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Adrienne Hartman, Director of Ecommerce & Customer Insights at J.J. Keller & Associates talked about how B2B Ecommerce cannot be solved only by software alone. (I agree with her) She also talked about using Google Manufacturing Center. She encourages you to ask, “How well can buyers use your site?” It is clear that her words come from an employee of an organization with a strong culture.
More Firms often sell low margin items because customers seek the low margin items and, when buying, buy higher margin items as well. These low margin items can make sense through their enablement of the firm to profit from economies of scope. Killing low margin items can make sense in some cases, but other cases doing so will kill the firm.
More Neither revealing the company’s cost structure to front line salespeople, nor managing sales performance metrics and salespeople’s compensation with constantly varying variable costs isn’t strategically beneficial or managerially realistic. Alternatively, profit sharing plans have been used, but they don’t reward individual performance, just team performance.
More What Tesla has changed for the automotive industry is now that upselling process can continue long after the purchase of the vehicle. If you buy a S60 then get a better-paying job with a longer commute, you can choose to upgrade with essentially no additional cost to serve for Tesla. And spacing out the payments for the vehicle and later the capacity may make the original vehicle purchase more palatable for the consumer.
More Politico writes: “But as Trump the candidate has ascended, hitting the top of the polls and staying there thanks to a series of controversial statements and a groundswell of Republican populist support, the opposite has happened to Trump the brand.”
More While deal points are a powerful tool, implementing them requires careful thought. List prices, sales kickers, commission rates, and various approximations through product groupings have to be determined to create a workable plan. And, once a workable plan is defined, sales managers may determine that sales territory realignment is furthermore in order.
More That structural problem is the “deep divide” between manufacturers and dealers. While manufacturers spend millions of dollars on image advertising to promote the brands, the dealers care little about the long-term brand value and instead put their emphasis on the transaction.
More One of the most interesting booth visits I had was with Starfrit. Founder Jacques Gatien started selling kitchen gadgets at trade fairs in 1965. Over the past several decades, they’ve created many new categories. They showed me The Rock, a frying pan with a unique non-stick surface using what they call RockTec. It comes with a generous 10-year warranty.
More To embrace creative destruction is a choice. We can either lament that we fell on the destruction side of market forces, or we can throw ourselves into the creative side of market forces. When market forces destroy your industry, embrace it as the opportunity to create a new path — don’t wait for some third party to have pity on you and fix it for you. Fix it yourself.
More Marina Krakovsky argues in a compelling new book that conventional wisdom was wrong. The Middleman Economy argues that, while transaction costs have decreased for everyone, they have decreased at an even faster rate for professional middlemen, leading to have an even larger role in today’s economy.
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