Evolving strategies for industrial manufacturers

Evolving strategies for industrial manufacturers

Product and solution offerings have been evolving for decades—from the standard discrete products and services, each sold separately and distinctly, to bundled products and services, defined as value-added, tailored solutions that could be “wrapped” efficiently to deliver on a customer’s needs. 

In the past decade, we’ve seen most manufacturers now also offer software and subscription-based solutions. These provide improved productivity and enhanced up-to-date product features with recurring and usage-based billing in what is now increasingly an outcome-based business model, with a trend towards outsourcing all equipment, services, and maintenance needed to achieve a business outcome. CPQ (configure, price, quote) has likewise evolved with these strategies to facilitate the quoting of increasingly complex offerings and to stay ahead of the evolutionary cycles of customer demands.

• How can companies avoid slow product rollouts to quoting solutions with unnecessary complexity and duplicated effort thus increasing time and cost to market?
• How can sales avoid ad hoc proposals that rely on or are influenced by manual “find & replace” Word documents, differences between salespersons, quote discrepancies, and a lack of tracking?
• How can companies alleviate slow and tedious sales approval processes and instead quickly have the right things approved by the right people?