I was working with a industrial manufacturer who made construction equipment, such as diggers and backhoes. They had a beautiful park-like setting around their factory. Artfully placed on manicured lawns around the ponds and fountains were quite a few backhoes . It reminded me of Jurassic Park. We discovered later that these backhoes were a [...]
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?
What if you could reduce the cost of marketing while giving customers better access to what they really want? Consumer empowerment requires that companies give up some control over product access, promotions and price in exchange for increased consumer responsiveness. See this Q&A with professor Luc Wathieu, Harvard Business School.
We often talk about the sales history of a product, so let’s explain exactly what it means. There is a raw sales history and a collapsed sales history. The sales history, raw or collapsed, is the starting point for all the analytics we will be introducing later.
Raw sales history
A product is a collection of features, [...]
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,” [...]
In any manufacturing company that builds configurable products, there is a lot of discussion around what product complexity is. What’s interesting is that when times are good and there are lots of sales, the discussion is usually around how to simplify or streamline with the goal to sell more product even faster, that complexity is [...]
1. Product
A product is something offered for sale to customers. This is deliberately vague, because we want to encompass services as well as tangible products. Most of our discussion and examples involve manufactured products, but our framework also applies to services with many variants like insurance policies and cell phone calling plans.
2. Instance
An instance of [...]
