Q&A with Vendavo’s Chief Product Officer – The Future of Rebate and Channel Management 

Vendavo’s Chief Marketing Officer, Mike Bernard and Chief Product Officer, Alex Hoff, discuss Vendavo’s acquisition of Market Medium and what it means for the future of rebate and channel management. 

In July 2022, Vendavo acquired Market Medium, a cloud-based rebate and channel management solution provider. Vendavo’s Chief Marketing Officer, Mike Bernard, caught up with Vendavo’s Chief Product Officer, Alex Hoff, to chat about strategic product alignment, customer benefits, and the power of next-gen commercial excellence capabilities.   

Mike: Why was acquiring Market Medium such a strategic move for Vendavo? 

Alex: Running channel incentive programs like rebates, billbacks, allowances, MDF programs, or other incentives is a best practice in commercial negotiation. But in talking with our customers, we’ve heard that these programs can be extremely challenging to administer as they require far too much effort and result in a lot of manual errors in accounting, accruals, and payments.  

By adding Market Medium’s capabilities to the equation, we’re bringing a full end-to-end channel incentive management solution to the Vendavo offering, empowering companies to create their programs, track and accrue automatically, and even generate the claims and deductions needed that result from the various programs in place. This removes the administrative burden, ensures greater accuracy, and removes revenue and margin leakage around these important aspects of B2B commerce. 

In addition to being a strong solution fit, Market Medium was also founded by a team of experts who have decades of experience in channel management and enterprise software, serving many of the same industries as Vendavo such as manufacturing and wholesale distribution. Plus, Market Medium has a similar employee culture to Vendavo and opens up a new employee center in India to complement Vendavo’s existing employee centers in the US and Europe. 

Mike: As someone who thinks about the Vendavo products all day long, tell us a little bit about where you see alignment between the existing Vendavo applications and Market Medium’s capabilities. 

Alex: One key way that this solution will work well with our other solutions, is by informing the quoting and negotiation process for sellers. They will have a really accurate picture of their deal once they’ve negotiated pricing and terms. Apart from sellers, this is also very important for approvers in the company who might have to approve a contractor agreed price.  

For years, Vendavo has had a leading solution for analyzing our clients’ businesses across the full price waterfall. Historically though, for the rebate and invoice adjustments, we’ve relied on other systems to do the accruals and allocations to get those as accurate as possible. Now, we’ll have an in-house, tightly integrated solution that can provide hyper-accurate reporting on the true profitability on the price waterfall. 

Mike: Speaking of integration, how soon can we expect to see Market Medium capabilities integrated with the Vendavo solutions? 

Alex: The Market Medium solution is now called Rebate & Channel Manager and will be integrated quickly into Vendavo’s existing solutions to complement and augment existing workflows in quoting and negotiations to include rebates and channel incentive programs.  

In addition, Market Medium’s advanced accruals and calculations engine will provide other Vendavo solutions with accurate and up-to-date program accruals to generate even more accurate margin calculations, pocket-price waterfall analyses, and price / volume / mix analyses. 

Mike: What excites you most about this acquisition and what it means for the future of Vendavo’s products? 

Alex: The addition of Market Medium will really help our customers achieve a greater level of commercial excellence maturity. Rather than having to give an upfront discount when negotiating with a big customer, they can agree on an incentive program. This enables true commercial excellence.  

This also really helps our distributor customers because if they hit certain levels that they’ve agreed to with their suppliers from a sell-through standpoint, then they’ll achieve certain incentives that sometimes can make the difference between being profitable and not being profitable. 

Mike: What’s next for Vendavo’s products? 

Alex: There are three primary ways Vendavo has been and will continue to grow.  

First, we have been and will continue to be expanding our functional footprint in the markets we serve. As with this acquisition of a modern end-to-end channel incentive management solution, we will continue to find new ways to bring innovative solutions to our customers whether organically or inorganically.  

Second, as we continue to make our solutions easier to configure and easier to combine through our advanced data factory and common data model, we will make our solutions easier and faster to setup which will encourage greater penetration in our existing markets.   

Lastly, through both partnerships and acquisitions, we expect to grow into new geographies and industry verticals. 

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