Ten Ways to Energize Your Product Configuration Strategies and Sell More

With the beginnings of an economic recovery on its way, now is the time to set goals around capturing greater market share.

Don’t overlook what you can accomplish by using your product configuration strategies to battle for more deals and win them.

Here are ten ideas to kickstart your product configuration strategies to gain greater sales :

• Move high maintenance products INTO your product configuration platform now – quit having them drain your channels of sales  time . One networks products manufacturer had to do this with their routers and switches, as the support drain was so significant that the demand for expertise was starting to outstrip the service organization’s ability to scale.

• Incite and encourage competition in your channels by actively ranking resellers by their quoting activity, accuracy, sales and profitability levels. Companies who get their channel partners competing on quoting accuracy often attach a first, second and third prize to the content as well.  Consider $100 AMEX Gift Certificates for each members of reseller teams who come in first,  and steak knives for those that come in second (from Glengarry Glen Ross but still, you get the idea).

• Consider adding in services bundling within your quoting systems and strategies to give resellers and direct sales teams a broader range of solutions to sell.

• Using your quoting system for win/loss analysis will give you entirely new insights into why certain configurations are winning sales over others.

• Automate special pricing request and provide resellers and direct sales teams with the flexibility requesting these on a 24/7 basis.

• If you haven’t already, integrate your lead qualification, quoting and CRM systems together to track how effective marketing campaigns are at driving quotes for build-to-order products. Integrating lead qualification to quoting will tell you how effective your marketing campaigns are very quickly.

• Give your product configuration interfaces an extreme make-over. From the companies I’ve spoken with lately many are doing this to also increase the performance of their applications as well.  Instead of relying on HTML which is painfully slow to develop on, many are embracing AJAX and completely re-doing their quoting systems in both appearance and performance as a result.  If your sales team have to go through more than two screens to complete a quote re-do the app now, which is too long.  The norm is two and there are some companies with a single page for their quoting system. Also consider letting your resellers put their own own design on the configuration and quoting screens, which has in some cases driven up adoption.

• Customer satisfaction scores for your quoting and product configuration systems – the headlights you need for the recovery. How satisfied are your resellers, channel partners and direct sales team with the product configurator?  It’s time to do an audit of their effectiveness and see how to improve how they are to work with.

• Take the next major revenue producing event (a product introduction for example) and model the new product, its options and services all within the product configurator. Go through a test run of the launch with key distributors, dealers and the inside sales force.  Link the quoting and product configuration systems back to order management and supply chain systems and see if you can get a demand-driven network running to alleviate stock-outs if your product’s sales take off above forecast.

• Look for new product taxonomies for your product catalogs that will make using the product configuration system even more efficient. Consider how a one electrical products manufacturer was working on a new series of distributors to sell to, and created a customized taxonomy just for this market.  When the demo of the new product configurator was ready the taxonomy had been fully populated and was invaluable to the manufacturer, and they won a distribution agreement as a result.

Bottom line: Re-energizing your quoting and product configuration systems is all about getting focused on how to be easier to do business with.  Knock down the barriers that separate your product configuration systems from serving customers and you can increase sales as a result.

Flick attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/extranoise/153341174/sizes/m/

Courtesy – Louis Columbus