TEST & MEASUREMENT MARKETING & CUSTOMER INTERFACE
NON Contact MARKET COVERAGE, SIZING & PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT & VoC
It is a remarkable coincidence that in the age of Covid19 our practices of 40 years & the attributes of the instrumentation market coincide. Here are a simple classification of markets & their interface with customer & instrumentation fist in the third group:
- consolidated markets are those where product functionality is known & number of suppliers has rationalized. These behave like consumer good & promotions can go digital.
- semi mature, often with an intermediary who does some selling or give customer advice.
- Classic industrial products are in need of an “application engineer sales” interface, namely a solution is offered & has to be understood & applied with deep product & technical knowledge. Such product sales need collaborative exchange & often the sale involves site visit & “problem solving”
So if one is selling a Sig-gen, protocol analyser, Network Analyzer, or even a high end oscilloscope, life is not as easy as putting specs & application cases up on the website & hoping for the best! How many have got orders because the buyer is posing his problem & you succeed by taking the client trough a solution?....that is application engineering sale & is unavoidable if you wish to score.
We now face significant problems of “market coverage” in selling instruments while having two reinforcing events which obstruct customer access. (a) Covid19 restricts access & (b) senior management pushes for reduction in resources to project sales ability at the market.
Take the latter first: with this slow economy management will not allow increase in headcount so number of salesmen will be same or less.
Customers do not wish to meet & try to explore things online & thanks to new technology meetings can be online BUT how about the physical intelligence that is acquired by walking through a site with the client even to reach the meeting room, during which the salesman has a view of the size of the facility, what else is on the bench?...how many are in the R&D or QA department etc…
Much the same restrictions apply for hearing “voice of the customer” (VoC) like why you lost the last order, or studying tool features & functionality or pricing aspects of these.
Working across the globe has taught us to reduce travel costs & conduct high level interviews over the phone so such research is second nature for us. There are two sets of solutions to consider:
- Specific issues of product development, VoC, Lost orders, Competitor profiling & projects which have a finite end. These are one off events
- MARKET MAPPING which is a long term matter & involves several modules of vertical market databases for different applications & conducting census type work. Examples are full map of every R&D or production site in a given territory with tool inventory & project profiling. Simpler forms of this sort of database building was used by photocopier companies who got to document the age, copies made & br& of machine at your site, ready to hit at the right time.
At Research Solutions we have a long history for conducting these types of work in VoC, product development, competitor & lost order analysis & of course buyer censi……
+442074981451 www.research-solutions.co.uk