Everything You Need to Know about Integrating Pricing and Rebates in 45 Minutes
If you want to get the most out of pricing, you must understand rebates. If you want to fully leverage your rebates, you must understand pricing. In this session, Enable’s Mark Gilham discuss the intersection of pricing and rebates. He’ll talk about his own experience with how pricing and rebate strategies can work together to drive more profit for your business as well as challenge areas you need to be aware of so that you avoid common pitfalls. You’ll walk away from this session understanding how a good pricing strategy combines with a solid rebate strategy to make your business a commercial success.
Full Transcript
[music]
Mark Gilham: Welcome everybody. Sorry to keep you waiting. So it'll be everything about integrating pricing and rebates in 40 minutes. So firstly, thank you for coming. I'm Mark Gilham. I've lived and breathed rebates, for quite a while now. Not so much in the software side, actually in industry. Qualified numbers guy, former CFO. So I've really been at the hard end of rebates, and also working with pricing....
Mark Gilham: Absolute privilege to be here. Whoever thought it was a good idea to give an accountant a microphone, I'm not sure it was, but, hopefully you'll enjoy this. So what I'm gonna really talk about is three key areas in the presentation today. The first is incentives and rebates. Why are they important? Kind of how do they compliment a pricing strategy? The second bit that I'm gonna talk about is rebates. And I'm really gonna get into a crash course. All, the good, the bad, the ugly of rebates, best practices, things to do, things not to do. And then in the final segment, what I'm gonna talk about is a real story from my own personal experience where I'm gonna talk about a business that was once challenged by rebates. They were just making trading, really difficult. And we really didn't know how much money we were making and then how we used technology. And, really got a really good grasp of our rebates, and transformed a lot of what we were doing a lot in the pricing space as well.
Mark Gilham: So first of all, incentivising behavior. And I've been talking to a lot of people at this conference and I've been surprised at how often this comes up, that pricing people are actually talking about rebates and incentives, which is great because I think they work very well together. And we know that a lot of organizations use some form of B2B incentive. And so just as a start, just to get the audience engaged, who in this room... Raise your hand if you think B2B incentives are important. Great. And I'm assuming for most people in this room, they actually do exist in your sectors as well. So the good thing is most people raise their hands, which makes my next slide a bit easier to present. So why are incentives important?
Mark Gilham: This is a waterfall, I couldn't present a pricing without putting up a waterfall because I know you guys love these. This is from a pricing community, and you're admitting that incentives are important because the discount, the 7% at the beginning where we focus so much attention, we then see all of this other money that we're passing down to our customer. Some people call it profit leakage. Other people might think actually that's where we had the value, but it's there, it's real. This happens all of the time and in my opinion, we don't talk about it enough. We talk a lot about that 7%. This other bit, it's a bit like the, kind of, what's the right way to put it? The deals in the shadows, the kind of smoke and mirrors, the special handshake that, used to be the envelope with the cash slid under the table. Rebates and incentives used to get quite a bad reputation, and a lot of people... So they stayed clear of them, but the reality is they existed.
Mark Gilham: So for me, it's absolutely vital that the pricing community pay attention to this. And really, you are the professionals in this space. Influencing this is so important because in a lot of businesses this can be the, make or break between a good year and a bad year. And it's really about how do you have the tools to work with your sales operations? How do you make sure that the discounts or the off-invoice discounts and the on-invoice discounts are all aligned, that you're not giving away the same money twice, and you're actually driving a behavior that you actually want to drive. So just to level set, because I've used rebates, incentives for me, there's lots of definitions out there about what is a rebate? For me, it's a commercial initiative that encourages trade that doesn't form part of the invoiced consideration.
Mark Gilham: There's lots and lots of different examples of that. And to level set, and I have to take a deep breath for this. You might also hear them called things like rewards, support schemes, retros, rebates, trade rebates, volume rebates, distributor incentives, channel incentives, partner programs, MDFs, CO-OPs, special performance incentive funds, incentives... Cashbacks, loyalties, not royalties, they're different performance discounts, growth incentives and so many other things. It can get really confusing, but it's always important when you're talking to people about these things, just ask a few questions and get an understanding of the substance behind the transaction. Because the word discount often gets associated with rebate and people can quickly get confused. So what I'm gonna run into now is a bit of an example about how incentives influence us, given that we're at a conference where there's a lot of airlines. I know we're the B2B sector, but there's a really pertinent example here.
Mark Gilham: A lot of us probably flew into Denver. The big question is, what guided us as to what airline to use? For me personally, it was British Airways and why? Because they have a loyalty scheme, an Executive Club. My first decision when deciding to book a flight was not price. The first decision was, well actually it's gonna be British Airways, because they offer tiers, they offer the miles. So they've created my loyalty with that incentive scheme. And I suspect many people in here are part of a similar scheme, especially if you travel a lot with business. But even personally, it's great, you accrue miles, you might accrue them through a credit card as well. These are incentives. They're technically a rebate with a different title. You do something and you get something back later on. And they're effective, absolutely effective, if you think of the psychology behind it, there's a lot of people who are, they really value, the rewards they're receiving.
Mark Gilham: When you think about how an airline does it, it's not just one incentive either. This is not a pass or fail scenario. With British Airways, you start out as a blue member before you've even flown, you're already part of their club. You can then move up to silver get lounge access. Great. It's, a really good benefit. Get up to gold, more privileged position. And what they're really good at there is they're talking about something that you really hold value. You've earned this. And that's a really other key part of an incentive. A discount is generally given, but an incentive is earned. When something is earned, it generally has more value to the holder. So that is a really really important point. When you're think of incentives, yes, you're trying to drive a behavior, but actually the reward you're giving for that, you want the receiver to see the value of it. And when you work and earn something, you do hold it more dearly. You are more attached to it. I'm very attached to my executive scheme. I know people who will fly for no reason other than to make sure they stay in a grade. That's the loyalty and the value they're attaching to that reward.
Mark Gilham: And to really recap there something earned is far more powerful than something given. And that's why incentives are powerful. So have a think right now. We'll just pause for a second about other work, other incentives that exist in our lives that drive our behaviors. And the reason I say this is businesses don't make decisions. It's the people within them that make decisions. When you're offering an incentive, you're playing on exactly the same emotions. So here's a couple of examples we've got in the UK. One of the first ever loyalty schemes from a supermarket. They use it for 2 reasons. One is to create the loyalty, the second is to collect data. But that loyalty, the number of people I know who just chop at Tesco and you get your vouchers back and all of that kind of thing. Credit cards, I put up both Virgin and British Airways. I didn't want to discriminate. But again, if I'm flying British Airways, I'm more than likely gonna have an American Express because their brilliance, again, driving that loyalty, creating that attachment we have in trade sectors. Lowe's offer the trade people incentives. And I know from personal experience, if you're working in an industry, you've always got to understand who's the decision maker and who's the bill payer. Because for example, in the construction trade, it could be two different people.
Mark Gilham: And really what we're trying to do here, this is a bit of a nod to Christopher and the audience, we've talked in the past about, and this is between pros and Enable. What are we trying to do? We're trying to take strangers and turn them into partners. And that's a journey. So when you walk into a store and you've never been in there before, you're a stranger, but over time there is a partnership that's created. You are giving them loyalty and they're giving you something back. Let's think about this in terms of what we might want to offer. And we look at what they're doing and they're very good at this tier. And like I say, it is not pass or fail. One size fits all. If your customer, we know times are uncertain. So don't just set one target. You might want to offer different targets depending on, how they're gonna perform. The next is the reward that you're offering.
Mark Gilham: It should be tailored. As an example, British Airways, you get the Avios, which is kind of like the miles you can redeem on excursions, flights, best thing ever during COVID wine. So most of the delight of my wife and I, there we had options as to how we could get paid back for our loyalty. When you're thinking about that, there are two key areas. And then finally the technology side. We're at, this is a technology conference. Everything we're talking about is technology. If you're doing these things, you want to be driving insights, you want to be making sure you're on top of it. There's nothing worse than an incentive scheme that fails because the customer doesn't actually get the rewards they're expecting or you don't get the performance you are expecting. So it's really important to embrace technology.
Mark Gilham: Let's now think back to British Airways. How would my experience and my behaviour coming to Denver differ if there was no loyalty scheme, I'd have probably gone to a price comparison website, picked a couple of airlines that I feel are okay, all of a sudden prices become a lot more important to me, and I think we all agree that when price is the primary driver in a commercial negotiation, it tends to go in one direction, which is down. A good incentive scheme doesn't take price off the table, but it just makes it slightly less important, and even with British Airways, have I ever had bad service from them? Absolutely, I have.
Mark Gilham: I mean, my flight was delayed coming in last weekend, would I consider moving? No chance, there's no way I am walking away from all of that accrued loyalty to start all over again. So good loyalty schemes, that's what they do, they create, they lock you in, but you'll actually value them, I talk very highly about the rewards I get from my scheme. And so you want your customers to be doing the same thing. So with that in mind, we're in agreement, rebates, incentives are important. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna dive into, well, when we offer them and we create them, what actually should we be doing. So this is really getting into kind of, the advice section.
Mark Gilham: So good versus bad rebates, and I like to do it this way because it's just simple. A lot of us have the perception of rebates from the bad side of things, and I think we always remember the bad experiences over the good. But let's start with the good. Good rebates are specific, they are tailored, they are intentional. This isn't just about offering a rebate, 'cause my customer asked for them, this is about actually, well what am I getting back?
Mark Gilham: And it's exactly the same with what are you giving your customer? If you're offering the wrong incentive, you're not gonna get the performance you want. The next point, this is not about the kind of the deals in the shadows anymore, this is about them being visible, transparent and collaborative. Collaborative is really key here. If you're offering an incentive and your customer just thinks, they actually don't want to pay me this, how engaged are they gonna be in the process, you want your customer to be driven and motivated by the incentive, you're offering them. The next point, the right tool for the right job. So if you're offering incentives, you wanna make sure your customer knows how they're performing, what's been expected of them, so are they just near an incentive band to hit the next tier? I've been on the receiving end of where we've just missed an incentive band at the end of the year, it doesn't feel good, it was our fault, but it did damage the relationship with our supplier because we went to them and said, Well, come on, please. If we just spent another 50,000, you'd have given us another 100,000, can we not do something and they're like, No, that's the scheme.
Mark Gilham: You don't want your customer to be in that position, you want your customer to be in the position where actually they know exactly what they need to do, your sales team can see where they're at, and they can phone them up and say, Hey, did you realize if you do this, you're gonna get a bit of extra money. It's all about creating that mutual positivity because a good rebate scheme is a reward for you, the offerer and for the customer, because you should be getting exactly what you want back. Next one influences behavior. There's no point in offering an incentive, that, what's my way to put this, that doesn't... The customer was gonna do it anyway, that's not an incentive. So what you want is you want to make sure that even if the customer says, hey, I want a rebate, and you know you're gonna need to give them one, just ask for something in return. Because again, it puts that value badge onto it, as well, so then they feel they haven't been given something, they feel are earning something. And then finally, frequently reviewed. Rebates and incentives don't stop when you sign a contract, that's when they start. So you want to be reviewing and even adapting them. Customer's scenarios change, so you don't have to be rigid with these things, and then we get to the bad.
Mark Gilham: Unfortunately, there is a lot of bad, one-size-fits-all. Conges, a lot of images, but the reality is, not everybody is motivated by the same thing, not everybody is gonna deliver the same performance, you can have a very long-established client, should you be targeting them on aggressive growth, probably not, you're gonna be looking more for retention, loyalty. So structure your incentives to where your client, what actually is gonna motivate them.
Mark Gilham: Difficult to understand or execute. This is a brilliant one, I've been there where I've picked up 30-page contracts and you're thinking, What on earth as a customer, is this about. Do they actually want to pay me anything, will I even understand if I'm gonna be paid anything? It's really not gonna help me as a customer deliver to you what you're actually wanting. Opaque and self-serving, a good rebate, rewards both sides. This is about at the end of the year, both parties having a nice turkey on the table. If it's not collaborative, it's not gonna last.
Mark Gilham: It's not gonna build and foster a good relationship, not driving behavior. So the opposite of the other, you're offering a rebate, but actually the customer's doing nothing different. That's a conversation I've had quite a few times next door where people say, Hey, we're giving out rebates. We don't actually know if they're doing anything. You absolutely need to know if they're driving a behavior and only communicated on payment. I smell a dispute coming when that happens because we, all have our spreadsheets, we all have Excel. You're gonna have two versions of the truth. Your customer's gonna be making their accruals. You are gonna be making yours. If you're not comparing numbers, you're gonna get to the end of the year and what's gonna happen? This customer's gonna say, Hey, this is my number. I'm gonna say, well, no, that's not, it's here. It doesn't matter who is right or wrong.
Mark Gilham: There's now a gap between your two businesses in the books. That then means you're into dispute mode. It means your businesses are no longer talking about how do we work together to grow our businesses next year? You're too busy arguing about what is the right rebate number. It's going to damage the relationship.
Mark Gilham: So make sure there's ongoing communication. There's nothing wrong with comparing numbers. In fact, it's really important because if there's any misalignment or misunderstanding, you want to know about that after a month, not after 12 months, because it gives you the time to renegotiate and actually align on, actually, you know what, what you're trying to achieve. So we've got the good, we've got the bad, now we're gonna get the ugly. So hopefully this works. That's the right bottom. The ugly incentives are risky if you don't manage them well. Don't think any of these organizations set out to do things badly, but when they go wrong, they go seriously wrong. Every year when I was audited, we were number one on the auditor's risk list because the incentives were so big in our industry. I personally wrote a paper all about Tesco. It was one of these scenarios where it was maybe an error in judgment that it started with, but then it quickly became, well who's gonna actually now come clean and say we've got a big problem. So they didn't.
Mark Gilham: The creative accountants out there kind of masked it over and we're like, okay, we'll make that back next year. Their sales numbers dropped the following year. They came stern market competition and before you know it, the whole thing spiralled these businesses in some cases it's hundreds of millions or billions in rebates. You do not want to be putting any of your operations in this scenario. So it's so key to focus on that good and the bad, using the right technology, staying on top of these things. I mentioned about them being specific for me, a good rebate strategy for you smart. So know exactly what you're paying out and what you're gonna get in return. Do all of the maths around it. Make sure that actually the numbers stack up. Measurable. So that's the next bit. You should be able to do the maths on this. Really try and avoid subjective incentive terms because they're just gonna lead to arguments about whether something did or didn't happen. Attainable. There's no point in offering an incentive if there's no chance your customer's gonna achieve it. It's a bit more of an, it's more of an insult and probably a deterrent than an incentive.
Mark Gilham: Next one, relevant. There's no point in offering an incentive to, for example, somebody who works as a painter and decorator and you incentivize them to buy plumbing supplies. So make it specific to them and then time bound for me, what's really important here, this is more about the frequency. Not everything has to be an annual incentive. Sales teams hate annual incentives. Most of them are on quarterly, so they can see the reward quickly. You can do exactly the same with incentives. You can make them monthly, quarterly, annually, three yearly, however, whatever is appropriate so that the reward is kind of in their eye.
Mark Gilham: And as an example, the most common is the annual volume incentive. And then your customer comes along at the end of the year and thumps you with loads of orders, which cripples your supply chain, and then they buy nothing for the first couple of months of the following year. You can avoid that if you structure the time-bound piece well. So that's really important. A good rebate strategy is collaborative. So what this means is it's not just you offering something, you need engagement. So the other party you need to talk to them and understand. So when I mentioned earlier about what is their objective? What's your customer's objective? Are they actually in growth mode? Are they looking to take a new product to market? Are they expanding new operations? Understand what they want. You already know what you want.
Mark Gilham: But create schemes that actually give you both what you want. If possible. They're far more likely than to be engaged in the process. I mentioned it earlier, consider the decision maker. You don't have to just incentivize one person in a business. So think about it, with British Airways, again, my company's the bill payer, but I'm the decision maker. So they recognize that and they're rewarding both sides. They do obviously the business schemes as well. Think of the construction trade. You could have a buying deal or a good great commercial deal done at head office level, but that trade person can probably go to multiple distributors to get their product. 'Cause there'll be multiple contracts in play. So make sure that when you're incentivising you're understanding, who makes the decision because that's the party you want to make sure at some level is incentivized. This is my favorite slide. Use the right tools. The reason I say it's my favorite slide is 'cause I just know that right now there is actually somebody out there cutting the lawn manually or something like that.
Mark Gilham: For me it's a great analogy, you just wouldn't cut your lawn manually with a pair of shears use the lawn mower. I did a bit of research on this though 'cause I was gonna talk about power tools and how to do this and it actually took me in a slightly different direction which is actually... If you do cut your lawn with power tools, don't use things like whipper snippers. I had to do some research on this as well. 'Cause we call them streamers, whipper snippers or weed eaters. Don't use them near your wife's flower bed. That is the time to use a manual tool. So be mindful of that. So right tool for job. I think everybody agrees at this conference. It's very much about don't do your pricing in a spreadsheet. Don't do your incentive management in one... If it's big enough to your business. And then do the maths. So what we're talking here about a lot is if we look at a scenario, we have two product ranges and our sales are 80 20 between those ranges. And so we have a combined margin of 18% and then we're...
Mark Gilham: Where we want to get to is we want to move it to 70 30, moving our mix of our sales towards our more profitable range. We've done the math and we're like, well if we get to there, our margin will be 19.5%. We're gonna improve our margin by 1.5% That's technically your budget for your incentive. You could give it all away, in which case you've really changed nothing for your bottom line. Or you could give away parts of it, but do that math, whether it's a growth incentive and you've got to work out at what point have I covered my overheads and actually now my cost to serve becomes less. Whether it's just products and contribution, really important. And then the final piece, there's not a lot out there in incentives on this. There's loads on pricing and elasticity and lots of different models you can use to set a price. The reality is that when it comes to an incentive, there is actually some science that should be applied. So if we think of a really easy scenario. If I was recruiting somebody and let's for argument sake say good pay for that job would be a 100,000. And I come to them and say, I'm gonna offer you 80,000. So at this point we could be at the flat bit of the curve at the bottom. They're not even engaged, they're not gonna give me anything for that.
Mark Gilham: And as I start to move I move up to 90 and they're like oh, we're getting close we're talking. Their engagement and the performance they're going to give me. So that line, the higher the line, the more performance they're gonna give me. So we'll get to a 100,000 and I'm starting, you know, I'm going... Starting to go up. They go 110, they're like really talking now we're happy. I'm like, well see if I could probably sweat them a bit more. I want... I'm gonna offer you 130, but I'm gonna need you to week work weekends, long hours, it's gonna be a tough year. They're like, okay. Then I go to 150 and actually nothing changes. They're already maxed out. They're already giving me everything they can. So you want to know when you're offering an incentive, the value of it. You don't want to go beyond what they can actually give you. Because then you're just paying for nothing. So using the data available to you, even just speaking to the customer, you will, you would get a level, a sense of at what point are we cresting that curve?
Mark Gilham: It may well be that actually you work out. We don't even need to be at the top of the curve. Where I'm happy paying the 100,000 and getting that performance. It'd actually be cheaper for me to go and get do something else. So understand what you're paying and what you're getting in return and where they kind of... The limits are. So what we've covered now is a bit of best practice about incentives and why they're important. What I'm gonna do now is kind of combine all of that in a real story. So when we think about trading profit, the real simple formula, what you've sold less what you've bought equals what you've made. If life was only that simple, when you start to throw incentives into the mix. So I started out working in a listed business, multi-billion construction materials distributor and we were receiving rebates and we were paying them out. We had a brilliant pricing team, seven people. They used spreadsheets and...
Mark Gilham: We thought we were doing all the right things. We were year on year. Our margin was slowly dropping, but we couldn't work it out. What we were doing is our procurement team were doing fantastic negotiations. They were getting better deals every year. We really really pushed on our sales team and our pricing team to grow margin. We were talking a lot about not discounting beyond kind of the what the pricing team we're recommending. I spent a lot of time going out to our branches or our depots to understand what behaviors are they actually doing. And I observed them and they were telling me, Mark, there's certain products you can... You just can't book the market. But they were very very mindful of not discounting where it wasn't needed. And they were very proud of kind of the margins they were making. They were showing me, they were going, Hey Mark, look at my system. Look at my margin. Month on month.
Mark Gilham: It's going in the right direction. I'm like, brilliant. This is great. And all 200 depots were engaged in this. They were doing exactly what we told them to do. We also then had multiple divisions. So we had an electric distributor, we had a plumbing and heating distributor. We had a higher excavators, great fun, we had showrooms, local authority, contracts. All of these divisions needed something slightly different, but they were all doing what we'd asked them to do. But our margin kept dropping. We just couldn't work it out. The one thing though that we did not know was we saw the margin in what we class as we called it a system margin or a screen margin. The margin that our ERP showed us. So that was going up in the right direction and then we'd get to the month end and then finance would come along and they hated us because we'd then tell them the real margin and they'd be like, why is it lower? And we were like, dunno, we've got a big rebate number.
Mark Gilham: We've just dropped in. We've done this, we've done that. But actually month on month your margin's gone down. And all it created was lots of arguments. So as an example, they'd be like, oh, it's because you're not collecting all the rebate from the suppliers. And we're thinking, no, we're pretty confident, we are. It would be, oh, well, clearly something's wrong. We are discounting we shouldn't be. And the branch are like, no, no we're doing the right things. And this went on for five years. Five years. And I remember sat in so many meetings with our CEO and his message to the business was our margin is going down, focus on your margin. So the business kept focusing on their margin with the one bit of information they had available to them, the margin in the ERP. So where was it all going wrong? That's not the formula.
Mark Gilham: You got to add all the layers and you need that at a granular level. We did not have, we had that at a company level. We had sales invoice and purchase invoice, kind of that granular. We knew our screen margin on every line of every sales ticket, but we didn't have the other bits integrated, working nicely, connecting the world of buying to the world of selling in incentives, didn't have that. But then something magical happened, and I'd love to say it was Enable, but it wasn't. We actually developed it in house ourselves. We built that and we built it. And we had it at the most granular level. It took us less than a week to understand where we've been going wrong for the last five years. And where we've been going wrong and I'll illustrate this now with a few numbers. These numbers, to be honest, are actually, sorry to put it, they're actually, I've watered down the effect.
Mark Gilham: They're actually worse than this. And forgive me if you can't read this, but what we've got at the start is we've got a scenario. We've got two product ranges. We've got bricks and blocks, and we've got insulation. Sell a lot of those two things. Our screen margin on bricks and blocks was 20%. Our screen margin on insulation was 10%. For argument's sake, we were selling at 50/50 making 15% screen margin. Our CEO told them to grow the margin. So what did they do? They sold more bricks and blocks and less insulation, and they took their margin up to 16%, which was good. It's what they were told to do. I think we all know what's coming next. At the layers, bricks and blocks it wasn't even 5%. In some cases it was none, at the best it was a couple of percent. So what they were seeing there, they were making 20 at best, they were making 21, 22%. Also on a product range that is heavy, bulky, high cost to deliver. So before the whole, so five years ago, they were making 30.5%.
Mark Gilham: What we told them to do, they took it down to 29.2, but there was no way we could see that because we only knew the left-hand side. When we were informed and we knew what we were doing, we flip it the other way, screen margin goes down below to 31.8. This was not selling the product for more money to our customers. It wasn't increasing prices. This is an industry where there's quite a few players in the market and customers spread their spend over multiple distributors. So we just had to be a bit smarter. So what we did was very simply, we aligned incentives. Our sales team were no longer bonused on selling bricks and blocks. We said, Hey, you can sell them without even trying, sell insulation and we'll give you a bonus. We did that across our entire product range. We made it really simple. We said, you're bonused on the high margin ranges. This is the list of them. You sell this stuff, you get a bonus. We work with our suppliers and we said, Hey, we're gonna push more of the products that make us more money. Is that aligned to what you are doing? If we do that, is that going to make you more money? And in a lot of cases, they said, yes, actually, you do that. That's really gonna help us. So it's great. Well our procurement team can now actually have a really valuable conversation. We're aligning buying to selling...
Mark Gilham: In one year. The needle moved the other way. It was almost an instant move. The key message people said, well, what does this mean in pricing? I said, think of it really simply, low-margin, be credible on price, high-margin, be competitive on price. And I was even pulled up at a conference by one of our branch managers, kind of a really thick set guy hands like spades. He's like, Mark all this math, I don't get it. Give it to me in a really simple thing. I said to him, so you've got five trucks making deliveries. He's like, yep. And I went, and they can make three deliveries a day. He's like, yep. I went... So 15 deliveries, great. And I went, and you work five days? He's like, yep. I went, that's 75 deliveries. If you can one delivery, swap it from bricks and blocks to insulation, you've moved the needle the right way. He went, oh, perfect. Got it.
Mark Gilham: So do more insulation. I'm like, yeah, we as a business, were sold for a record value that year because we had moved our margin and the business wanted this. They wanted this bit on the right. They are still absolutely amazed at the insights it's giving them. So for me, doing it right is, and forgive me for people who don't play computer games, but if you remember the days of when they first came out, if you've ever played against somebody, what I call is a Button Masher, where they literally just mash the buttons, they're never gonna win against somebody who actually knows what they're doing. It's exactly the same with incentives and things.
Mark Gilham: What you don't want to be doing is just trying as many things as possible. Because the person who actually knows what they're doing will beat you. So it comes back to that being very deliberate, very targeted. Being very measured, knowing what happens when you press a button. Christopher and I have talked about it, is knowing when you pull a lever in your business, what you getting back for it? And so good rebates. It's not about tomorrow, just giving them to everybody. This is about understanding what their impact is gonna be on your business. Learning from it. You will not get a perfect rebate strategy on day one. You'll probably never get it, but you can continually improve. You can learn from what the data's telling you. So to kind of wrap this up, are rebates important?
Mark Gilham: Yes. Great bit of animation there. Or even better. I didn't do that. Accountants don't use PowerPoint. So to summarize, I think as a business, if you are trying to grow your business or whatever it is you're trying to deliver and you're not using incentives or you're not using them well, you're kind of handicapping yourself. You don't want to be that business that's creating disputes with your customers. You don't wanna be that business on the front pages. Be deliberate, be focused on what you're getting, and be absolutely certain that when you offer an incentive, you know what you're getting back.
Mark Gilham: And then finally, We offer a community on incentive management. It's not salesy. It's, I think we've got like 700 people on there now. It's one of those places. So it's fully... Sorry to put it, lots of professionals who work with incentives. We recognized it's an area that's not talked about. So most recently, I was talking, in there about antitrust law. We've talked about what incentives do people see working, which ones don't, what trends are we seeing? So if you, if you ever want to learn more, you can do it through there. But if you wanna learn something a bit more right now, I'd open it up. If anybody has any questions, doesn't have to be on this presentation, just anything generally about rebates and incentives, I'll do my best to answer it. So does anybody want to ask.
[music]