Author Archive for Louis Columbus
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.
Learning from Guided Selling Failures: How To Get New Products To Market Faster
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
Guided Selling in Medical Products Manufacturing: Lessons from Market Leaders
Bottom line: Guided selling in medical products manufacturing drastically reduces errors and increases profitability, and is essential for an industry highly dependent on order validation and precise definition to healthcare providers’ needs.
What Guided Selling Strategies Need To Learn From Social Networking – Part I
Bottom line: Earning trust by thoroughly understands customers’ expectations and then exceeding them is what best practices in guided selling can be. It is far beyond automating commodity transactions – it can be a catalyst for delivering service with heart.
Guided Selling Predictions for 2010: Crossing the Chasm from Transactions to Trust
Bottom line: Guided selling is due for a breakout year due to these trends, some nascent and others quite visible, impact selling strategies across industries using them.
From Mountain Guides to Manufacturing Guided Selling Systems – It’s All about Trust
Bottom line: Guided selling systems can deliver the same and greater value to your prospects and customers across the entire product lifecycle than your best sales and service teams – and can help navigate them around major risk just like the guides do at Machu Picchu.
Best Practices in Guided Selling and Service: Lessons from Apple’s Genius Bar on How to Make Knowledge Cool
Bottom line: Go visit a Genius bar and see what guided selling best practices looks like. It may not be about an immediate sale but it is all about creating trust and customers for life by helping them get to their goals. Your company’s knowledge can be cool if it is put into the service of customers first.
What The Future of Guided Selling Looks Like: Cisco’s Healthcare Avatar
Bottom line: The future of guided selling is going to be much more about delivering exceptional experiences with navigable approaches to gaining access to exceptional levels of information, as the avatar illustrates.
Getting Your Sales Moving In the Right Direction with Guided Selling
Bottom line: Guided selling is much more powerful as a selling strategy than merely front-ending a catalog. Think creatively about how guided selling as a strategy can educate, increase customer solution value and share information.
Increasing Your Time-to-Value with Guided Selling
It’s no secret each of us has less time to accomplish more as this year accelerates. Think of your customers too. Stop and consider what they must be going through. And your resellers, they are attempting to keep selling and service relationships in place that have in many cases taken years to create while doing more with less.
Serving Channel Partners through Guided Selling
Guided selling as a strategy for more efficiently launching new products, providing customers with the flexibility of defining bundles of products and services that align with their needs, and reducing the length of sales cycles by more efficiently educating prospects all have been proven very successful.