The 5 Most Common Wastes in the Front Office
Businesses implementing lean manufacturing often bypass the front office and target their manufacturing processes. After all, front offices have paperwork not inventory, right? However, it is possible to implement lean strategies in the front office, and there are great reasons to do so. Order entry, quoting, scheduling, design, and engineering are front-office functions that can provide an opportunity to create improvement, eliminate waste, and increase profits in your business.
The Sales Challenges of Complex Manufacturers
Streamlining the quote-to-order process improves competitive advantage
What Guided Selling Strategies Need To Learn From Social Networking – Part I
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
The essence of any successful guided selling strategy is the ability to fully understand customers’ needs and recommend the best possible combination of products and services to meet them. For a guided selling to be believable it has to be trusted – even for commodity products.
Guided Selling Predictions for 2010: Crossing the Chasm from Transactions to Trust
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
2009 as a crucible that both companies and people passed through, making them stronger, smarter, more aware of how critically important trust is in these times is a good way to look back on last year. Trust is the enabler of selling, not just price or any other aspect of a channel or marketing strategy.
Specialty Vehicle Manufacturers Excel at Automated Sales Functions
When compared to their peers in similar industries, transportation and specialty vehicle manufacturers are excelling at automating some of the most crucial selling strategies and critical links in the overall sales process.
For many companies their guided selling systems were initially created to either make their online catalogues more useful, applicable to prospects’ unique needs, or to manage selling high inventory turn products at the lowest cost per transaction possible.
Creating and sustaining selling strategies for medical products often involves taking into account the treatment strategies and long-range plans of hospitals, medical centers, and clinics. Each of these healthcare providers has completely different needs for medical products and equipment.
Having spent much of my college years in the southwest I developed a passion for hiking and mountain climbing. Every weekend friends of mine and I would head out for the Chiricahua Peak, an old volcanic ridge that towers over 9,700 feet from the desert floor or Mount Lemmon, which towers over Southern Arizona. Getting to the top however of either of these, especially Chiricahua Peak with its meandering trails which had the occasional shy but very loud bighorn sheep looking for fresh berries and food, wasn’t easy. 
Despite selling complex engineer-to-order products that are challenging to sell, none of the commercial HVAC/R manufacturers that responded to a recent Cincom survey stated that they had true predictive guided selling systems.