Learning from Guided Selling Failures: How To Get New Products To Market Faster
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
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.
What these two motivations miss – the streamlining of catalogs and the aggressive reduction of cost per transactions – is that guided selling systems can also be used for listening to customers too.
Some of the best product and service innovations occur when customers don’t find what they need in your existing catalogs or aren’t just shopping for a deal.
Tuning In To Customers Needs
Using a SQL database to save each of the abandoned shopping carts and analyzing them over time, patterns emerged for a high tech distributor of electronics products. The data specifically showed that bundling was too difficult to use and customers wanted to create their own customized packaging of products and accessories. Integrating hubs, switches, and wireless networks to create a highly specific network configuration their own staff could install and fine-tune was the goal.
How did they find this out?
By looking at demographic and historical sales data and in one instance calling a customer to see why they abandoned a series of orders. This led to the development of a product configuration system that could design an entire network once a prospect entered their system needs. The high tech distributor in turn created partnerships with networking products, network infrastructure, WiFi and networking companies to also add in their products as well.
The result of the initial analysis of why guided selling systems weren’t scaling to customer needs was found by listening and analyzing why customers’ needs were not being met. The development of a multivendor networking configurator was the result – and entirely new sales strategies started to take place as a result.
Bottom line: Get passionate about the hard work of digging out where your guided selling system is showing your customers’ interests are going, and invest time to mine and analyze that data. Take failures of guided selling as a catalyst for figuring out what customers were attempting to accomplish yet the system didn’t allow it. Find that pain or problem and potential new markets could also be discovered.
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Filed Under: Louis Columbus' Blog • Sales Channels • guided selling
About the Author: Louis Columbus is Senior Manager, Enterprise Systems at Cincom Systems, concentrating on assisting clients with their channel management, sales and product configuration system strategies. Pricing and revenue management strategies enabled through Cincom Acquire are also his key areas of focus. Louis is a former senior analyst with AMR Research where he served both companies adopting enterprise software and vendors with their product and go-to-market strategies. He has worked with enterprise clients on defining solutions to their channel management, order management and service lifecycle management strategies. He is the author of fifteen books on technology and two books on analyst relations. His book, Getting Results from your Analyst Relations Strategies, can be downloaded for free (http://bit.ly/yDKWs). Mr. Columbus also teaches graduate-level international business and marketing courses at Webster-Loyola Marymount University, Webster University and University of California, Irvine.