Rebates as a Strategic Tool in Pricing: Transforming Customer Behavior and Driving Profitability with Mark Gilham

Mark Gilham is an experienced senior executive with a proven track record in finance, strategy, and consulting. He brings deep expertise in driving commercial success, improving operational efficiencies, and influencing industry best practices. 

In this episode, Mark shares the transformative power of rebates as tools for driving both customer behavior and operational efficiency, rather than just cost-cutting mechanisms. He highlights the importance of designing rebates that align with business goals, such as incentivizing desirable customer actions, improving operational processes, and fostering long-term loyalty. 

Why you have to check out today’s podcast:

• Learn how rebates can go beyond simple cost-cutting to solve operational challenges, enhance customer loyalty, and drive profitability for your business.
• Gain insights into how rebates can incentivize customer behaviors that benefit both parties, creating a more collaborative and sustainable business relationship.
• Discover innovative ways to use rebates to optimize your operations, create efficiencies, and stronger partnerships with customers.

"Get out from behind your desk; get away from the spreadsheet and understand your business. Understand what makes your business tick."

- Mark Gilham

Topics Covered:

01:11 - How he transitioned from accountancy to pricing

02:24 - Explaining why accountants' focus on cost-plus pricing

03:52 - Highlighting how understanding pricing enables finance professionals to interpret data more effectively and influence business outcomes

05:35 - Strategic role of rebates in B2B, their challenges, and how they differ from traditional incentives and discounts

08:18 - Importance of structuring rebates and balancing discounts and rebates in B2B to maintain margins

11:11 - Dynamics of incentivizing end consumers versus channel partners

14:59 - Optimizing rebate structures

20:40 - Sharing how rebates can incentivize operational efficiency

25:55 - Advocating for pricing teams to lead rebate strategies to create lasting customer relationships and reduce reliance on discounting

28:11 - Highlighting the potential of rebates to address operational inefficiencies

Key Takeaways:

"Immature pricing practices tend to be that cost-plus. And when I say immature, it's not that it's bad, it's just they don't know what good looks like or what's better." - Mark Gilham

"A good rebate is a rebate that a manufacturer or supplier wants to pay out." - Mark Gilham

"I believe pricing have the tools and the skillset to, and it should be on the sell side, to equip salespeople to go out, not to win an order, but to kind of win a relationship. And make that relationship sticky so that discounting actually is not, it's always going to be important, but hopefully you can take a little bit of that pressure off the table." - Mark Gilham

"If you want a better deal from your supplier, think about all the things you could do to make their life easier and ask them, ‘What's that worth to you?’ And that's a far better way of getting a bit of extra money out of the contract than just saying, ‘I want my product for less.’" - Mark Gilham

People/Resources Mentioned:

• Enable: https://www.enable.com

Connect with Mark Gilham:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markgilham/
• Email: [email protected]

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: [email protected]