Maximizing Manufacturing Revenues with Rebates with Mark Gilham The Manufacturers' Network

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturer's Network Podcast. Our guest today is Mark Gilham. Mark is a rebate expert, director, and evangelist at Enable, a SAS solution for B2B rebate management used by manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers across 50 states. Mark started his career at a major financial institution and progressed to senior finance roles in the construction industry, where he witnessed firsthand the strategic value of rebates. Mark, welcome to the show.
Mark Gilham: Hi, Lisa. Thank you for having me on.
Lisa Ryan: Please share a little about your background and what led you to be an evangelist for rebates.
Mark Gilham: Sure. It's quite a job title. I started nearly a decade ago after moving out to the financial industry. And I went into the construction industry, where I went to an organization with hundreds of millions of pounds of rebates.
And what they realized was they needed financial controls. So, for example, a bank would have to manage all this money because this rebate was multiple their profit. So I was brought in and worked with them for many years optimizing the administration side. And as we optimized that, we moved into how to enhance the management and laterally into how we add strategic value with our rebates and look at how they're used commercially. 
And yeah, it's been, as I said, a big journey, and then more recently, I transitioned over to Enable. as you mentioned, they provide software that manages rebates. We were inclined to use Enable throughout this whole time. And what's been great is that they're coming over to help the industry rather than just the company I was working for. So for me, it's not about the software. This is more about how we strategically use rebates to add commercial value.
Lisa Ryan: And when you're talking about rebates, I know in the past they have had a bad reputation where people have used them to either mask pricing or come up with these complicated schemes that made it almost impossible for you to get your money back. What's changed? And how is it benefiting manufacturers?
Mark Gilham: One of the biggest challenges I see now is this reputation in the past about rebates. When I started at Grafton, you could see that they were not used for mutual growth. There were a lot of schemes there that were benefiting one side more than the other.
And there were almost seen as a necessary evil in business relationships. And what's changed is that companies have become more digitally aware and mature. So I think that the whole business relationship has changed. In the old days, I believe businesses were not as collaborative as they are today and didn't recognize back then the importance of working together for mutual benefits because of that shift. 
That's how trading deals are structured to benefit everybody. And rebates are part of that shift. By making them more transparent and bringing them out into the open, everybody can see their influence on a business starting to take them into place. I want them to be a strategic tool, but for mutual benefit.
Lisa Ryan: Can you give examples of what a manufacturer would use a rebate for? How do they work?
Mark Gilham: There are many use-case scenarios, but if we go to a simplistic scenario, let's say you manufacture two product ranges. 
You've got one product range, which is your staple product which you sell high volumes of. But that's not where your margin is. That's not your highest margin range. Then you have a second range in which the lower volume, the higher margin you could offer your customer.
A rebate that says, if you buy in this particular ratio of the two ranges from us, 25% of your sales are in that, in the higher margin...