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Building High Quality Pricing Systems

By Pravin Vemuri October 18, 2017

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.

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Strategic Movements: October 2017

By Tim J. Smith, PhD October 18, 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.

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Top Salespeople Are NOT Magical Creatures

By Tim J. Smith, PhD September 14, 2017

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.

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Wake Up and Smell the Fumes, Mr. Trump: Renewable Energy is the New Growth Industry!

By James T. Berger September 14, 2017

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.”

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Learning on the Clock: Should You Rethink Your Policy?

By Ky Kingsley September 14, 2017

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.

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Strategic Movements: September 2017

By Tim J. Smith, PhD September 14, 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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The Most Effective Small Business Growth Strategies In a Turbulent Marketing Environment

By Helen Brick August 25, 2017

Growth strategy plan is the key to success. Constant development in the market can make promotional efforts difficult for marketers tasked with finding methods adapted to those rapid changes. Staying on the course involves constantly following current trends and tendencies, which are not always obvious.

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Give-Get

By Tim J. Smith, PhD August 24, 2017

I have seen three or four multinationals, and four to six local suppliers sell the same core product in the same country, at roughly the same price. Because there is so much competition in these markets, customers ask for discounts and drive suppliers to bid against each other to win their business. It is hard to make a stable supplier business in these situations. How can one win? And, what does value-based pricing have to contribute to these markets?

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The Apple iPhone Success Story: Planned Obsolescence, Disruptive Innovation or Something Else?

By James T. Berger August 24, 2017

Another argument against the planned obsolescence argument is that Apple is not so much trying to convert its existing users to the newer models, but that its innovation is superior to the competion and users of other products should switch to the iPhone.

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Why Customer Research Is So Important For Any Business

By Victoria Greene August 24, 2017

Customer research will help small businesses to identify the best avenues for investment in terms of marketing, web design, and so forth. This is going to be especially important when the limited budgets of smaller businesses are considered. Customer research can really make or break a new business, so make sure you spend time and budget on yours.

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