Track sales transactions to understand your customer’s buying patterns, establish a more relevant product mix, satisfy more people and sell more.
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Tag Archives: customers
Self-Service simplifies Product Offerings and increases Margins
August 20, 2009 – 4:55 pm
Self service is a term we all know, such as pay-at-the-pump gas and self-checkout stations at some grocery stores, and now more obscure things like video game kiosks by GameFly, but the true tidal wave of self-service hasn’t even started, and it’s going to be good for both the consumer and the manufacturer, if done [...]
Q&A with Mark Gottfredson, Bain & Company
May 28, 2009 – 3:17 pm
In today’s post, we talk to Mark Gottfredson about product complexity and customer choice.
Emcien: It’s natural for companies to add products and features to keep customers happy. What are the downfalls?
MG: The challenge of adding complexity is it’s the most natural thing in the world. Marketing comes up with new ideas for products or configurations [...]
Arm your salespeople to make the sale
May 25, 2009 – 9:59 am
Your salespeople are representing and selling your product. Customers who want to buy your product typically list a few things they want and look to the salesperson to guide them. The salesperson is their advisor on your product offering. The salesperson is expected to know the product and suggest good choices for the customer. Is your salesperson equipped to do that?
Variation is valuable
May 20, 2009 – 2:43 pm
Advances in interconnection technologies are driving an increasingly demand-driven market. Customers are learning to expect to get what they want, when they want it, how they want it. And they tell you in each and every interaction they have with your company, or not. In a demand-driven world, increasing product variation and complexity in your [...]
Guiding salespeople
May 19, 2009 – 9:39 am
We have talked a lot about how configurations and complexity affect an organization, but often we forget to look at customer-facing roles. While managing product complexity is important for product teams and production teams, it should also extend to the sales force.
At the end of the day, the number one mission for your sales team [...]
The quality connection
May 13, 2009 – 1:44 pm
Recently I wrote about quality rankings for automotive manufacturers and the perception of these rankings in the market. While the marketing teams at these companies must shoulder the burden to convince consumers about their products’ quality, there is a very real connection between product quality and configuration management.
In many industries where products have grown over [...]
Help the sales team help the customer
May 11, 2009 – 1:19 pm
This morning I was talking to the VP of business process improvement for a company that sells industrial machinery. Their products are highly configurable. She told me that every year they have 50% new configurations they have never seen before. The number of choices on their products has grown over time. ”A salesperson can’t know everything about the product,” [...]
