If you are in marketing, sales support, sales operations or product management, make a point of going out on a weeks’ worth of sales calls before the end of this year.

The lessons you will learn about how your company is serving the sales force – or not – will make this incredibly valuable. Add in the benefit of meeting customers face-to-face and seeing their reactions to your company’s products, services and performance, and this week will give you great insights into how your company is really performing.

Great Quoting Systems Are Deal Closing Power Tools

Your sales team’s attainment of quotas, commissions and comp plans all rely on how well the quoting, pricing and product configuration systems are working.  During this week on the road with your reps, try to find out first-hand how easy or difficult the quoting systems, pricing and product configurators are to work with.  It’s one thing to read about frustration on the part of reps with these applications and systems, it’s quite another to sit across from them as they try to get a quote done and see how much time is wasted on trying to get these applications to work.

Look at how your company can streamline the time from completing a sales call to a quote getting done and delivered. Consider how the steps for getting validation of the quote from product or service experts can be made more efficient.  If your sales team spends the majority of their time outside of sales calls on their cell phones or Blackberries trying to get quotes approved, special pricing requests or price exceptions, it’s time to get automate your quoting process.  Also pay attention to how many times your sales reps call into corporate headquarters for support and don’t get anywhere.  In my experience, it is well over 30% in manufacturing companies I’ve worked with.

Lessons Learned

• Sales teams have a pace and perception of time completely different from many other departments in their same companies. It is an excellent idea to understand where the greatest differences are between sales and support teams.  Using quoting, pricing and product configuration strategies to bridge these time gaps is what helped HP to grow their enterprise business for example.

• Product expertise needs to be designed into automated quoting, price exception and product configuration systems. Across companies and entire industries, this is where the greatest pay-off is of automating these strategies.  Imagine your sales teams being able to call customers instead of dial in to corporate for support?  The payback of automating quoting and knowledge management can set a sales force free to sell more, and not juggle quoting approvals via cell phone and Blackberry messages.  Your sales team can also focus more on the next sales call if they don’t have to chase down experts in every spare minute.

• Realize everyone serves the sales force, not just those with sales or marketing in their title. Everyone, from the pricing administrators, to the VPs of product management, marketing, service and even finance need to focus on serving the sales force.  To make deals move through the quoting process the needs of sales do not to be priority. Yes, there does need to be balance of roles and balanced process workflows.  But when it comes to getting a quote out and winning a new customer, that needs to take precedence.  It is frankly amazing, given how challenging this economy can be, to see quotes just languish in e-mail in-boxes and get ignored.  Seeing this from the sales forces’ perspective, it literally looks like a purchase order being given to a competitor instead of your company due to the delay.

Bottom line: With the selling year quickly entering its 4th calendar quarter, it’s time to get a strong sense of urgency about cleaning up quoting, pricing, and product configuration strategies.  Go take a week and travel with your sales force.  The lessons you learn could and will change your business for the better.

Flickr attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/69166981@N00/2786297072/

Transforming your sales pipeline into profits depends on how well customers’ expectations are set and exceeded. Creating and exceeding customers’ expectations has to begin with consistent sales proposal, quoting, pricing exception management and product configuration systems and strategies.  Each of these processes and strategies tell your customers who your company really is, over and above any presentation deck or whiteboard session.

Quoting Performance Says Who Your Company Really Is

How a company executes on proposals, quoting, pricing exception management and product configuration says who they really are.  Any company can claim to have excellent integration of sales force automation, CRM, pricing, quoting, manufacturing, and service systems, yet their track record with fulfilling quotes accurately speaks to the truth of how they operate. Getting the point of having quoting systems deliver what your company can actually produce profitably is critical to attracting new customers and keeping existing ones.

Based on the companies I’ve worked with on these strategies, here are the top ten ways to sell more by automating quoting and pricing:

• Define the entire quoting process from the customers’ perspective first. The most common reason why quoting strategies fail to deliver accurate, buildable quotes is that too often companies build these processes not for the customers’ benefit or ease of use, but for their own.

• Never quit asking how more time can be saved in the quoting process. The best-performing companies are obsessed with trimming the time it takes to create a quote.  They are continually focused on how to get more done in less time, especially when it comes to creating quotes for customized products requiring unique pricing and licensing agreements.

• Integrating pricing to the system of record level is critical. The majority of quoting systems rely on a separate pricing database, or worse, a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that is queried through the use of Visual basic macros or XML integration links if it is online.  In fact, the first generation of quoting systems relied on this approach to get pricing onto quotes at all.

• Get your services teams involved early and often. Think of it this way, services keeps the commitments sales and production set in the sales cycle and during the products’ delivery.  Keep them very involved in all pilots of quoting systems to make sure every single commitment made can be kept and exceeded.

• Think of quoting as a part of your forecasting system instead of just being stand-alone. One Cincom customer is using the quoting system to actively manage the mix of make-to-stock and build-to-order products, trimming back their engineer-to-order products and attaining higher margins as a result.  Focus on making quoting systems an integral part of how you forecast product mix.

• Win the battle for channel partner mindshare with quoting and price exception management. Responsiveness and undivided attention is the greatest compliment you can give a customer, whether in person or not.  That is a major lesson learned from manufacturers who have to battle for their channel partners often.

• Use a quoting system pilot to test your systems’ integration points across pricing, manufacturing including Bill of Materials, services and support. Try to break the integration points to find their weakest links and push the system hard with multiples more transactions you expect to receive.

• Be open about quoting, price exception management and proposal performance, down to the win rates and accuracy rates. Rolling out a new system that affects the sales force, and most importantly, their compensation, is going to get a very critical look from the channel and your sales teams alike.

• When you look at the highest performing quoting, proposal and pricing systems, they have over time all had their challenges with performance.

• Use quoting systems as a means to get your sales teams competing with each other over order accuracy, close rates and services revenue. That is exactly what one manufacturer did with excellent results.  This manufacturer is a Cincom client and has been able to get their internal sales teams focused on selling at higher prices when bundles are included, in an otherwise slow growth or flat market.

Bottom line: Making quoting, pricing and product configuration strategies effective needs to start with these ten tips and move forward with focus on redefining the process to meet and exceed customer expectations.

Flickr attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/37996588867@N01/3746988196/

Bottom line: Your channel partners thrive on the extent to which product configuration, pricing, quoting and order capture are integrated. The tighter the integration of strategies, systems and processes the greater the sales.

Creating more sales through channel partners has more to do with how quickly, thoroughly and error-free initial quotes are to begin with.

Quoting gets the entire sales cycle started and studies by Gartner Group show a startling point: quoting systems that have the highest adoption rate are not necessarily the sexiest or sleekest in interface design, they are the ones flexible enough to match how people work.

What Really Matters Is A System That Matches How Your Work

The study, completed by Gartner, suggests that merely enabling a configuration, pricing or quoting system on SaaS for those platforms’ innate abilities is not enough.  For a configuration, pricing and quoting system to be truly sexy it must be agile and flexible enough to meet the needs of the sales reps using it.  When that happens, growth happens.  SaaS is in and of itself not sexy, despite the tremendous hype it receives as a means to deliver software.

Forget The Hype, Get To Your Goals

Configuration, pricing, and quoting systems that give sales managers and sales reps the flexibility they need to get the process workflows defined and stable they need to sell more is where the real value is.  Being able to also define integration points through a company matter much more than the hosting platform.  Focusing on the strategic goals of a configuration, pricing and quoting system needs to guide any selection process and decision.  Get beyond the SaaS hype and start thinking about what the strategies really need to achieve to turn quoting into a catalyst for growing channel sales.

Attribution http://www.flickr.com/photos/groume/

David Neeleman is Chairman and CEO of JetBlue Airways Corporation and in a speech at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, he provides insights into how to avoid price commoditization.  His airline, JetBlue, has been able to withstand pricing and commoditization pressures in the markets served for well over a decade. His comments are prescient in the timeframe of the talk as to just how important Earned Customer Value would become in the airline industry.  Listen to his short video and see how you can transform your business to keep pricing stable or even raise pricing to retain margins.   Adding in the ability to customize the experience adds to earned customer value over time as well – a point made in his speech later on past this clip.

Bottom line: Creating a unique customer experience while at the same time holding firm on pricing gives a company competing on the edge of a commoditized market a greater chance to grow.

Over the last ten days, I have been at the Stanford University Strategic Marketing Management Program in Palo Alto, California.  It is an excellent experience and time well spent.  I recommend it without hesitation to anyone wanting to learn about the latest techniques and strategies for strategic marketing management.  Classes are broken up into teams and every evening each group meets to analyze cases.

I was fortunate enough to be on an excellent team comprised of managers from Schlumberger and from the wealth management division of a financial institution in the United Arab Emirates.  This was an excellent team because the engineers kept the practical and pragmatic in focus while the financial professionals were lightning-quick with their gross margin, pricing and financial analysis calculations.

What Build-to-order Bathrooms in the UK and Profitable Product Strategies Have In Common

Our first case study was solving a pricing problem for customized bathrooms in the UK.

With a flat demand curve for the product as evidence by little growth, distribution and re-direct of sales under complete control of plumbers, the natural inclination would be to bundle services, create low-end products, and attempt to drive volume just on price.  Ironically enough the high-end shower and bathroom redesign industry of the UK sounds a lot like delivering build-to-order or mass customized experiences in the U.S.  It has the same characteristics.  Build-to-order products, like custom bathrooms, require higher prices to cover the costs. The tendency is to bundling in more products, services, even product features, to increase value.  A good answer, yet not enough.  Here are the take-aways from this case study that apply perfectly to making production and service strategies profitable.

Key Take-Aways

• Focus first on the Economic Value to the Customer (ECV) and get a solid foundation for pricing strategies based on that. This was a great lesson learned, because using this technique showed that the high-end of the electronic showers and remodels could drive a price nearly double, what the company was charging.  We were amazed in our team how much money was left on the table even with the small price increase the company in the case did do.

• Don’t assume that bundling increases economic value to the customer – it may actually decrease it. When you consider the ECV framework and look at how a customer values your products or services, bundling may not be necessary, just a more effective pricing strategy may be what is needed.  It was astounding during the case analysis how much money the company manufacturing the electronic shower components would not charge –even though the ECV analysis clearly showed they were at 60% of their value.

• Do an ECV audit for your build-to-order, configure-to-order and engineer-to-order products now  and see how much money you are leaving on the table. This is astounding as an exercise, and while sales will fight prices increases, the reality of it is so many products customized to user needs are vastly underpriced.   The hard reality is that with ECV analysis as the foundation of evaluating the value of what you’re delivering from a customization standpoint, you can attain greater levels of margin and profitability than is occurring today.

• A flat market that is inelastic is perfect for a price increase. This point came out in case after case analyzed in the ten days I spent at Stanford.  The more inelastic the market, the more a price increase can be accomplished successfully. What does this mean for revenue management strategies in your channels?  That you can increase price, pass along margin to resellers, and gain greater mindshare and share of channel.  A great way to fund new channel development as well.

Bottom line: Get to know the concepts of Economic Value to the Customer (ECV) and apply it to your revenue management, channel management, sales and product configuration strategies – and do not be afraid to raise prices to gain greater revenues that this analysis can show you.  It could mean the difference between funding new channel and market development.

Flickr attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rwp-roger/with/3186643153/

In the following short video Rich Morris, BMW Manufacturing explains BMW’s unique lean production philosophy.  The approach BMW takes to production planning, scheduling and supply chain coordination all are driven from the customer order.  Thank you to Matt Littlefield of Aberdeen for posting this to Twitter.

Flickr attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30626457@N00/189991794/

Halfway through this year and many sales teams are just staying at pace with their sales quotas, some have fallen behind, and a few lucky ones are surpassing them.

Why are some companies in your industry kicking all kinds of butt and others barely making it?  They focus on taking customers from competitors who are dissatisfied with pricing, performance or product quality.

One of the best strategies for doing this is using pricing and quoting together to penetrate competitor’s accounts.  In watching this happen in the aftermarkets industry for aerospace manufacturers for example here are five tips companies in this industry are using to outsmart and outsell their competitors:

• Use quotes as a competitive strategy to go after accounts at competitors most like your own. One of the requirements of MRO manufacturers was to source from a supplier in their same city, in the same industry, with references.  A competing manufacturer had the references in the same city and through an intensive cold-calling effort, was able to get a meeting and quote to the buyer.  The result: they displaced a long-standing supplier by being aggressive and using quoting to get a shot at the opportunity.

• Increasing Your Quoting Speed Can Open Up Entirely New Selling Opportunities. Keep in mind your company may be perfectly happy with the speed of generating quotes, and may be cruising along winning a decent number of deals.  But keep this in mind: just like jets that fly over 40,000 feet typically miss the majority of the weather, fly faster, farther and arrive sooner as a result, so it is with a quoting strategy.  Just “cruising along” means you may be missing so many more deals by flying higher, faster, and speeding up the quoting process.  There are those companies whose need for quotes is within hours, not days, and by “cruising along” you are missing many deals you’ll never see.  Fly higher, faster than your competitors and take deals that never come into the timeframes they are comfortable at.

• Quoting as an attack strategy. The sense of urgency a sales team has needs to be matched by the ability to execute on a quote fast, even if it requires special pricing and an availability date.  The companies kicking butt out of this recession do this – they take their processes and turn them into selling strength to knock competitors out of deals and eventually, accounts.

• Using a product configuration engine to analyze your competitor’s pricing strategies and undercut them on their best selling products to take them out of deals fast. When I was at Ingram Micro, we did this against our distribution-based competitors and later at Gateway we did this against Compaq and Dell.  In the markets Gateway competed in, speed was King.  We could easily beat Compaq on quotes for complex workstations and servers, while Dell was lethal at speed. The bottom line: analyzing our competitor using a configuration engine gave us insight and we knew how they would react and just how critical timeliness was in addition to price.

• Build in Special Pricing Request flexibility to any quoting system and use it to push competitors out of deals. I have seen this often in the disk storage and disk drive industry, where special pricing requests (SPR) are commonplace. Due to the rapid product lifecycles in the storage industry and price often being a commonly used differentiator, special pricing is used for pushing products through channels and closing out product lines fast.  You can also use special pricing to get competitors out of deals by creating online applications that make the entire SPR process automated.  Special pricing is one of the most potent selling strategies there are for knocking competitors out of a deal and winning the sale.

Bottom line: Being one of the companies in your industry that comes out on top of the recovery has a lot more to do with how you attack both opportunities and weak ties your competitors have with their customers.  Think of quoting and product configuration strategies as a means to launch more focused and aggressive selling strategies and capture more customers as a result.

Flickr attribution:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/twcollins/

This book is a journey through the modern landscape of polymaths, from the innovation at General Electric to clean tech, to an excellent analysis of how social networks are changing CRM.  There are many more areas covered including guidance on changing organizations to be more creative and innovative.    Well balanced with case studies of companies creating innovative processes, products and perspectives that are changing entire industries, this book delivers fascinating insights.

Winning is Easy, Just Share Your Insights

I have a passion for teaching and enjoy helping students. I have noticed that at the universities I teach at, the social networking applications are out of step with student needs.

This contest focuses on creative, innovative ways to bridge this gap.

Send in as many ideas as you want to each question and the best response to each will win an autographed, personalized copy of Vinnie Mirchandani’s book.

First Contest for a copy of The New Polymath

From a student’s perspective, how can a school or university be more effective at using popular networks to achieve course and learning objectives?

Second Contest for a copy of The New Polymath

How can instructors create more of an interest in  learning and attain course objectives using popular social networks, in addition to class portals and websites?

Please send your responses to me at lcolumbus at cincom dot com.  Good luck and thank you!

Emergency vehicle manufacturer E-One has standardized on Cincom Acquire to streamline their quoting, sales and product configuration strategies.

The net result has been a single version of the truth of customer requirements as Jonathan Plant, Configuration Manager for E-One explains in the following interview.

Bottom line: Streamlining product configuration strategies leads to greater time spent on customer-driven, not internally-driven needs and projects.

From the initial sales calls and customer meetings to the delivery of quotes, the entire selling process is fueled by trust.

Setting up sales to win, especially in these challenging times, needs to start with making the quotes reflect what can be achieved by sales, operations, manufacturing and fulfillment all working together toward the common goal of exceeding customers’ expectations.  From the simplest product to the most complex system, there are several common factors that all quoting systems need to concentrate on, and they are listed below:

• Let your sales teams drive quoting system design. Go right after change management by putting not IT, but sales in the driver’s seat of what the next generation quoting system looks like.  This increases ownership and lets sales define how they manage process workflows.  Every sales professional I have ever known has their own way of working – get your quoting system in alignment to this fact and see the adoption rate soar.

• Measuring quoting accuracy so that each team involved can see their contribution. This is another strategy for getting each department critical to a quoting strategy’s success to own it.  Walking the halls of one provider of Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) products that has build-to-order product lines for Airbus, Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, it’s clear that the quoting and bidding process is heavily owned across engineering, manufacturing, project management, scheduling and service.  Quotes and bids get tracked very visibility in these companies and anyone walking by can tell in an instant if a given order is behind schedule, on time or ahead of schedule.  It infuses accountability into the entire culture – and quotes and bids get out on time and are accurate the majority of the time too.

• Your best knowledge experts should routinely torture test your quoting systems. In selling, complacency kills.  Never be complacent about how your quoting systems are performing, never stop looking for how to bring greater product expertise and knowledge into the quoting process.  That’s why it is a great idea to unleash product experts on your quoting systems, and ask them to critique them and also ask for how product and process expertise could be made more available and useful.  This kind of critique can help quoting strategies improve over time.

• Quoting systems need to include line item support for services and bundling. Having started several years ago as an option in companies who offer their own warranty contracts (like BestBuy does in the consumer market) this trend has accelerated over the last two years.  Warranties and services are the majority of revenues many manufacturers have, and up-selling these within a quote is paying off with increased margin as well.

• Create quoting price thresholds in your pricing systems by product line or popular build-to-order configurations. One manufacturer of pumps and valves is doing this as they move into an indirect selling strategy to keep pricing consistent across their channel partners.  Another is using this, only varying pricing tables by channel partner, to ensure the minimal levels of margin are attained on each quote.  Integrating pricing into quoting gets prospects an immediate and accurate view of just what a given product configuration and services bundle is going to cost.

Bottom line: Winning more quotes starts with a concerted strategy that extends beyond sales and gets everyone involved to won its performance.

Flickr attribution: caribb

Summer months are when selling gets challenging, as key decision makers in sales cycles hit the road across the U.S. and Europe for vacations.  This drives the good and bad sales people I know crazy.  They all want to close on the deals they have been working in some cases over ten months or more now.  But they can’t, the key decision makers are out in many cases until mid-August .

How sales reps, managers and senior management handle this frustration is going to decide if they are going to win the deals they are working on.  Here are the reasons why:

• Knowledge Wins Deals, Hard Selling Can Kill Them. Investing their summers in really understanding their prospects and customers to the process and role level is winning more deals for sales reps than any hard sell technique ever did.  The best sales reps are after knowledge and intelligence of how to better serve their prospective clients and existing customers.

• Go after the most painful areas of your prospects’ business because that is where the real opportunity is. One of the best approaches during a slower time of the year is to get time with the account contacts closest to the pain areas your client has.  Invest heavily in these areas with your time – because if you can help get a solution defined here your potential to close is much higher.

• Talk with, not at, your prospects. Just like Julie the automated voice-recording expert in the following clip, frustrated sales reps go through their own automated hard-sell script and kill deals as a result.

Bottom line: Listening is the ultimate selling weapon. From quoting and product configuration to pricing, it is all about focusing on the customers’ pains first with these strategies.  Don’t hard-sell your way out of deals; stay focused on gaining insight and knowledge to earn trust and the opportunity to service prospects over the long-term.

Flcikr attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29096601@N00/3629084631/

Regardless of the economic climate, trust rules – it is the catalyst of growth in any business.  Especially in these economically challenging times, gaining and keeping trust can make the difference between keeping the highest performing resellers for your company focused on up-selling new products and services and strengthening their relationships with key accounts.

Transforming Product Expertise to Profitable Selling

The companies attaining best practices in quoting and product configuration take the time to align their product information to the specific needs their customers have in sales cycle.  They are process-centric in how they use product information. Not looking to waste their resellers’ (or their own) time, these companies who are increasing their channel partners’ performance are focused on the following ten strategies for using quoting, product configuration and product knowledge to better serve their resellers.

Lessons Learned

1. Create product taxonomies and product knowledge bases that align to resellers’ needs first, internal needs second. To do this well, it’s critical to go visit resellers and see how to best create product taxonomies that map to how they are managing sales cycles.  Making the product taxonomies map to their internal needs can also significantly drive up adoption of quoting and product configuration systems.  Don’ ever assume one-size-fits-all in how product information is organized internally – make it flexible enough to stay relevant to reseller’s needs.
   
2. Creating quoting systems that can track completed, accepted, rejected and escalation quotes easily. This makes the process of using quotes to win more sales through channels much easier to manage.  Create process workflows within a quoting system so you can escalate leads to channel partners, also manage, and measure them as a resource.
3. Integrating special pricing workflows into quoting pays. Instead of treating this as a separate process, consider how best to bring special pricing requests into quoting so your resellers’ time is maximized on relationships not on managing special pricing exceptions.
4. Consistency of quoting systems across all channels is a must-have. Too often, there are different quoting systems across different sales channels, often not integrated together.   The result is that price lists, product descriptions and product categories are often inconsistent across a company.  Quoting systems that can support Web-based, telemarketing, direct and channel partners lead to more consistent pricing and better order management over time.
5. Give your customer visibility into the product configuration and order process. Order status is by far the most-requested improvement to Web-based order management systems.  Why not include that as an add-on for quoting as well?  It will save significant time for telemarketing representatives and lead to greater customer satisfaction over time by concentrating on being responsive.
6. Get a passion for measuring your quoting performance – from your customer’s perspective. What kind of a grade would your customers give you for your quoting and product configuration performance?  DO you give them a chance to comment on the experience?  If you are not, consider how you can give them that voice.  Look at it this way: eventually you will find out how your performance stacks up – but to go and ask for it and seek to continually improve.
7. Use quoting for complex multiline product and service orders. A study recently completed by Webster University of the ERP installed base of manufacturers showed that the second most error-prone area of a manufacturer is in the quote-to-Bill of Materials hand-off.  Look at how you can use quoting systems to reduce the number of lost BOM items and make the entire process more error-free.
8. Define and pilot new build-to-order products just for sale through distribution using product configuration. This strategy concentrates on higher margin products that are configurable to customers’ specific needs.  The Cisco flip phone is an example, with the specific casing and artwork, which can be applied.  There are also specific Dell, HP and Toshiba laptops configurable for sale only online.  Consider how to make the most of this type of strategy to assist resellers in gaining greater margin.
9. Creating integrated marketing strategies that have the call to action being a t cost drive of a new, customized product or service. Car companies do this extremely well. Helping resellers get their prospects to try your products needs to start with a test drive of the product configurator – get a sample version of a product produced can lead to a sale quickly.
10. Give resellers control over which products they sell, how they sell them and how they manage expectations for their customers. As selling portals gain greater quoting and product configuration functionality, giving resellers the opportunity to tailor their specific sites based on profitable, buildable products becomes a reality. Give resellers more freedom to sell how and what they want to gain greater trust and credibility.

Bottom line: Getting your resellers in control of selling starts by choosing to make quoting and product configuration strategies centered on their needs while balancing the need for production efficiency at the same time.

Flickr attribution:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/spilt-milk/164145237/

Programming applications requires thought about how the people will interact with the application.  It comes back to the GUI.  I’ll stick to the basics of keyboard input and monitor output.  We’ll skip the mouse for our cranial application development.  Remember the tab key?  It is very important for moving between input fields.  The mouse input tends to slow things down when you have a lot of typing to do.  The standard GUI for business applications usually includes radio buttons, check boxes, text input, drop down lists, multi-select lists, buttons to press, and text to read.  I think you get the idea.

The GUI is built at design time by the programmer and then compiled into the application.  However, there are many applications that build the GUI while the application is running.  The application can be programmed in a way that reads knowledge and builds the GUI dynamically based on the knowledge.  This makes the application GUI a slave to the knowledge.  Doing that will take the GUI development away from the programmer and gives the GUI control to the knowledge manager.

The key ingrediant to making an application GUI driven by the knowledge is to make a GUI contract.  Everything on the screen needs information about it: who, what, when, where, event handling, and what will it look like.  You can make a simple knowledge contract and leave much of the details to other externals, or you can make a detailed contract so the knowledge has to have many attributes.

Think of something simple like text to display.  If the knowledge management chooses what text to display, then the knowledge has to define the GUI element for the text.  Even if the text is “static”, it does change at least once when the GUI is first displayed.  I think I can explain this best by example of this cranial application.  The GUI defines a contract that requires a specific list named Static_Text to display static text.  There will be one static text created on the GUI for every row in the Static_Text list.  The Static_Text list requires one property that defines the string of characters to display called Display_Text, one property for the display style (see http://www.w3schools.com for more info on CSS) called CSS_Class, one property for display tab called Tab, one property for location called Location.

The contract also defines the assumptions of the application for building the GUI at run time.  The top to bottom order of the Static_Text rows is the order that the text displayed.  If there are overlapping location, the last one in the list will be displayed on top.  The GUI contract assumption for my cranial program is for the web, so I expect that the CSS_Class will be defined in the GUI web page or in a referenced CSS class file.  There are other assumptions, but my point here is that you think about them when defining the contract.

The end game is what you make of it.  The GUI presentation is a blank slate until the knowledge is read.  Then the GUI gets built dynamically by the application as defined in the knowledge.  As a bonus, the knowledge can be altered before the GUI is built.  Rules can be put in place for add/subtract/modify of the Static_Text as the application starts.  This puts power into the knowledge manager’s hands as long as the contract isn’t broken with the application GUI.  Enhancements to the contract require a rebuilt application, but now you wouldn’t need to rebuild the application everytime you want to change the static text on GUI.  Just change the knowledge and the application will change the GUI for you according to the contract.

I have one last thought about the dynamic GUI.  You don’t have to read the knowledge and display the GUI just one time.  The application can be contracted so that the GUI can change any time during the user interaction triggers specific events.  The GUI elements, like static text, can be added/subtracted/modified anytime as long as the programmer writes the code to do those changes and reads the knowledge for what those changes are.

One real example.  The knowledge is an XML file.  The application is an XSLT file.  The XSLT reads the knowledge and places text, buttons, input fields and more onto an HTML form.  When the GUI form is displayed in the web browser, you see the result of the application reading the knowledge and creating the GUI.  See http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/default.asp for a simple example.

“Think about a guy who distributes stoves,” Gregor says. “The stoves have a lot of options.  So, you ask yourself, how do I sell this to my customers in an easy way? How do I communicate with the manufacturer of the stoves about the options that the customer wants and get a price and configuration back to the customer quickly? How easy is it for me to get information and pricing?” Gregor says that as the manufacturer, you need to be easy to do business with, which can be a problem if you have products with a lot of options and twists and turns.

How can product configurators fix these issues? “They can provide a guided selling environment that lets people choose options without tracking down an expert on the phone. They can choose options and see how that affects the price,” Gregor says. He says an example of this would be buying a computer online with Dell. “Go to the website and try to buy a computer. You can mix and match options and features and as you do so the price changes so you can see how much the computer will cost.”

 “Most people think dealers go to the people with the best product features or the best price,” Gregor adds. “They don’t. They go to the people who are easiest to buy from.” And, according to a study conducted by AMR and McKinsey & Company, he’s right. The study found that 80% of business goes to manufacturers who are the easiest to buy from.

 According to Gregor, “it’s even more important in today’s manufacturing environment because the economy is in the toilet and nobody’s market share is growing. The only way you can succeed in a competitive market place is to steal market share from one of your competitors.”

How do you steal market share from your competitors?

Gregor says that one strategy is to become easier to buy from than your competitor. A product configurator is important because it makes you easier to buy from.

Not only would your business become easier to buy from by using a product configurator, but you would also decrease costs because you have fewer people involved in the sales process. Additionally, a product configurator also allows you to grow revenue because when you increase market share, you grow revenue.

“It’s kind of a double whammy,” says Gregor. “You bring more money in through the front door while paying lower costs.”

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Bottom line:

Web-based marketing strategies including organic and inorganic search, use of social networks, lead scoring, lead escalation and intensive use of video campaigns all are making upper funnel metrics of performance in many companies skyrocket.   Never before have so many communication channels, techniques, strategies and platforms been available for generating interest and awareness of a company – and all that activity can be measured as it is digital.

It’s no surprise that recent studies by Forrester Research and others show spending on print-based and traditional marketing channels is dropping – fast.

Making Selling Strategies Work with Quoting

Upper funnel strategies are today, in the majority of cases, digital.  All that data about customers is nowhere to be found in how quotes are created, expectations set, or specific programs put together.  This is where upper and lower sales funnels begin to disconnect.  The minute a sales lead or even a quote hits the lower funnel, many companies and their marketing and selling departments go right back to square one.  They initiate an entirely new sequence of processes, strategies, using systems that do not take advantage of all that data captured in the upper funnel strategies.

Mind the Gap

It is painfully obvious in some of the companies during quarterly reviews, when marketing’s performance is breaking company records every quarter, while there are only a few new sales.  What went right in the few sales completed was that the sales teams took accountability and ownership of scouring company systems to find everything they possibly could on the customer – they did the work that systems and the integration between them was supposed to do.

A Strategy for Setting up Sales to Win

For sales teams to win more deals the upper and lower funnels need more than just lead escalation and scoring – they need to provide the truth about what is going on with customers.  They can get to the truth with a quoting system that is integrated to customer data.

This is especially important for sales teams who navigate longer sales cycles.  The more insight and intelligence you can get to your sales teams, the more effective they can create solution selling strategies and the further down the sales cycle they get – and the more they close deals.   The best quoting systems capture not only the unique requirements of prospects, they also capture their current constraints, budget requirements – and in the case of highly customized products – their one-of-a kind integration requirements.  Bring all these elements together and your sales team has the intelligence and insight to move much more aggressively and with much more focus through sales cycles.

Look to quoting as a means to bring an aggressive use of intelligence to selling.  It works.

From the aerospace manufacturer whose Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) business is booming right now as a result of selling with quotes to capture customer requirements perfectly to the manufacturers of values and pumps whose business depends on accuracy, quoting is the first step to delivering a perfect order every time.  Senior managers from the aerospace manufacturer are in my graduate-level course in international marketing this semester.  They speak of not having enough time for a mistake; Boeing and others demand perfection on their programs because there is not enough time in schedules to deal with badly produced orders.  Quoting as a result is the path to getting a perfect order out the door.

Turning Metrics into Money

Part of the hype associated with social networks is the skyrocketing marketing metrics they are driving for upper funnel marketing strategies.  But unless those metrics can be turned into cash – does it matter?  That is the challenge for any marketer – make those skyrocketing upper funnel metrics matter and bring intelligence into selling.  Quoting is making it happen and helping sales teams win.

Look for how you can connect upper and lower funnel selling strategies using quoting – and give your sales teams a chance to use intelligence not piecemeal, but with a very focused, very deliberate goal in mind: pushing deals through the sales pipeline and delivering exceptional value to customers.

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