helps B2B buyers

Buyers look for clarity as they step through an online customer journey. Ordering and reordering can be straightforward, but increasingly distributors and manufacturers have turned to “solution selling” of interconnected products using a visual approach. Buyers appreciate seeing a more fully integrated list of materials. It removes the guesswork and saves time. Sometimes it even saves them money.

In some categories, visual commerce provides wholesalers (and even their consumers) with engaging experiences. It might be a virtual showroom with curated collections that support full online buying. Other times it is a mixed-use tool, a digital assist: buyers peruse fixtures and materials in a real showroom and place items in an online cart, on a device, as they shop. This can save buyers time and it can be a wonderful way to cross-sell them throughout the customer journey.

New technology tools

One tool — exploded-view diagrams, or schematics showing parts together — was a mainstay for engineers. But they are more common now throughout B2B ecommerce. Buyers can now see the entire solution, both holistically and individually, and order with them. Per the parts diagram below, the exploded view integrates with the order management system. See a part that you need? Check. See the whole solution? Check, check. In either case, just click and place it in the cart.

An exploded-view diagram, which is becoming more common in B2B ecommerce, lets buyers view and click to buy individual parts of complex equipment.

One B2B company incorporated this technology into their user experience flow. The goal was twofold:

to make it easier for B2B sellers in their organization to explain larger, integrated solutions; and
to make it easier for their customers, B2B procurement teams, to visualize the outcome.

By creating an integrated visual tied to the company’s order management system, they reduced steps in the customer journey. As the ecommerce manager says, “There’s a wonderful moment when buyers say: ‘Aha! I see how it all works.’ We want to delight and relieve buyers during the process.”

While not all B2B categories are a match for transactional visual commerce, other augmented reality tools are on the cusp of changing the way that overall B2B business performs. Again, driven by experiences in gaming, buyers like MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) engineers can now don A/R headgear or use tablets to “see” solutions in their natural environment. As a result, they may uncover potential barriers earlier in the buying process, maybe even prior to ordering. This accelerates the knowledge build and helps save time and money with returns.

MRO engineers use visual commerce to view products in their natural environment before placing an order.

Preparing for the future

Visual commerce may never fully replace traditional ecommerce, just as “voice commerce” hasn’t become the dominant way to place B2B orders yet. However, visual commerce will continue to be incorporated into many facets of B2B digital commerce given the appetite that online users have for strong visuals. A great place for your organization to start is with a strategic discussion about use cases. These provide the foundation alongside good product data, and with technologies like Digital Asset Management systems, you evolve toward the Visual Commerce experiences that your customers increasingly expect.

About the author

Kathleen Leigh Lewarchick is the VP of Marketing for Xngage LLC, a B2B digital commerce services company with more than 60 clients across the industrial trades. She is the former PURELL® Hand Sanitizer Brand Director, has co-created automated replenishment products with Amazon Business, and created telehealth solutions for a company that she later helped sell to CVS Health.

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BigCommerce expands technology options for B2B companies

Paul Demery — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 15:30:09 +0000

BigCommerce, a provider of cloud-based ecommerce software, is taking steps to grow its market reach with companies of all sizes.

The software vendor’s latest move came this week when it announced the acquisition of Quote Ninja Inc., a provider of price-quoting software doing business as B2B Ninja.

B2B Ninja, which launched in 2014 and says it has more than 125 enterprise-level companies as clients worldwide, is a long-time BigCommerce technology partner. companies running their ecommerce sites on the BigCommerce platform have also deployed B2B Ninja’s quoting application. The two companies did not reveal what BigCommerce agreed to pay for B2B Ninja, but they say they will now work more closely together to blend their technology platforms.

The acquisition follows BigCommerce’s launch last year of B2B Edition, which it developed with technology partner BundleB2B as “an advanced suite of B2B functionalities.” Those functionalities include such B2B processes as managing multiple purchasing authorizations among buyers, providing re-ordering of commonly purchased supplies, and management of customer accounts.

The B2B Edition also came out with a tool for managing price quotes, but with B2B Ninja BigCommerce can now offer “the next level of quoting functionality” for more complex and higher volume quoting, BigCommerce says.

Industry analysts note that BigCommerce is addressing a significant need among B2B ecommerce practitioners. “The B2B Ninja acquisition is further evidence of BigCommerce’s efforts to enhance its standard B2B technology offerings,” says Andy Hoar, CEO of consulting firm Paradigm B2B. “In my 2021 Paradigm B2B Combine research, I identified ‘quoting’ as an area where BigCommerce needed to make some improvements. This acquisition is proof that BigCommerce is listening to the market.”

Bulk Bookstore, a supplier to more than 35,000 customers, including schools, businesses, and nonprofit organizations, has used B2B Ninja integrated with BigCommerce to electronically manage several hundred online quotes each month, Heather Bradley, Bulk Bookstore’s operations manager, says in a case study on B2B Ninja’s website. That has saved the book company time and freed up its sales reps to focus on other areas of helping customers instead of manually processing quotes, she says.

BigCommerce clients will have the option to deploy B2B Ninja along with any version of BigCommerce ecommerce software.

The monthly cost to deploy B2B Ninja ranges from $75 to $499 or more depending on such criteria as the number of users and quotes processed, according to pricing figures on B2BNinja.com.

Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 B2B News, published 4x/week, covering technology and business trends in the growing B2B ecommerce industry. Contact editor Paul Demery at paul@digitalcommerce360.com and follow him on Twitter @pdemery.

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No room for lagging prices in the digital marketplace

Valerie Howard — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 20:06:24 +0000

Valerie Howard

While the B2B marketplace has operated at an accelerating pace year after year, today’s COVID-19 crisis drives unprecedented market conditions that are forcing businesses to be more agile than ever before. Businesses need to adapt to changing customer demands and stay attuned to changing buyer preferences in order to better serve their clients—downstream businesses who are likely trying to make sense of how to reliably service their own customers in this new environment.

Traditionally, the B2B purchasing engagement has been rather rigid, requiring a tedious dance of price opacity and careful negotiation. With large portions of the global economy under stay-at-home orders, many businesses are forced to move a lot of the traditional sales engagement to digital channels. And selling digitally makes it a lot more difficult to keep prices ambiguous. The businesses that succeed today understand that today’s conditions require differentiated digital experiences—and often that can be achieved with responsiveness, transparency and personalization.

The cost of static ecommerce prices

Many businesses have been hesitant to truly shift sales to digital channels. Instead, they’ve treated their digital presence as an online catalog as a way to protect their pricing. In doing so, they’re operating under the assumption that clients will call to negotiate for the actual price—and are willing to endure haggling and the back-and-forth with a sales representative just to get a market-relevant price.

There are several problems to this approach: the inevitability of price variation and pricing errors, the reduced productivity of salespeople, the missed sales of buyers that just aren’t willing to endure the tedious negotiations, and poor customer experiences.

Problems with price variation start to occur when there is little price governance in place, causing prices to vary as much as the salespeople negotiating them. Businesses that have high price variation will gain a reputation for low price integrity—essentially, driving their customers to negotiate for better deals and causing them to focus on price rather than value. This negative cycle reduces the productivity of sales who then spend a significant amount of time seeking internal discount approvals instead of focusing efforts on educating their clients on the value of their goods and services.

Balancing competitive pricing with profitability

Businesses that seriously want to drive sales through their digital channel know that there is a significant challenge to doing so—balancing the delivery of competitive pricing while protecting profitability.

According to a 2019 study of pricing professionals conducted by Hanover Research, a majority of pricing teams (62%) are updating their eCommerce prices on a cadence of monthly or less frequently. For nearly all industries, prices calculated based on last month’s cost information and market trends will be outdated.

While 38% of these pricing professionals say they are delivering a universal price list for their digital channels, another 38% say they are able to personalize prices through digital channels. Personalized pricing helps balance the delivery of competitive pricing to customers whose contract pricing or volume spend may warrant deeper discounts without sacrificing profitability across the enterprise.

How are businesses delivering this personalized pricing? Many enterprises identify their customers by requiring that they log in to their digital commerce portals to have their prices retrieved from a static, pre-calculated list. Taking this approach ensures that prices can be rapidly retrieved without delaying ecommerce page loads, but pricing teams face many complications with this method.

There are a few challenges with leveraging static, pre-calculated price-lists for ecommerce. First, these prices are calculated based on outdated data. Second, maintaining the coordination and rationality of prices across channels is incredibly difficult and error-prone when prices are retrieved from disparate sources. And finally, this typically requires the pre-calculation, storage, and management of millions of personalized, price combinations—99% of which won’t get calculated on and may not ever be seen by customers.

Agile and dynamic approaches to pricing

So what’s the solution for addressing these challenges? The most sophisticated businesses have addressed this head-on by calculating prices for ecommerce in real time. Instead of leveraging an uploaded list of all the potential personalized price combinations, these businesses have enabled the retrieval of a real-time price calculation for every price that appears on the screen for a potential buyer.

By connecting their ecommerce platform to a real-time price calculation engine, businesses are able to deliver prices that are optimized in the context of current market data and personalized to the unique conditions of each buyer engagement. While pricing teams can’t predict the weather or the market, they can build price calculation strategies that take the current weather and market conditions into account. Even when pricing teams are sleeping or simply offline, they can ensure that their customers are receiving market-relevant, personalized pricing allowing their customers to successfully transact through self-serve channels.

While the most sophisticated are increasingly leaning into dynamic pricing, organizations that are still ramping up their digital channels can still leverage automation and personalization to enable periodic pricing updates to their eCommerce channels. As of 2019, 70% of organizations were updating prices weekly or less frequently, however, 64% believed they should be ideally updating prices at least daily. Many commodities-based industries will schedule intra-day price updates to ensure that they are periodically updating their prices to include the most recent cost information.

Another alternative is leveraging trigger-based updates. Other organizations that may not be ready for real-time price calculation and don’t have the bandwidth to support several intra-day price updates may look to this solution. By setting thresholds that trigger price updates that then propagate the delivery of new prices to digital channels, pricing teams can rest assured that their prices will automatically update in response to significant changes in cost or market conditions.

Regardless of the methodology, your business chooses to deliver personalized, market-relevant pricing through ecommerce, buyers will expect that these prices are coordinated with other purchase channels. Prices do not necessarily need to be consistent across channels, but you’ll want your customers to perceive that prices are rational. Ultimately, buyers want to work with vendors who make a meaningful effort to be fair and transparent in their pricing.

Focus on expanding value

Once a business is able to demonstrate to their customers that they can be trusted to provide market-relevant pricing that aligns to their customers’ perceptions of value, they can move beyond price-haggling and price-following. Moving beyond a focus on price allows businesses to tune into where they can offer expanded value to their client base.

This may mean tuning in to a personalized catalog experience that presents ecommerce buyers with the offers that are most relevant to them, or giving sales teams guidance on how they could consider locking in clients to an incentivized subscription. In these experiences, customers benefit from their vendor’s deeper understanding of their needs and ability to proactively engage with clients on ways in which they can expand value delivery.

Valerie Howard is the solution strategy director at PROS, a provider of online pricing and selling technology and services. Follow her on LinkedIn.

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Emerson Electric drafts a blueprint for engineering ecommerce

Mark Brohan — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 19:31:50 +0000

Engineers can be hard to read when it comes to figuring which online tools and ecommerce features they want to help them do their jobs better.

Within many companies, engineers are several steps removed from the ecommerce process, mainly involved in designing and building products and services—not in making online purchases.

Our customers still want access to human expertise, but now expect a great digital experience as well.

Brad Budde, vice president, digital customer experience, Emerson Automation Solutions

Emerson Electric Co.

But engineers do have a need to be better integrated into the ecommerce channel, particularly in the design phase of a project.

And giving engineers better online access to product data—and ordering—is a primary reason Emerson Electric Co., a $17.40 billion manufacturer and distributor of engineering products, has launched a new digital portal for its $11.44 billion Emerson Automation Solution division. Emerson’s product lines include instruments for controlling air and water pressure and for managing electric power supplies for a wide range of industrial, commercial, and consumer markets.

MyEmerson portal launches for engineers

The new portal—MyEmerson, a part of Emerson.com—launched in September with the aim of giving engineers and engineering support teams access to digital content, planning tools and ecommerce features that speed up engineering design and collaboration. MyEmerson runs on WebSphere technology from HCL Technologies, which acquired the ecommerce technology and related products from IBM Corp. in December. (HCL has since renamed WebSphere as HCL Commerce.).

Illustration shows the components that make up the MyEmerson portal.

MyEmerson is part of a broader digital makeover strategy for Emerson, and the new portal has the potential to configure product instrumentation up to 93% faster, typically saving over 100 engineering hours annually, Emerson says. With a MyEmerson account, users can access digital tools to research and engineer answers to production questions, manage software and installed assets, access training opportunities, collaborate with experts, streamline procurement processes and improve visibility into buying history and trends, says Brad Budde, vice president of digital customer experience for Emerson Automation Solutions.

Brad Budde, vice president, digital customer experience, Emerson Automation Solutions, Emerson Electric Co.

For example, using an offline configuration approach, engineers would use a product data sheet, manually selecting the options from the order table to create the model code, Emerson says. This usually takes around 15 minutes per device—and often does not result in an accurate model code. But engineers can use an online visual configurator to generate the model code with much higher accuracy in about a minute, Budde says.

Addressing engineers’ digital expectations

“Driven by our personal interaction with digital technology, customers have new expectations today about speed and access to information,” he says. “Our customers still want access to human expertise, but now expect a great digital experience as well—combining these two experiences to deliver information immediately and use it to solve problems faster is what drives new business value.”

On MyEmerson, engineers can use digital sizing, selection and configuration tools for valves, actuators, fluid control, pneumatic, electrical and other products and instruments, the company says.

Other tools enable engineers to create a valid product configuration, generate required documentation or calculate a return on investment based on computer-aided design (CAD) drawings and diagrams.

More efficient procurement

For engineering support teams and procurement directors, there are tools and features that let users create requisition lists, generate quotes, and automatically populate purchase orders. Other features let users view order status, order history, quotes, and purchase orders. “With greater visibility to order status and order history, procurement teams have access to the information they need to drive more efficient processes,” Emerson says.

Currently, Emerson has about 10,000 SKUs available for purchase on MyEmerson, and users can purchase and pay electronically through a variety of channels, including ecommerce, electronic data interchange and e-procurement. Emerson doesn’t break out web sales, but over time expects to attract a substantial user base among engineers, purchasing managers and engineering support personnel.

“We expect many (users) to register since we serve thousands of customers around the world in a diverse set of industrial businesses,” Budde says. “The biggest challenge is change management. As we hear across the industry, it’s less the technology that is the hurdle—it’s driving the adoption to embrace and realize the benefits of a new approach.”

Sign up for a complimentary subscription to B2BecNews, published four times per week, covering technology and business trends in the growing B2B ecommerce industry. B2BecNews is a publication of DigitalCommerce360.com, whose titles also include Internet Retailer and Internet Health Management. Contact Mark Brohan, director of B2B e-commerce research, at mark@verticalwebmedia.com and follow him on Twitter @markbrohan.

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Simplus Acquires CirrusOne

(PRESS RELEASE) — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 12:53:17 +0000

SALT LAKE CITY FEBRUARY 02, 2018 Simplus today announced that it has acquired San Francisco–based CirrusOne, a firm that specializes in high-quality consulting services for CPQ, CLM, billing and customer success solutions. The move is part of Simplus’ vision as a leading CPQ service provider that delivers customer success through quote-to-cash solutions tailored to maximize the user experience.

“Simplus and CirrusOne have long shared the same dedication to raising the industry bar, so my team and I are absolutely thrilled to combine forces to further accelerate progress in the CPQ space,” said Ryan Westwood, Simplus CEO. “We’re especially excited to inherit greater technical depth and domain expertise, as well as CirrusOne’s exceptional operating principles.”

Simplus, founded in 2014 and headquartered in Salt Lake City, has now completed five consultancy acquisitions since Q4 2016. It most recently purchased CRM manager in November 2017 after a successful Series B funding round led by EPIC Ventures, including Salesforce Ventures and Cross Creek Advisors.

Simplus – recently ranked No. 78 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 and recipient of six Comparably 2017 Best Company awards – will be adding 44 full-time CirrusOne employees to its team, expanding upon its creation of 100 new jobs in 2017.

“Combining Simplus’ global footprint and success with the consultant development and project governance that has fueled CirrusOne’s rapid growth is an incredibly exciting proposition,” said Shane Anastasi, CirrusOne CEO. “Combined, we have an arsenal of go-to-market products that helps us accelerate our shared vision, and we are all very excited about the future.”

CirrusOne – a Silver Salesforce Partner and Gold Oracle Partner – was recently named the No. 4 Fastest Growing Consulting Firm in North America by Consulting Magazine for its 740 percent growth from 2013 to 2016.

“Combining technologies from CirrusOne and Simplus has the potential to create an unparalleled firm in the quote-to-cash space,” said Erich Rusch, CirrusOne co-founder and CSO. “We’re excited to co-create one of the largest quote-to-cash firms on the planet. Having the ability to combine our collective wisdom and experience toward achieving this goal is a primary driver in our decision to merge with Simplus.”

Godard Abel, former CEO of BigMachines and SteelBrick, now Salesforce CPQ, also commented on the acquisition: “With this acquisition, Simplus is further strengthening its team and creating a preeminent quote-to-cash consultancy in the Salesforce ecosystem. It is great to see Simplus bringing this tremendous talent together to help customers achieve success.”

For more information, please contact 1-833-SIMPLUS or email katherine.kireiev(at)simplus(dot)com.

Salesforce, CPQ and others are among the trademarks of Salesforce.com, Inc.

ABOUT SIMPLUS
Simplus is a Platinum Salesforce Partner and an industry leader in Quote-to-Cash implementations. We provide enterprise-wide digital transformation across the entire Salesforce ecosystem through advisory, implementation, change management, custom configuration and managed services. Guided by the mantra “Success Simplified,” we use leading cloud solutions to help companies achieve a strategic vision, improve performance and increase value to stakeholders. With more than 2,000 clients and a customer satisfaction rating in the top 1 percent of all Salesforce partners, Simplus helps companies improve, innovate and grow. For more information about Simplus, please visit http://www.simplus.com.

ABOUT CIRRUSONE
CirrusOne specializes in high-quality consulting services for CPQ, CLM, billing and customer success solutions. Led by a seasoned team of subject matter experts who leverage an innovative consulting approach for complex CPQ and billing solutions, our team of architects, consultants and executives leverages this expertise to bring you trusted advice to maximize your technology investment.

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SAP buys Callidus Software for its cloud‑based sales tools

Bloomberg News — Tue, 30 Jan 2018 19:25:05 +0000

Business software provider SAP SE today revealed a $2.4 billion deal for Callidus Software Inc., its biggest acquisition in more than three years. Callidus, known as CallidusCloud, provides cloud-based software that sales reps, marketing managers and others use to manage interactions with customers.

SAP has been expanding cloud-based services to challenge rivals such as Salesforce.com and Oracle NetSuite.

SAP said Tuesday it will pay $36 a share for Dublin, Calif.-based Callidus to give Europe’s biggest software company access to new sales analytic and customer engagement tools. CallidusCloud’s clients include such companies as merchants Build.com and CDW, and manufacturers Lenovo and Philips.

Walldorf, Germany-based SAP—which also owns e-commerce software vendor SAP Hybris and procurement network provider SAP Ariba—also reported fourth quarter earnings, generating sales of 6.8 billion euros ($8.4 billion) in the period, in line with analysts’ expectations, due to uptake of its flagship business software S/4 Hana. New cloud bookings, a keenly watched metric for future sales growth, grew 31% at constant currencies.

SAP CEO Bill McDermott has been expanding cloud-based services to challenge rivals such as Salesforce.com Inc. and Oracle Corp. (including Oracle NetSuite for e-commerce and back-end business operations software) and serve clients using the software to run sales, manufacturing and human resources functions. CallidusCloud’s software integrates with Salesforce.com’s technology platform.

Yet after swallowing Ariba Inc., Hybris, Concur Technologies Inc. and SuccessFactors Inc. for a combined $15 billion in acquisitions between 2012 and 2014, SAP has been relatively quiet in the business software arms race.

SAP rose as much as 1% in Frankfurt trading Tuesday.

While McDermott said the deal doesn’t represent a return to a strategy of major acquisitions, it’s the biggest purchase since the $7.4 billion Concur deal that was announced in September 2014. Shares of Callidus closed at $32.7 as of end-of-trading Monday.

Meanwhile, SAP’s flagship S/4 Hana software added 1,000 customers including Unilever NV and Puma SE in the fourth quarter to reach more than 7,900 users, a greater intake than in the previous three-month period. The software allows businesses to run tasks on their own machines or in a cloud-computing arrangement hosted by SAP or one of its partners.

Operating profit, excluding share-based compensation, amortization and other charges, was 2.36 billion euros (US$2.93 billion), missing the average estimate of 2.4 billion euros (US$2.97 billion). The company sees non-IFRS operating profit in a range of 7.3 billion euros (US$9.05 billion)to 7.5 billion euros (US$9.3 billion)this year. (IFRS, or International Financial Reporting Standards, are internationally accepted accounting standards set by the International Accounting Standards Board. Hundreds of companies based outside of the United States use IFRS standards in their filings of financial statements with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. U.S.-based companies use GAAP standards, or generally accepted accounting principles, in their SEC filings.)

SAP’s results fell slightly short of consensus because of “weaker-than-expected” license order entry in the final three months of the year, said Knut Woller, an analyst at Baader Bank AG, a miss seen as a “cycle hiccup” rather than the beginning of a negative trend.

SAP said the deal will be “essentially neutral” to non-IFRS earnings-per-share for fiscal 2018 and accretive to EPS in fiscal 2019. SAP will fund the acquisition with existing cash reserves and an acquisition loan. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2018, subject to approval from regulators and investors, SAP said in the statement.

McDermott, who sat next to U.S. President Donald Trump during a meeting with business executives at the at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, said in an interview on Bloomberg TV that Trump’s tax plan was “extremely well received” by CEOs at the forum.

“There was not a single CEO I talked to that wasn’t feeling good about the economic momentum,” he said. “2018 will be the year for investing in jobs, manufacturing, growth.”

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‘Quote-to-Cash’ software vendor Apttus raises $55 million

Paul Demery — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 21:14:10 +0000

Apttus Corp. is still raking it in.

Since launching 11 years ago, the provider of a cloud-based “quote-to-cash” sales management system used by such client companies as Deere & Co., LinkedIn, Kuka Robotics and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is on its fifth round of venture capital funding. It said it raised $55 million in Series E funding, bringing the total raised from investors to $329 million.

Premji Invest, an investment firm that joined prior investors in the current round, calls Apttus a promising company in a fast-growing market.

“Premji is always highly selective in its investments, working with the strongest management teams and the most promising companies,” says Sandesh Patnam, Premji’s partner and lead investor in the U.S. “In Apttus we have found a team and market opportunity that fits that description perfectly, and we look forward to working with them to help realize the full potential of the platform.” Premji is the private equity firm of Azim Premji, who is chairman of I.T. consulting and systems integrator firm Wipro Limited, which is based in India.

Apttus says it will use the funding to continue developing its technology. Among its recent developments is an artificial intelligence software it calls Max, which is incorporated into the vendor’s quote-to-cash and contract management applications to help its clients devise contracts more likely to suit the needs of their clients and build sales. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a term used to describe software that learns from the data it compiles to improve on its own such functions as devising contract terms or recommending products likely to produce revenue.

Apttus, whose technology was developed to integrate with the cloud-based CRM software platform from Salesforce.com Inc., provides a suite of online software applications for such tasks as configuring and pricing complex products, managing contracts and billing, managing promotions and managing employees’ incentive compensation. Its quote-to-cash technology is designed to manage and record all of the steps between when a seller provides a product price quote to a customer, and when the seller receives payment at the completion of the purchase process.

The company is based in San Mateo, Calif., and has about 1,200 employees worldwide. It also has offices in Bozeman, Mont., as well as in Chicago, London, India, Japan and Australia.

Also participating in the current funding round were prior investors K1, Iconiq, and Salesforce Ventures, the investment arm of Salesforce.com Inc.

Sign up for a free subscription to B2BecNews, a twice-weekly newsletter that covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B e-commerce industry. B2BecNews is published by Vertical Web Media LLC, which also publishes DigitalCommerce360.com, Internet Retailer and Internet Health Management. Follow B2BecNews editor Paul Demery on Twitter @pdemery.

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Apttus Releases Intelligent Incentive Compensation Management Solution

(PRESS RELEASE) — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 11:10:24 +0000

SAN MATEO, CA – August 25, 2017 – Apttus, the category-defining Quote-to-Cash (QTC) and Contract Lifecycle Management solution provider, today announced the general availability of its Intelligent Incentive Compensation Management (IICM) solution. IICM is an enterprise solution that utilizes business intelligence, machine learning and Max, Apttus’ artificial intelligent agent, to fundamentally change the user experience. It enables organizations to design and execute strategic sales incentive programs (commissions, bonuses, SPIFFs, contests, etc.) that align the behaviors of sales representatives and partner sellers with the interests of the business.

The introduction of the Intelligent Incentive Compensation Management solution is yet another example of Apttus’ innovation in the Quote-to-Cash business process. Built on the Apttus Intelligent Cloud, IICM enables sales leaders and compensation professionals to manage simple to complex incentive programs that target optimal selling behaviors aligned to a business’ revenue goals. As the newest addition to the Apttus Incentives solutions suite, IICM goes beyond traditional offerings by now providing variable incentives to internal sales teams and partner channels, alongside its existing capabilities, such as marketing incentives and promotions for customers and rebate programs for customers and partners. Aligning all selling channels, including internal sales teams, partner channels and E-Commerce, allows IICM to ensure customer satisfaction while providing motivation to sales teams.

Intelligent Incentive Compensation Management is critical for all enterprise-level organizations, yet its processes are fraught with limitations which IICM is designed to address:

48% of incentive plans do not achieve desired results. This translates to a significant loss in time, resources and money. Apttus IICM allows organizations to embed incentives throughout their Quote-to-Cash processes, align incentive programs across channels and design intelligent sales compensation plans that drive business results.
87% of companies are not using automated, packaged solutions today. Spreadsheets and homegrown solutions are still the norm. In addition to gaining operational efficiencies through automation, Apttus customers can integrate IICM and QTC applications with a single vendor, single platform, single data model, and single user interface – a unified experience unavailable with other solutions today.
90% of companies are choosing to make changes to their sales incentives programs in 2017. Apttus provides the insight and intelligence through Apttus AI using Max and machine learning to quickly and intelligently adjust sales incentives and provide the visibility to ensure alignment of these programs.

“As the unquestioned leader in Quote-to-Cash innovation, we are proud to continue driving our industry forward. One of the latest ways we are doing this is with Intelligent Incentive Compensation Management,” said Kirk Krappe, Apttus CEO. “Through the years, we have learned that the best way to drive business outcomes is not only to automate the process, but also to motivate individual behaviors throughout business practices. By having incentive-based applications wrapped around Quote-to-Cash solutions, organizations can align user behavior to business outcomes. Additionally, using our Artificial Intelligence agent Max, we take the user experience and insights to a level not seen in our industry today.”

About Apttus

Apttus, the category-defining Quote-to-Cash and Contract Lifecycle Management technology company, drives the vital business process between a buyer’s interest and the realization of revenue. Utilizing a patented combination of SaaS-based applications, the Apttus Intelligent Cloud maximizes revenue and business outcomes for companies of all sizes, including 100 of the Fortune 500. Enhanced by Machine Learning and Max, an Intelligent Agent, Apttus applications include Configure Price Quote (CPQ), E-Commerce, Contract Management, Incentives Management, Renewals, Billing and Order Management. The Apttus Intelligent Cloud is powered by the world’s most trusted cloud platforms, including Salesforce and Microsoft Azure. Apttus is based in San Mateo, California, with additional offices located across the globe. For more information visit: apttus.com.

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Wal-Mart targets value-oriented online shoppers

Zak Stambor — Fri, 26 May 2017 19:37:11 +0000

With its slew of recent acquisitions and push to rapidly increase the number of SKUs available on Walmart.com, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., No. 3 in the just-released Internet Retailer 2017 Top 500, is making a major push to boost its online sales.

Experts say one way that it aims to chip away at Amazon.com Inc.’s online lead is by offering consumers a better deal than the e-commerce giant. That’s why it one-upped Amazon by introducing free two-day shipping of select products for orders that are at least $35 (Amazon responded in May by lowering its free shipping threshold to $25, however it doesn’t guarantee delivery within two days) and why it has focused on value with initiatives like Pickup Discount, which offers shoppers reduced prices on “several hundred thousand” items sold only online if they pick them up in a Wal-Mart store.

“Amazon hasn’t captured the value-oriented customer,” says Scot Wingo, chairman of ChannelAdvisor Corp., which helps retailers sell on online marketplaces such as those operated by Wal-Mart and Amazon. “Wal-Mart wants to fill that niche.”

That means pricing is particularly important to Wal-Mart. And, based on two studies conducted exclusively for Internet Retailer, it’s clear Walmart.com’s prices are competitive, even if they’re not necessarily the lowest online.

For instance, Market Track LLC compared the average daily online price of 140 electronics products on Walmart.com, Target.com, BestBuy.com and Amazon.com from Nov. 16, 2016, to May 14, 2017. On average, Walmart.com offered prices 12% lower than Target.com over the full six-month period, roughly the same prices as BestBuy.com and prices that were 2% higher than Amazon.com.

However, the prices were similar enough that they shouldn’t make much of a difference, says Traci Gregorski, senior vice president of marketing at Market Track. “Price is no longer a differentiator—it’s the cost of entry,” she says.

Another analysis, by Boomerang Commerce, compared the prices of Walmart.com’s 100 best-selling SKUs across electronics, home improvement and clothing on a single date, May 16, to Amazon.com (both items the online retailer sold and those sold by its marketplace sellers), Target.com and Jet.com. The analysis found that, at least for its top-selling products, Walmart.com often offered shoppers the best deal.
[infogram id=”walmarts_prices_vs_rivals” prefix=”ZfH” format=”interactive” title=”Walmart’s prices vs rivals”]
“Wal-Mart is incredibly competitive on its best-selling products,” says Michelle Ai, Boomerang’s manager of marketing and strategic projects.

Click here to read “Wal-Mart’s e-commerce strategy comes into focus” from the June issue of Internet Retailer. Click here to subscribe to the magazine or sign up here for a Strategy membership to access the story online.

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