Sales & Wholesale
Trade pricing and discount approval support
Assess discount requests against margin thresholds, the account's history, and comparable deals, and give the approver a recommendation with the margin consequence stated in cash terms.
1–3%
improvement in realised trade margin
Opportunity assessment
Moderate impact. Meaningful cost or revenue improvement, likely noticeable at function level but modest relative to total business scale.
Moderate effort. Requires configuration, prompt engineering, and testing. A capable team can get there but expect several months.
Demanding data requirements. Relies on clean, integrated data across multiple systems. Significant data preparation work typically needed.
Moderate risk. Some customer or external exposure. Errors create rework or reputational impact but are recoverable.
Moderate people impact. Part of someone's working day changes. Requires training and some adjustment time, but roles remain broadly the same.
Tooling required
Things to consider
Discount leakage is usually invisible because each individual approval looks reasonable. The value is in showing the approver where this deal sits against every comparable deal, which no spreadsheet does at the moment of decision.
You need true net margin including rebates, settlement discounts, and freight terms. Gross margin recommendations will approve deals that lose money once the back-end costs land.
Expect resistance from sales if it reads as a policing tool. Frame it as giving the account manager the evidence to defend a price, which is what a good one wants.
Experiment starter: Run last year's discount approvals through the model and quantify the margin difference between what was approved and what it would have recommended. If the gap is material, pilot it as an advisory step on deals above a value threshold.
Go deeper in the playbook
Section — Opportunity Identification, including the AI Opportunity Assessment ScorecardSection — RAG and Knowledge Systems: Unlocking Proprietary DataThis is an decision support opportunity — see the relevant playbook section for how to approach it.More in Sales & Wholesale
Wholesale account performance briefing
Generate a pre-meeting briefing for each trade account: sell-through by line, order pattern versus last year, open orders, credit position, and the three things worth raising in the meeting.
Trade order pattern anomaly detection
Monitor trade customer ordering behaviour and flag material deviations — a dropped category, a halved reorder, a shift to a competitor's specification — early enough for the account manager to intervene.
RFP and tender response drafting
Draft responses to tender and RFP questions by retrieving from a library of previously approved answers, accreditations, and policy documents, then tailoring the wording to the specific question asked.
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