Recent Articles
How to Banish the Boring: Eight Ways to Use Animoto Video in Business Presentations
The best presentations are always great stories. Stories that invoke clashing images that open your mind. But, the “State of the Business Presentation” today is pretty lame. Boring. Bullet-pointed PowerPoint ad nauseum. How to get adventurous when giving presentations?
Opportunity for Advanced Analytics Exists for Electrical Equipment Manufacturers
The majority (86%) of electrical-equipment manufacturers rely on a combination of direct and indirect (distributors and dealers) sales channels. That’s 15% more than the composite benchmark. Yet, none of the survey participants rely on advanced analytics and lead escalation to ‘learn’ which channel partners can deliver the best sales performance by each type of lead. [...]
Ten Tips for Being “Good in a Room” in the Complex Sale
Do you know the one skill that’s considered to be an absolute “must have” in the complex sale? To win at the complex sale, one must be a storyteller, master tactician, strategist, cajoler, evaluator, philosopher, psychologist, bean counter and techno-geek. Yup. All rolled into one. But, even with all of that, there is one skill that is an absolute “must have” in the complex sale. Without it, success is always a delayed sales cycle away – with a morbidly high improbability rate of closure ranging from 0 to 10 percent.
Who Should Own Your Next Technology Project?
Every key decision maker in business, regardless of their role, will face a technology decision at least once in their professional career. The goal is to ensure that the professional is best equipped with the knowledge and insight to make the best decision around IT implementation. A key consideration for any technology solution revolves around [...]
Product Configuration: Balancing Customer Experiences and Pricing
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.
Information Confusion: Selling with Dealers in Specialty Vehicle Industry
Selling to-order vehicles would be easier if the engineers who designed them also sold them. But that’s simply not scalable if you want to achieve any type of global selling and service success.
So you are tasked with this challenge as a Director or VP of Channel Sales, Marketing Operations or Channel Management: How to get [...]
Complex Product Often Equals Complex Sale
Rule of thumb: If the product is complex to manufacture, then it’s probably complex to sell. Case in point: Fire engines.
Growing Complexity Forcing Front Office Focus
Companies have spent considerable time, money and resources implementing enterprise backbone (ERP) systems to improve the performance of their “back office” processes (finance, manufacturing, purchasing, etc.). Companies selling complex products and services must now move their focus to the “front office” (customer sales and service). The need for this shift is driven by several trends:
A&D: Transforming Customer-Centered Change Into Profits
In 2008, Cincom undertook a study to measure the factors that A&D companies rely on to be competitive in their markets. The results show that A&D is in the middle of a major transition from being long dependent on manual processes to more automated approaches to integrating financial analysis into project management decisions.
The Future of U.S. Manufacturing
No industry has suffered from this current recession more than U.S. manufacturing. But before jobs come back, manufacturers are predicted to first invest in infrastructure and technology to grow their business profit.