Archive for 2017
Shaping Customer Behavior Through Commercial Policy
There are two basic approaches businesses take to managing commercial policy. For most, the default approach is tactical decision making. For some, they take the leap and add strategic decision-making.
Read MoreBundling Products to Help Your Customers
Price bundling typically involves combining two or more discrete products with heterogeneous demand, with the demand for the bundle resulting in higher profits despite it effectively being a discount on each individual product.
Read MorePricing and Sales: How to Begin Building a Better Relationship
Sales professionals are always on the go, often driving from one call to another. They don’t have time to sift through a long slide deck explaining sales data analytics. Summarize key findings in just a couple of slides, using only a few bullet points to convey the most vital facts.
Read MoreIs Retailing Becoming an Oligopoly?
Certain retail industries such as groceries, cars, cellphones and airlines to name a few have always been oligopolies, but more and more additional retail product categories are leaving the world of pure competition, and entering the world of oligopoly.
Read MoreBuilding High Quality Pricing Systems
These systems typically flow into order management systems and are sometimes built on top of them, or contained within them but often they are stand-alone and talk to the order management system through some standard interface (API). The industry term is CPQ (Configure-Price-Quote), also called pricing or quoting engines.
Read MoreStrategic Movements: October 2017
Sonos Inc. felt the heat of Amazon’s Alexa in the in-home wireless sound movement. What to do? If you can’t beat them, join them. Working with Amazon, Alphabet, and Apple, Sonos is planning to make smart speakers for all of them. Smart move Sonos for the increasing Smart Home.
Read MoreTop Salespeople Are NOT Magical Creatures
Neil Rackham, Reed Holden, Andy Zoltners, Prabha Sinha, and many others have all repeatedly found that good salespeople are methodical. They use an approach towards sales that drive prospects through a process. The process starts with discovery, goes through a learning phase and needs understanding stage, then a proposal that solidifies the tradeoffs, and finally closing.
Read MoreWake Up and Smell the Fumes, Mr. Trump: Renewable Energy is the New Growth Industry!
Urban Green Energy (UGE), wrote: “The distributed renewable energy (DRE) industry has gone through significant changes in the last five years, as the industry grew from a cottage industry to one with worldwide revenues of $100 billion and rising.”
Read MoreLearning on the Clock: Should You Rethink Your Policy?
In a recent study by Robert Half Finance & Accounting, only 26 percent of CFOs polled said their companies allow all employees to fulfill CPE requirements during business hours. Another 24 percent say it depends on the employee, and half said they rarely or never let any staff take classes while on the clock.
Read MoreStrategic Movements: September 2017
Wendy’s achieved another quarter of same store sales growth. Was it their sassy social media campaign that reminds detractors of the existence of refrigerators? Was it their new menu items? Or was it the fast food chain’s competitive pricing? Of the three, I think it was their social media campaign that propelled otherwise strong product and pricing strategy to outperform.
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