Finding the Urgency to Transform Prospects into Customers Now With Quoting Strategies
Great Quoting Systems Are Deal Closing Power Tools
Great Quoting Systems Are Deal Closing Power Tools
Focus first on the Economic Value to the Customer (ECV) and get a solid foundation for pricing strategies based on that.
Bottom line: The key to a successful product configuration strategy is anchoring results into strategies, not just relying on the depth of a configurations strategies’ functionality.
For many companies the length of their quoting cycles is directly proportional to the complexity of their products. The greater the complexity, the longer the sales cycle.
Bottom line: Pricing powerfully communicates who your company is and its market position relative to competitors – and the value delivered in customer experiences. Look at product configuration as a means to get in control of pricing, optimize it, and make it a competitive asset instead of a liability.
Bottom line: Selling products and services on the same purchase order, integrating them from even different quoting systems is turning into a transformational strategy for many manufacturers who are locking down loyalty with their customers.
John O’Donnell from Microsoft interviews Jim Wilson and Gregor Newland about their product offering, Cincom Acquire. This technology can easily be used as an expert system to deliver the knowledge needed in many different industries. Topics include how to become easier to buy from, product configuration, and the importance of a declarative rules engine. View [...]
Bottom line: Making every dollar count in your channel management strategies has to be anchored in nothing but results, and there must be an intensity to achieve despite higher quotas and shrinking budgets. Looking at these constraints as a crucible and not a crutch pervades those companies getting to their channel selling goals.
Bottom line: A channel will only move as fastest as the slowest reseller. Go find ways to get that problem solved and your entire channel program will become more competitive. Making yourself easier to do business with by automating bidding, estimating and quoting is a start.
Bottom line: Product configuration systems and the strategies can drastically reduce the amount of time sales teams waste in trying to get their quotes approved and priced, then back to the customer.
While product configuration is often seen as a strategy to interlink order management, supply chain management, and ERP systems together, all giving a uniquely consistent experience to customers, it is also a critical strategy for sustaining channel loyalty as well. In these times of economic uncertainty the best path to more channel loyalty is to [...]
Louis Columbus Cincom Systems Typically product configuration strategies are more oriented towards creating multichannel-based strategies that give access to quoting, sales and product models across multiple channels. In fact research completed both at AMR Research and Cincom both support the idea of making sure product configurators are rolled out across multiple channels is by far [...]
Unlike the typical perception that channel management, sales configuration, and product configuration strategies can take years to pay off, there is cash in product configuration quickly. The payback comes from getting away from manual processes – some requiring many hours for a salesman, product expert or production planner to work through – that can be [...]
Louis Columbus Cincom Systems Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, presented recently at the Stanford Technology Ventures ProgramSpotlight on Scalability. Her insights into how to make an impact with your business based on scaling key processes, from sales channels, to service, to content delivery, are well worth listening to. Below is a 4 minute video excerpt [...]
Louis Columbus Cincom Systems Tying contracts to revenue management goals and benchmarks is the path forward-thinking companies are finding out of this recession. Having insights into how contracts impact their pricing in the short- and long-term, these forward-thinking companies are finding entirely new approaches to serving their channel partners, service providers, and suppliers in the [...]