Louis Columbus Cincom Systems

For any company to be successful and grow they have got to exceed customers’ expectations consistently – to only meet them is to flat-line sales. Yet there is also the need for delivering exceptional products as part of the experience.

Aligning the two using product configuration can be the most profitable strategy of all.

The Experience Argument
Much as been written about delivering exceptional customer experiences, including the Three “Ds” of Customer Experience from Harvard Business School and the excellent work that Joe Pine has done over the years on this topic. Managing channels like a marriage, with all the conflicts and the rewards, must be a core focus of any company if they are going to deliver exceptional customer experiences over time. The bottom line is that channel partnerships are emerging as one of the most powerful asset any company can have today.

The Innovation and Products Argument

Grow or die is the mantra is nearly very technology-driven company on the planet. From nearly every component and semiconductor manufacturer to the accelerated product lifecycles of most tech products, companies live and die by meeting their market windows. Be early with a product generation and your company can win exceptionally high market share; be late and be viewed as less viable, weak and out of touch with the market.

With so much riding on the ability to keep up with innovation and product designs, every insight, element of intelligence, and piece of data gleaned from customers is critically important. As Blue Ocean Strategy has shown it is not in the rigid, highly spending hierarchical approaches to development that innovation flourishes; it is in the perspective of making the right decisions at the right time to open up new markets. Product configuration can help out by accomplishing the following:

• Launching new build-to-order and product configuration-based products entirely through dealer and online channels. Using sales configuration or quoting and product configuration systems as the basis for launching customizable products entirely through indirect channels can accomplish some great objectives. First, it can give your indirect channels exceptional levels of ownership for product strategies specifically developed to enrich them. Second, in the grow or die world of high tech products, being able on the launch date to roll out a fully configured product configurator is powerful. It makes a global statement: we believe in our resellers and their ability to sell these customizable products and they will exceed any customer expectation. What a tremendous vote of confidence for any channel program. Both Cisco and their product configuration strategies and the HP product configuration strategy do this often.

• Services, services, services and answering the question “are you strong enough to serve?” Let’s face it, for resellers their lifeblood is finding unmet needs in the client base that for many of them, go back years and years. How can product configuration be used to fuel their fact-finding and the ability to get to those unmet needs? Ask yourself this question often if you are in a grow or die industry like networking equipment industry.

• Data mining those quotes and product configurations abandoned. This can show you where your product strategies are falling short relative to customers’ expectations and also serve to provide ideas for Product Lifecycle Management efforts in the future.

Bottom Line: From those companies competing in grow or die industries and all of those struggling to make product introductions count, it’s time to look at how product configuration strategies can help you grow by making every customer experience exceptional, and by learning what matters most to your customers.

Flickr attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chazoid/2598478591/sizes/s/

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

The true strength of any company is in the knowledge it has.

Transforming this knowledge into sales, overcoming lost opportunities due to a lack of follow-up or being too slow to respond to sales’ requests for data can drastically slow down a company’s ability to compete.

I’ve seen small but very technologically astute companies work very hard at coming up with databases that have everything imaginable in them for their sales teams.  From unstructured content organized through the development of semantic search, through highly structured content in enterprise-wide content and knowledge management systems, these solutions run the gamut of automation.

Yet all of them have failed in serving the sales force. Why?

When you look at why such Herculean efforts on the part of IT departments to equip their sales forces with the best possible tools and knowledge fails, it’s clear that automating already-efficient processes is not enough.  Here has to be more, and the “more” includes the following:

• C-Level skin in the game. This is critical, and the C-level executives (CEO, CIO, and CMO) have got to present a unified, consistent and even passionate pursuit of change for the new systems to make a difference for the sales force?  Why?  Because if you think of a company like a series of watch gears, all department interlocking like watch gears, it just takes one department or even one individual to think change does not apply to them to bring it all to a grinding halt.  C-level skin in the game sets the example, pace of change and clearly communicates that this strategy of knowledge sharing is critical.

• Freely sharing knowledge and making sales happen is the best job insurance there is. Every company lives and breathes by the salesforce and their accomplishments.  More companies have to equate the speed they share information at was the speed they make sales happen.  Share more, sell more, it’s clear in the services businesses I’ve been a part of.  Hoard more and everyone loses.  Company management must attack this problem head-on and the insecurity that breeds information hoarding.  To hoard is to kill sales, to share is to grow them.

• The more knowledge you provide customers the more trust you earn, the more opportunities to keep that trust by performing well. Excellent selling is more about teaching prospects hope you can solve their problem first, and closing the deal second.  Look at Accenture and the many problems they had trying to create an enterprise-wide content and knowledge management system.  This is an organization with legions of brilliant people yet no one was sharing information. What happened?  The company allowed portals to proliferate, and needed to completely re-architect their knowledge management strategies to put sales and the customer engagements first. It took exceptional effort to create a shared base of knowledge that was based more on creating cooperation, not competition between Accenture divisions.

Bottom line: The quickest path to being a trusted advisor is to be the most knowledgeable one. Equip your sales force with the knowledge they need to win now.

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

People have a passion to be heard, and in a world that at times shows it doesn’t have time to listen much less have real, in person relationships, social networking has proven to be the proxy for people too busy to connect in real-time.  Paradoxically giving face time to customers is now the ultimate compliment.

Social networks have unleashed a freedom and candor of communication never seen before.  One can pull back and try to clinically analyze the exponential growth of social networks using concepts such as The Network Effect, theories of information velocity, or collaboration theories – but in the end it is all about the passion people have to be heard and to be free in doing that. 

The passion people have to communicate on social networks reminds me of how the word Eleftheria (Greek for freedom), a word that reverberates with strong emotions of being able to do what others said you could not.  Never mind if those who said you couldn’t were governments, bigoted people who judged you because of the color of your skin or your gender or even your appearance. Eleftheria says those people don’t matter.  It is a beautiful word and one my Greek immigrant grandparents said with passion and reverence too.

Eleftheria: Too Valuable For Any Marketer to Waste

Don’t waste the Eleftheria social networks give you to serve your customers and enrich others.  The best marketers get it.  They don’t waste or trivialize the Eleftheria that exists in social networks, they capitalize on it to enrich, serve, support, strengthen and get their customers to their goals. You have to love the paradox of how the best marketers involved in social networks look to free their customers, not ensnare them.

For any marketer looking to excel at social networking the most important questions to ask are “How can I free my customers from inconvenience, from unnecessary costs, from their problems by sharing more relevant information? Or by listening to them more using social networking?”   Imagine how much more valuable many of the social networking sites would be if marketers asked themselves these questions rather than seeking out virtual bull horns.  Social networking is not a virtual bull horn, to trivialize it to that is to throw away Eleftheria.

Marketers Listen Up: You Get What You Give

I’d like to suggest a contrarian thought to those companies and persons on social networks: the more followers you have, the more people you have to serve. They are not there to serve you; you are there to serve them with encouragement, insights, support and most of all, to give them a chance to get to their goals.  That is what Eleftheria is really all about – freeing your customers (and followers) to get to their goals. Self-aggrandizement is a distraction. It takes marketer’s eyes off the real goal of helping customers to their goals.  Better to be part of their passionate pursuit of freedom than tell them how great you are.

What Makes a Great Social Networking Marketing Strategy?

Honesty, being real, getting your customers (or followers) to their goals and re-orienting every social networking platform strategy to embrace these values is what matters most. 

Think of it this way: trade off sending out thousands of Tweets to promote your brand (or yourself) and think of how powerful it would be to deliver Eleftheria to just one customer (or follower) through social networks? To free just one customer or lighten the load of just one follower – so much more worth it.

Yet it does not need to stop there. 

There are so many more ways marketers can free their customers – from time drains, from annoying problems, from costly errors in their approaches to doing business – using social networks to achieve this.  Here are some additional thoughts on how marketers can use social networks to deliver Eleftheria – yes, a passionate freedom of giving customers the ability to get to their goals. Now keep in mind I am no social media expert so you mileage may vary, all I do know is that trust is earned when you can deliver Eleftheria over and over again to your customers. 

• Be very selective of which social networking platforms you participate on.  Marketers who attempt to be on every single social networking platform often fail.  Why? Because they can’t scale to support the conversations and unique needs each.  Seeing social networking as a means to an end – delivering Eleftheria – is the real value.  One of my favorite authors, David Meerman Scott, has used the cocktail party analogy of how annoying it is when you attempt to have a conversation with someone and they keep watching the door to see who else is there. Don’t be that person.  Actually listen to conversations.
  
• Own your problems in public.  There are not enough companies doing this on social networking today.  Comcast comes to mind as one, and there are many more.  How powerful this is for creating credibility. Own even the ugly, messy problems online and strive for a solution to them together with your customers.  Deliver Eleftheria from them. 

• Assign an Acronym Assassin your marketing team to seek out and destroy gobbledygook. Make it fun yet make sure any content going out makes sense to anyone outside the four walls of your company.  Check out Hubspot’s Gobblygook Grader. This is not meant to be snarky or mean; it is meant to say embrace clear communication as another step to deliver Eleftheria.   

Bottom line: Think about those companies and people that really matter to you, that you are fiercely loyal to and then consider the full meaning of Eleftheria – chances are they delivered that to you over and over again to win your trust.  In that experience is the essence of using social networking for marketing.

Flickr attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2764625499/sizes/m/

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

This is the second week of the global competitive strategies course I am teaching at a local university. If there is a single take-away from this class so far it is this: small businesses have a fighting survival instinct going on right now and it is injecting a very pragmatic pace and tone to the class.  I like it.  It keeps the class grounded. 

Small Businesses: Keeping It Real

Every class should have these small business managers and owners it in.  The recession isn’t felt from reading the Wall Street Journal every day, it is in seeing the people physically walking into their stores ebb and flow with customer confidence.  It is literally like talking to people who live on the fault line of this economy.

We’ve been covering how the truly great companies are capable of transforming knowledge into competitive strength, from the Toyota Production System to the use of supply chain optimization by United Parcel Service and Wal-Mart.  We have been blessed to have a Deloitte supply chain specialist in the class who has worked with Wal-Mart for years too. It’s a challenging class to teach but an extremely rewarding one too. 

Market-Driven Begins With Turning Knowledge into Cash

Looking at how knowledge networks dominate small businesses and how critically dependent they are on each other for everything from discounts with suppliers, to sales leads, referrals and referencing, the following take-aways emerged from the discussion:

• Technology only has a single purpose in their small businesses: create and sustain trust.  These small business owners and students could care less about generating mountains of metrics or doing intensive ROI analyses – they are all about using Web-based technologies and especially social networking to stay connected with their customers.  And it isn’t the en masse strategies you read about so often – it is one-to-one relationship building over time. 

• A far greater sense of urgency and skill in small business about transforming knowledge into cash.  This was apparent not only in the class discussion but also from the case studies we looked at.  Of my students who are from small businesses, they have developed a skill of transforming supplier knowledge into potential selling strategies much faster than the larger organizations allow their employees to.

• A passionate focus on reducing customer churn at all costs. Again the students from small businesses have their paychecks indexed by reducing churn either directly through comp plans or due to the fact that only the most loyal customers are upgrading the products he sells.
  
• Supplier exchanges have become very popular to gain purchasing clout.  There is a definite take-no-prisoners mindset in the telecom small businesses represented in my class about supplier exchange.  Looking to drive down purchasing costs to the lowest level possible, small business owners are banding together and pooling purchase orders more than some of these students have ever seen before.

• Team selling has become the norm.  Up and down the distribution channels of the PC industry this is happening right now, especially on deals in vertical market industries.  Where before one reseller would try to handle all the requirements of a customer, there is more solution knowledge sharing going on than ever before.

Bottom line: You have to admit the intensity and creativity small businesses are bringing to transforming knowledge into cash.  There is little patience with too much theoretical jargon or frameworks, much more of a focus on how to learn from other company’s mistakes. Small business owners and managers are delivering much in this class in terms of real-world knowledge as a result.

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

In this recession product introductions are the lifeblood many companies are relying on for future revenue.  It’s the single biggest sales-producing event that many of them have.  Getting it right requires an inordinate amount of coordination, communication, and planning from a product transition standpoint.

As a member of a study team that was funded by a Japanese electronics manufacturer with McKinsey & Company several excellent take-aways emerged on how re-defining built-to-order strategies online can increase the likelihood of success of the launch of entire new products and product line extensions. 

Here are the key take-aways:

• It takes a minimum of 16 weeks to launch a new product successfully.  An aggressive timeline for new product introductions like this assumes that a senior manager, in the case of this Japanese manufacturer, their General Manager, take the lead and prioritize work across the entire division.  This served to remove many of the roadblocks to getting the launch done.  It also did something far more valuable: it started changing the culture of the division to see the launch process not as a long, drawn-out cross-functional effort but more of a quickly and aggressively completed distribution strategy against competitors trying to take their market share.

• Creating product configurations that focused on increasing reseller margins matter most.  Everyone likes to talk about mass customization at the consumer level, yet this product launch used these powerful principles to create a stronger reseller base.  This Japanese manufacturer had done their homework, spending hours of face-time with both large and small resellers to understand how to use the combination of product catalogs, product configuration, pricing and service offerings online to actually strengthen their channels.  In the battle for reseller mindshare, this was a strategic weapon that worked.

• Cut the technical arrogance and sell more. At the time of the study less than 10% of the entire reseller base was using the online product configurator.  During one of many conference calls to understand why the adoption rate was so low one reseller said “get product configurators out of the ivory tower and do what you did with catalogs – make it intuitive!” The other resellers agreed that the navigation in the product configurators were way too complex – and when they asked for assistance they were told how it worked, not how to use it.  Frustrated, they had given up.  The entire graphical interface needed to be re-defined.  The project manager for product configuration was then turned over to Sales, not IT, and adoption, over time improved. Serving the channel with product configuration mattered more than telling them how technically awesome it was. 

Bottom line: In this recession every product launch counts. Get online catalogs, pricing, product configuration all aligned to your channels’ needs way beforehand and let them own it.  You increase your odds of success significantly by doing this. 

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

Just watching the companies fighting their way through the challenges of this economic downturn one can appreciate what it means to go after intelligence aggressively.  There is a small healthcare products manufacturing company in Los Angeles for example that has decided to throw down the gauntlet of transforming its supply chain, sourcing and marketing systems to be more focused on rapid response times to customers.  They decided that in the midst of an economic downturn, getting aggressive about how they used intelligence could make a huge difference in their ability to survive and grow. 

As it turns out their strategy of aggressive intelligence is paying off with increased orders from e-commerce sites the business development teams had been working with for years.  One of the senior managers of this firm is in my graduate-level course in International Business. Paradoxically, the recession forces his retailing customers to go multi-channel much faster than they had anticipated.  The result: an entirely new channel for his company as well.

 
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
President Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States. "Citizenship in a Republic," Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

Coming Out Swinging…With Knowledge

It’s time for more companies to get up and dust themselves off from this recession and start fighting back – with knowledge.  The easy strategies of using continuously dropping prices, sacrificing margins or even bundling products to the point of unprofitability are, to be blunt, weak.  How much better to fight the good fight of bringing the knowledge in our companies to the forefront of our customers’ unmet needs and knocking out their problems for them?  That’s the plan at this manufacturer and it is working.

Instead of complaining about how about how bad this recession is, there are those courageous companies who instead look at their customers’ knowledge and process problems as their own.  They attack these problems with an intensity they would in their own company.  The use intelligence aggressively to serve their customers.  That’s the key take-away from the small manufacturer I’ve gotten to know in L.A. from one of my students. 

Key Lessons Learned

After visiting my students’ company last Friday and hearing how pervasive the mission they are on is getting engrained into their culture, a few key take-aways emerged:

• Everyone sees themselves as fighting for their customers’ victories, not just their own.  This pervaded the assembly areas, and certainly included sales and service.  Every person I talked to, from the manufacturing supervisors to the sales managers, directors and VPs saw the recession as a fight they would help their customers win.  It wasn’t about them; it was about helping their customers get through this too.  The term “we got their back” came up several times.

• Using data mining to find patterns in special orders to create new build-to-order product configuration.  This manufacturer is taking their histories of special orders and looking for patterns in the data to create entirely new combinations of special order products.  While these special orders were costly to produce at the time, they do provide a glimpse of what is selling.  The result has been product line extensions quickly created with an increased probability of success. 

• Looking for new ways to help their customers be successful in multi-channel management strategies including increasing emphasis in e-commerce.  This was a big one as the company acts as a light manufacturer for trading partners in China and Taiwan and has better availability on specific healthcare products than their competitors globally.  As a result of the decision to get aggressive about how they manage data, they can now provide price and availability across all healthcare products on a 24/7 basis in three languages, and two Chinese dialects.  This has been one of the key areas where they are helping their distribution partners open websites in specific Chinese provinces and throughout the Pacific Rim.  The result is their sales are growing in the midst of this recession.

• Product catalogs customizable within hours for any given reseller’s needs in three languages and two Chinese dialects.  The online product catalogs are organized in an enterprise content management system so they can create specific subset catalogs and push them to a partners’ website within less than 72 hours if needed.  This is a major competitive advantage and further shows how aggressively this company is using intelligence.

Conclusion
What’s so unique about this company is that while the recession is certainly a major concern, there is no dwelling on it.  There is instead a mindset of using the recession as a reason to fight harder than ever for customers and get aggressive in their use of intelligence.

Flickr credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7320687@N02/3278783949/sizes/m/

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

It’s time for companies to challenge their perceptions of what guided selling can provide across their entire series of selling strategies.  No longer relegated to an automation assistant or some sort of digital automaton or robot, guided selling can be used to teach customers too.  Get beyond looking at guided selling as a virtual sales robot and instead see it as a strategy to educate customers.  Any selling process can be automated, perfected only so far until the critical integration they require to building relationships with customers take over. 

Efficiency without relationships is in fact worthless.  Efficiency in the context of relationships is priceless. 

From Automating to Teaching

Using guided selling as a means to tailor your company’s knowledge to the specific unmet needs of any prospect, customer or for that matter anyone who can benefit from your company’s knowledge base is infinitely more important.  Using guided selling as the front-end interface for your knowledgebase may not immediately generate leads, but it does do something even more critical.  It positions your company as one that values sharing knowledge – openly – like the best professors who have ever known.  With that you’ll earn credibility, trust and the opportunity to compete for their business by delivering solutions. 

Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher. 
Japanese proverb

All of us can point back in our past and recite those teachers and professors who took an exceptional interest in our success.  They were known for their passion for knowledge and for freely sharing it.  My sixth grade social studies teacher showed how research could unshackle you and take you places you could never go as an 11 year old, yet you could go to the farthest reaches of the globe through research.  There was a statistics professor in college who showed how what many students see as arcane and dry science was actually fascinating and alive with insights just waiting to be discovered when applied to mountains of data.  These teachers were on a mission, and they succeed.

• While guided selling applications can’t match the impact these committed teachers had on so many lives, their worth ethic and values need to be the foundation of how your company uses guided selling.
• Enriching others with knowledge and showing thought leadership, and earning trust over the long-term is more important than just using guided selling to sell commodity-like products.  Websites and for that matter guided selling cannot be treated exclusively as lead generation tool – it is a trust generation tool for sharing knowledge.
• It is about becoming relevant as a learning partner with your customers first and being able to step in and solve their problems when they need your help.

Bottom line: Use guided selling to enrich others if you want to be enriched with trust and earn the opportunity to compete for business in the future.  Don’t just concentrate on automating transactions; enrich prospects and customers to earn the right to compete for their business.

Flick credits:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sanchome/525890022/sizes/l/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/genewolf/147722422/sizes/m/

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

Your company’s reputation gets defined with every interaction, every expectation set and fulfilled, every product launched, and every promotional and marketing campaign launched.  All of these strategies, tactics and programs define a company’s brand and identity.  Companies get defined by how they attract, sell and serve customers. Selling is as much about branding as are advertising and promotion – think of the last positive buying experience and you’ll see my point.

With trust being the most precious commodity there is in any customer relationship, it’s time to start thinking about how your company’s selling strategies influence how it is seen by the outside world. 

What do your selling strategies say about your company?  Everything.

From the stereotypical pushy car salesman who has to check with his manager to give you a good deal and makes you sit for 30 minutes or more to the flight attendant that takes mercy on you and upgrades you even when a flight is 90% full, selling is all about delivering an experience.  It's about earning the trust of your customers more than anything else.

Selling is all about building a bridge of trust with your customers.   

Lessons Learned

In looking at how companies are approaching selling online, there are a few lessons learned.

Selling With Honesty Makes You Stronger.  Now before you think I am jumping on a moralistic soap box, consider the fact that social networking is making fallacies, inaccuracies and flat-out lies reverberate around the world in seconds, not days, not weeks – but in the click of a mouse.  One only has to reflect on Belkin and their paying for positive reviews to see how transparent the world has become.  Buying online using guided selling that delivers on what it promises is actually a competitive advantage – and that is a great strength today.

Exceeding Expectations Online Is All That Matters.  During the projects I’ve been involved in to create guided selling Web-based applications the tedious, at times, difficult tasks of managing integration to order management, pricing, logistics and ERP systems made the projects longer than anticipated.  It was a ton of work but worth it because customers had a better understanding of when their orders would ship and orders were more accurate as a result.  No, it wasn’t perfect but Order Status was the most popular Web-based app created at one electronics distributor I worked with.  It did make a huge difference in freeing up telemarketers’ times andover time it began replacing in-bound telemarketing calls. 

Buying Experience Trumps Buying Velocity.  When Web-based guided selling apps get funded internally there is a strong anticipation that transaction velocity will skyrocket. Sales increase first on convenience items that get sold based on price and availability.  Products with historically longer purchase cycles get traction from more efficiently educating customers.  Concentrating on making the buying experience transparent – meaning that customers can quickly get to price, availability, and using product configurators, create their own customized versions of products is critical.  Delivering on the experience paradoxically drives up velocity over time.

Bottom line: You are how you sell, and your reputation online is made or broken in second, not weeks or months.  Making your guided selling applications deliver beyond expectations is much work but worth the effort.

Photo Credits:
Lighthouse: http://www.flickr.com/photos/almardigital/421522126/sizes/m/
Bridge: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vinceman/111495105/sizes/m/

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

In a tough economic environment, there are no new price elasticities.  Dropping prices in tough times rarely leads to an increase in sales.  That is being proven time and again, across all industries today. If anything, tough and uncertain economic times lead to even greater reluctance to trust price alone when making a buying decision.

Prospects and customers trust knowledge more than ever before.  It carries more credibility than price.

What matters more than ever today is making sure your company’s unique strengths – its knowledge – is applied to customer needs more accurately, aggressively and efficiently than ever before.  You can’t buy your way out of tough times with a price cut – don’t expect to bribe your customers to buy when they are getting squeezed by the economy as well.

What Customers Want – Your Knowledge

Let’s face it, your customers can go anywhere and get the price they want, yet what is most important to them – your knowledge of how to solve their problems – if much more difficult to find.

Now take that unmet need and multiply it across all the customers served, globally, that who rely on the Internet due to its always-on, 24/7 nature and one can readily see that guided selling applications are critical.  From navigating through product catalogs to deciding which type of pet to adopt into a home, guided selling applications are every effective at translating a company’s expertise and applying it to the unmet needs of customers.    

Why Guided Selling Works as a Competitive Strategy

Instead of forcing prospects and customers to interact with you through channels as you have defined them, guided selling opens up how flexible you are to do business with.  Consider these key take-aways:

Capturing guided selling searches is the gateway to a great wealth of knowledge.  Cisco actively  captures every guided selling and product configuration sessions initiated by their resellers in an attempt to learn more.  One heavy equipment manufacturer located in the Midwest U.S. does the same thing.  Capturing guided selling and product configuration data quickly builds a vast repository of data that indicates customers’ preferences and their unmet needs.  Think of guided selling as a means of studying how close you are to solving key customer problems today and what you need to improve on fro the future.  

Saving your customers time is more critical than price right now.  Your customers want to compete with more focused, intense strategies than ever before.  Putting your company’s knowledge to work for them is the best competitive strategy right now, much more effective than relying on price alone.

Get your catalogs online and integrated them use guided selling to sell more.  When I was at AMR Research and now at Cincom it is astounding how much broader our customers’ product breadth is, with only a small percentage of their products online.  Opening up the total product set and making it possible for customers to create entirely new combinations is quite a bit of work – but worth it because it opens up entirely new markets too.  Guided selling is the first step to selling more of products not even available online today.

Guide selling for launching new products works. Instead of just focusing on guided selling applications for selling convenient and commodity-like products, consider the fact that launching entirely new products takes an inordinate amount of education.  Guided selling has been successfully used for educating customers on everything from the installation of car seats to the cost trade-offs in involved in planning computer networks.

Bottom line: Guided selling is an ideal online selling strategy during tough economic times. Taking the most critical asset you have, knowledge, and transforming it into immediate value for your prospects and customers – that is the one competitive strategy your competitors cannot touch if you do this aggressively and thoroughly.

Picture credit: Flickr

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

Product configuration isn't just for PCs or high tech products anymore, despite how much they are written about in those industries.   I've written quite a bit about that area, but in this blog post I wanted to discuss the ten coolest product configurators I have seen in the last few months. Being a product configuration fan, I love exploring these. I thought I would share them with you:

Elite Vinters WINE configurator - Yes this is actually a Wine configurator! And I thought that was a line from an industry conference, didn't realize it was true. You can find the Wine Configurator here.

M&Ms Configurator -There is a product configurator for putting a message on M&Ms too. Perfect for special events and also Valentine's Day. You can find this unique product configurator here.

Beer Label and Cap Configurator - Love the Australians, they rock! Leave it to our good friends in AUS to come up with a beer label and cap configurator. I'll drink to that, mate. G'day and find the configurator here.

Tiny Pocket People Configurator - Leave it to those brilliant configuration specialists in Sweden to come up with this idea. You send them a picture of a person you want a doll made of and they product a six inch stuffed likeness of the person. This is a product configurator assured to be a "must have" for long distance relationships. A customer quote says it all" Love your dolls! I live 5 hours from my girlfriend and can't see her so often as I would like. So my girlfriend was super happy to get a doll of little me!" -Matt Corna, N.Y., US.  You can find the configurator here.

Design Your Own Hat Product Configurator - Pretty nice website, very retro. Check out their configurator here and they have a wide selection for the zoot suit crowd.

Wallpaper and wall hanging configurator - OK this is cool but could get a little weird too as you can put any image - a person, a dog - anything - on your wallpaper. Never got over that crush from college - you can look at her all the time with this wallpaper. Site is in German but you get the idea. You can check it out here.

99Dogs.com - Product configurator for creating customized t-shirts and apparel. Check it out here - could come in handy for those reunions and company team building events through the year. You can find the site here.

Sonar Drumset Product Configurator - Ready to try out for Aerosmith but need that special drum set to get your beat down perfect? There is a product configurator specifically for that purpose. You can find it with the product configurator here. 

O'Neill Footwear Configurator - O'Neill is very popular in Southern California and has done an excellent job with their footwear configurator. It's intuitive, fun, and lets you save your designs. You can check it out here.

Nike Footwear Configurator - This is best practices in footwear configurators, very well done. You can check it out here. Worth a visit.

Bottom line: Product configuration is increasingly part of a company's branding efforts and what makes them truly unique. From the Tiny Pocket People Configurator to Nike's excellent navigation, it's all about setting and exceeding customer expectations with exceptional product configuration expertise.

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

It’s time to get more coordinated with your channels than ever before, because collaboration is a competitive strength that you can’t afford to lose during this recession. Here are ten strategies for fighting this recession with your channels – because no one is coming out of these hard times without building some exceptionally strong relationships. Let’s get the illusion out of the way that any manufacturer – or company for that matter - can get through this recession completely on their own.

Here are ten strategies for surviving this recession with your channels:

• Get your channel partners to have skin in the game and re-engaged. Now is the time to get your channel partners refocused on the goals you both share, and consider re-evaluating the shared goals to make them attainable by your working together. Channel partners need to have skin in the game like never before.

• Face time is key today. Get out and spend time with each reseller, channel partner, retailer and distributor to see what they need.

• Buzz for new products needs to start with your channels. Instead of being focused on how you can generate buzz through massive marketing spending, start by getting your channel partners into the launch of new products well before the actual launch date by asking for and acting on their feedback.

• Don’t give pricing concessions, give co-op instead. Don’t resort to price discounting to just keep your channel partners focused. Go after more spending between both you and your channel partners by increasing co-op spending and use Market Development Funds (MDF) to protect key channels.

• Create new opportunities for growth by looking at new vertical markets. In the last recession the best defense that many channel partners pursued was finding a niche of being strong in a given vertical market. That’s critical in this downturn as well – help your channel partners find that vertical strength.

• Get Special Pricing Requests automated. Get away from having your channel partners wait to get special pricing on deals approved; automate this process and you’ll be able to win more deals as a result.

• Accelerate new product introductions into the first half of the year. Competing by re-defining product generations in their industries is going to be one of the most pervasive competitive strategies in 2009.

• Make sales and product configuration pay. Get your channels onboard with sales and product configuration strategies and use these applications as the basis for giving your channels and opportunity to sell more. Get new products launched quickly through product and selling configuration strategies to further differentiate.

• Escalate sales leads through channel collaboration systems, not manually. Getting sales leads to channel partners and quickly escalating them to the best possible reseller is also critical right now. Get out and spend time with resellers specifically on this issue to make sure you know what they need in this area – and walk through the best approach you can serve them with leads.

• Get a Dealer Advisory Council created now, even if it is held online and through WebEx, to get insights into your channel partners’ unmet needs. You can go big on this and hold an offsite or you can do it virtually – but either way you need to get your channel partners’ unmet needs captured and concentrate on how to collaborate with them more closely than ever before.

Bottom line: Consider these ten channel strategies for making your relationships with channel partners stronger, more resilient, more profitable today.

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

Accelerating new product introductions into 2009 is a strategy that large and small companies alike are aggressively pursuing. Microsoft, who plans on delivering Windows 7 by the end of this year, to auto manufacturers racing to get hybrid and electric vehicles launched to differentiate themselves and thousands of other manufacturers, the highest priority strategy today is getting new products out quickly.

New Product Launches – The Undiscovered Competitive Advantage

Turning new product launches into a competitive weapon is critical in these uncertain economic times. One just needs to consider Apple Computer and their relentless product roadmap of iPods, iTouch and iPhone models to see how an aggressive new product introduction strategy can lead to dominating a market.

Making Every Product Launch Count

With 25% to 35% of total revenues of a typical manufacturer being used for marketing, it’s time for a much greater level of accountability and focus on making product launches a competitive strategy. There are those companies who have a standardized process for managing product introductions – and just going through the motions of these process steps is not enough anymore. Focus and intensity on making new product introductions the critical catalyst for growing new business is also crucial if new business is going to be generated. Start looking at how you can completely transform your product launch process and gain greater sales by working more collaboratively with channel partners, distributors, dealers and resellers.


In one manufacturer there is a 16-week process for launching products that every cross-functional team member in the organization has memorized. The product launches get executed yet there is no passion anymore, no intensity to excel and use the launch process as a means of gaining market share. Many organizations are like this – and they need a wake-up call to start competing again with their product launch process.

Here are some key take-aways to transform your product introductions from being routine to becoming a competitive weapon:

• Getting suppliers involved as early as possible in the design process. Too often, even for companies including Apple who compete using product introductions, supplier involvement is the most critical. Don’t just stop there however; go after insight into how to make your product introductions more effective by creating a Channel Advisory Council to seek out ideas on how to make each product launch count.

• Get your channels to have skin in the game – with every launch. What differentiates those companies weathering the economic storm right now is that they have created such a strong level of trust and coordination with their channels that their entire marketing and selling strategies execute flawlessly in conjunction with one another.

• Measure, monitor and manage to a common set of channel metrics. This is another  differentiating point of best-in-class companies when it comes to managing new product introductions – and turning them into strong competitive strategies. Using a channel collaboration system can significantly improve this entire process.

• Foster competition in your channels regarding new product selling performance. Using a channel collaboration system to nurture competition between channel partners in terms of their selling performance is what Cisco, GE, and all auto manufacturers rely on. A little competitiveness in terms of sales ranking with channel partners can go a long way to getting stronger results. Encourage sales competition and reward the top-performing teams, make them champions. You will be well on your way to changing your entire channel culture for the better.

Bottom line: Resolve to use product introductions as a competitive strategy – an opportunity to preemptively gain market share based on your latest product development. Top performing companies including Cisco, GE and others encourage competition and ownership of product launches in your channels as well – and give every channel partner a voice in the process – and then push for accountability to turn product launches into a competitive strategy that wins.

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

The next twelve months of battling to keep existing customers and gain new ones is going to forever change the perception of just what time is in many companies, and completely redefine how time is used. Time – the most precious resource any company has – is going to be in shorter supply than ever in the next twelve months.

The New Reality: Time As A Competitive Weapon

Get ready for a new reality when it comes to attracting, selling and serving customers.  It’s not going to ever be business as “usual” again.  Instead, there is a new edginess to competitiveness right now.  Instead of holding onto manually-oriented approaches to managing your channels, or relying on sales training via PowerPoint on unreliable WebEx connections, get out and do some real social networking, in person, with your channels.  And realize that your quoting systems need work to be as efficient as your competitors if the second major paradigm shift coming in 2009 is going to be a catalyst of change instead of a crutch.

Recession: From Crutch to Catalyst of Change

2009 is going to be a challenging year and instead of lining up all the excuses for not excelling in serving your channel partners, distributors or dealers today because of the economy, embrace the tougher challenge of changing how you serve channel partners instead.  Embrace the responsibility to fight for your channels and get them the tools they need.  Look at those areas of how you’re working with channel partners today and resolve to fix them – now – and make them strengths.  That is the surest path to surviving a recession.

The Path of Survival in A Recession: Serve Channels Aggressively

Go back and look at previous recessions and see how the top-performing companies were actually strengthened by it and also learned how to be more efficient. General Electric Lighting Division faced formidable challenges selling into the European Market and nearly quite its channel management program.  What changed? GE concentrated only on one area, how they managed their quotes and pricing.  The slow economy was making small and mid-size resellers choose Phillips and other European-based manufacturers.  GE concentrates so aggressively on making this specific process so efficient that they began winning market share – even in the midst of a recession.  It can be done.

Time To Get To Work
Instead of looking at 2009 with fear and trepidation and letting that fear paralyze your plans, be the aggressor.  Be the competitor in your industry that takes this opportunity to dominate channel relationships.  Practice real-world social networking by getting out and really talking to your distributors, dealers and resellers to see what their unmet needs are.  Sure, social networking and social media are fascinating, but trust and delivering on commitments are more important than anything else right now.

Bottom Line: Go find what makes your company most painful to do business with from your channel partner's perspective, and really see how it slows them down from selling more.  Resolve to do whatever it takes to get those strategies cleaned up, more automated, and focus on turning your channel partners' time into a competitive advantage for them.

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

Cisco and its many competitors, Dell, HP and Lenovo, and even BMW with its Mini all share a common trait; they all have the ability to take highly specific, customized requirements for their products and quickly transform them into deliverable products. Cisco completely re-defined their ERP system to be more demand-driven, enabling their manufacturing, sales and channel partner organizations to track customized product orders as they were completed. 

Responding back to customers with the status of their orders and the exact delvier dates is a major comeptitive advantage. 

Each of these companies have been able to earn customer loyalty and trust by making the qoute-to-order process both transparent and highly effective in fulfilling customer demand.    

What Differentiates Successful Companies: Financial Accountability Of Product Configuration 

What all these successful companies have in common is first the ability to quickly quote then deliver non-standard product configurations to both direct customers and channel partners. 

Second, there is a constant, unrelenting focus on how to make the quote-to-order process as efficient as possible. 

Third, each of these companies, especially Cisco and Dell, never stop looking at how quoting accuracy impacts their bottom line. 

As a result, these companies and others like them have been able to tie back their quote-to-order and product configuration performance to financial measures or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  

 The graphic is based on research completed by AMR Research, Gartner and other research firms that quantify the performance of product configuration strategies on the financial performance of the companies who adopted them as a core part of their channel management strategies.

Bottom Line: Look at how to streamline and make more efficient your quote-to-order and product configuration strategies in 2009 to increase revenues and profits.

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

The surest path during a recession is to invest in and even overcompensate in making every strategy, process and system that directly interacts with customers as efficient and streamlined as possible.  Given the choice between spending a dollar on increasing customer loyalty by making your company easier to do business with versus not doing anything, it’s clearly better to err on the side of investing in customer relationships. Earning loyalty is critical today.

Companies are finding they can get to that level of intensity in their service by measuring what matters most - and those are the metrics of service performance in their companies.

Analytics are often used in customer service and service management departments for resource  planning and forecasting, managing the service management system to optimal levels, also for defining schedule and route optimization, in addition to Fleet Management.

All of these strategies for using analytics lead to exceptional internal efficiencies – but let’s face it – this economy has sent a very loud and clear signal – it’s a very critical time to keep the customers you have and gain new ones through exceptional, over-the-top service. Using analytics to lock down customer loyalty is possible, profitable and a strategy forward-looking company in a broad range of industries are pursuing today.

Consider the following key points about how analytics can be used to make service more customer-centered and capable of fulfilling the goal of locking down loyalty:

Service Level Agreements (SLA) need to be exceeded during this recession – and analytics can tell you if you can or not.  Instead of just “getting by” on the measures of performance you commit to customers on, go after the ones specifically in your SLAs and do an exceptional job on them.  When it comes time for contract and service renewals, your service strategies aimed at delivering exceptional performance can form the foundation of keeping the customer.

First time fix percentage needs to continually go up, even faster right now.  Do you know what your first time fix performance is?  Get a hold of that figure and track it down and then begin to create a time series of it.  Chart it over time, work with your service department to figure out how to drive this figure up.  Consider it a leading indicator of customer loyalty.

Attack manual processes that cost you money and automate them over the Web instead – now.  Consider the fact that your customers live in a 24/7 world, why force them into a 9 – 5 world that is further constrained by when your RMA Specialists are at their desk? Automate the RMA process online.  QVC, HSN and other mass merchandisers who must make multichannel management work to survive are doing this today.  On the tech side specifically in the B2B arena, HP and IBM are masters of this as are dozens of component suppliers. 

Get your service act together and create a dashboard to measure performance.  Realize that service is the path to locking down customer loyalty in this recession.  Get a dashboard together and start measuring how you are doing on a set of key measures of service performance.  Resolve to do whatever it takes to drive up these measures of performance – because they are measures of your ability to keep customers loyal.

Bottom line: Want to lock in the loyalty of your customers during this recession?  Use analytics to measure how you save them time and respect their unmet needs by trying to anticipate their needs with more targeted and efficient services strategies.  When in doubt exceed their expectations on SLAs and measure – and celebrate that.  That’s where the future of any company’s viability is.

Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems

The competitive advantage of contracts is lost in many companies because they don’t take the time to organize them into an enterprise-wide system that can deliver pricing, service and negotiation intelligence.  If manufacturers could capitalize on their contracts more efficiently they could gain major advantages in negotiating with channel partners, defining new pricing strategies with suppliers, and have a better grasp of their liabilities.  There would be far fewer surprises for many manufacturers if they also had an enterprise-wide contract management system in place as well.  

Here are several key lessons learned from companies who have moved from being entirely manual in managing their contracts to automating them into an enterprise-based system:

Managing contracts through cross-functional systems is how the majority of companies are handling this process workflow today.  Realizing that having contracts stored on several different peoples’ systems and not cross-referenced leads many manufacturers to initially develop cross-functional approach where portals begin to proliferate.  This is where many manufacturers stop their efforts to improve, as contracts are at least searchable, even though it often takes several different portals to find the specific contract of interest.

Defining enterprise-wide systems that can search to the clause level is where highest-performing companies are at in terms of maturity today.  Being able to parse contracts to the clause level is critically important as any manufacturer begins to increasingly rely on indirect channels.  The fact is that indirect channel strategies lead to the development of an exponentially greater number of contracts and cross-functional, portal-based approaches can’t scale to the level of analysis necessary to support complex channel relationships.

Create standardized processes for managing contracts instead of having individualized and often inconsistent approaches across business units.  As is often the case when cross-functional versus enterprise-based approaches to managing contracts, often each business unit will define a completely different approaches to managing dates, commitments, costs and pricing.  The net effect of this is that company-wide opportunities are missed to make the most of all contracts enterprise-wide.

Bottom line: Contracts can be a significant competitive advantage if they are managed to be an enterprise-wide asset versus a departmental or division liability or cost of doing business.

With so much pressure on marketing departments to generate positive returns on the investments they make in channel marketing and channel programs, getting the most out of managing contracts often gets forgotten about.  There is no clear return on investment calculation for contract management, and as a result it gets ignored.

Yet contract management needs to be the basis of any multichannel management strategy today. It’s not enough to just rely on the outbound marketing strategies anymore; looking instead at how to better use pricing discounts, arbitrate on pricing strategies, and how to better manage resellers to performance levels and goals all can be tied to the better use of contract management.

Looking at how Cisco was able to capitalize on putting contract management at the core of their channel management strategies is a case in point.  Instead of allowing pricing discounts and opportunities for cost savings to expire, Cisco has create an enterprise-wide contract management system that is now core to their multichannel management strategies.  Their ability to manage pricing, analyze contracts down to the clause level and also increase the profitability of their channel partners and in so doing add to their own is evident in the latest fiscal year figures reported.  An astounding $4.8B backlog and 7% revenue growth illustrates how critical managing contracts with their many channel partners. 

An Emerging Contract Management Maturity Model

The majority of companies rely on intensive contract management systems to manage their procurement and supply chain contracts, yet this same level of concentration and intensity needed for sell-side contracts as well.  From several companies in the discrete manufacturing, high-tech, and process goods industries relying on contract management in their sell-side and multichannel management operations, the following maturity model has emerged from the companies spoken with:

Level 1: Stand-Alone and Siloed.  The majority of these companies use sell-side contract management only for managing pricing exceptions and as a database for re-evaluating selling contracts.  These databases often reside in Microsoft Access databases and also in Microsoft Excel.  As a result, there is often a lag in terms of the accuracy of the data that leads to lost profit opportunities as well.  From the research, approximately 70 – 80% of the companies researched are in this category.  There are major opportunities for increasing contract management performance in multichannel management strategies.

Level 2: Minimal Integration leads to Margin Loss.  This is the middle ground of the contract management maturity model, and is populated by companies who have integrated their sell-side contract management systems with sales operations, Accounts Payable (AP), Accounts Receivable (AR), and in the case of distribution-based businesses, their pricing and forecasting systems.  On average these systems have two to four system integrations, most often through internally developed adapters or connectors their IT departments have created.  Companies in this level of the maturity model have the ability to forecast and plan out the impact of taking discounts across their reseller base, create specific programs to help resellers get to their specific performance goals. 

Level 3: Contract Management Platform. In companies including Cisco, Ingram Micro, Intel, GE, Microsoft and others, channel contracts are managed more as part of the broader Master Data Management (MDM) strategy, which are what SAP customers commonly use for managing their Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) contracts. Forward-thinking companies spoken with during a series of sales calls on sell-side contract management want to move their dealer and distributor contracts into their SAP MDM warehouses as well.  Companies who have done this are capable of managing their multiple channels more profitably because the contracts can be accessed and used by anyone completing a marketing plan or evaluating a new marketing strategy.

Bottom Line: Instead of filling up filing cabinet with contracts, get them automated so they can be used for better managing your resellers and creating incentives for your channels to seller higher margin, more profitable products.

Saving channel programs from lead generation and escalation to the development of multi-channel management-based order capture and pricing systems takes a new focus that many of managers and directors championing these programs have not had to deal with: cost reduction and long-term expense reduction.

Now this cost reduction mindset is against the DNA of many of the professionals who champion channel management, marketing, sales, pricing and service in their companies. But to save any channel management program in this environment it’s time to fight for your projects using cost reduction as the new weapon.  Keeping sales constant is a major victory. 

CFO: Friend or Foe? Depends on Killing Costly Mistakes and Proving It

IT projects have historically been some of the easiest for a CFO to kill. 

To make sure your channel management strategies survive you have to get deep into the customer- and channel-facing strategies that have cost your company so much lost business in the past.

Lacking solid ROI analysis and often only accentuating top-line revenue growth, channel management programs only have looked at the upside and therefore lacked accountability.  No more – to save your channel management, order capture, order management, pricing or service lifecycle management programs, it’s time to get deep into the processes these systems are aimed at automating and quantify how they can help your company make less costly mistakes.

Keeping channel management strategies intact today requires an entirely new mindset. 

Go after the cost reductions made possible from tearing apart the customer processes that have gotten in the way of your company closing business in the past.  Instead of relying on ball-park estimates, get into each step of any given processes that has cost you business in the past and really get to the heart of how fixing it can save on costs. Lost business from a broken order capture system lost sales due to an antiquated lead management system, or lack of wins on special pricing requests – all are great areas to quantify how spending on channel management programs can save on costs.

Bottom Line: Get accountable, save a channel management project. Commit to aggressively pursue the knowledge to understand where the disconnects are in your channel management processes and measure those both in daily operating costs and lost sales.  Get that into a scorecard, even a dashboard fed by XML links if you can automate it.  That’s key to getting your CFO’s support and saving your program too.