How diverse products can ruin your business

Yesterday I talked to a dear friend who is also a web shop owner. She sells STEM-education kits to Swedish parents and sometimes to Swedish schools. If you didn’t hear the term STEM before it stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. These skills are most likely good to know in the future.

“In kids-electornics we have two big-sellers” she told me. “One small kit retailing around $60 and a bigger kit retailing at around $130.”

“Then we have some other similar kits in the range from $80-$100. You basically get what you pay for, the more expensive the more STEM-experiments you can do.”

There’s basically only market demand for the big-sellers and therefore she decided to lower the price on the mid-range products to reduce stock. This is when something strange happened…

The surprise

Instead of an increase in sales (when prices were cut) there was an overall reduction in sales.

After some analysis there was one obvious but maybe not intuitive conclusion.

When prices of the mid-range kits came to close to the small kit (with the discount there was only a 10 % difference) it became more difficult to decide what to buy. And when it becomes difficult to decide there will be no sales.

What can we learn?

When deciding how to price make sure that it’s easy to differentiate products. Remember that price is a very important factor in making this decision. By keeping a clear separation of prices you help your customer to decide what to buy, and thereby speed up the purchase processes significantly.

Prices don’t need to be logical, just make sure they help the customer decide how to pick and choose your various options. It's equally important, no matter if you run a web shop or if you're responsible for a CPQ-system.

As a "pricing officer" you need to do quick changes and sometimes quick adjustments. Don't forget that the correct prices will help you both to sell and earn some money while doing so.

Configure Price Quote Software

Nowadays CPQ is normally a cloud-based software that helps sales teams to automate their quotation routines and manage interactions with clients.

Configuration

The C in CPQ stands for configuration. This means keeping track of all the logic that goes into a complex product. Certain options are required, others can not be combined.

The number of permutations is normally enormous. Even simple products often have millions of possible ways of combining a product. This means that the maintenance-effort required to keep the product logic up to date is one of the most important factors when evaluating the configuration engine.

Pricing

The P in CPQ stands for pricing. The next set of logic to master is the rules and constraints regarding prices and discounts. Certain items come cheaper as a bundle, some item are alliable for bigger discount while other can not be discounted at all.

This means that workflow and organizational hierarchies are needed to do pricing effectively. Keeping track of prices and the possibility to escalate the sales opportunities to management is all part of pricing.

Support for different pricing models, pricelists and purchasing agreements are essential in pricing.

Quotation

The Q in CPQ stands for quotation. Texts, specifications and images all come together in an advanced template that dynamically adjusts the quotation for each customer.

The ease of use and flexibility of the document generation is a very important factor when evaluating how the quotation can meet your business needs.

For a global company it’s often a requirement that both configuration and quotation must natively support multiple languages.

Vendors

According to analysts the leading vendors in CPQ are Apptus, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP. Niche players in manufacturing are PROS, FPX and Tacton. 

CPQ as a cartoon

Looking for a simple way to introduce CPQ. This video was made within 15 minutes.

How CPQ analytics can improve product development

One interesting aspect of an implemented CPQ solution is the possibility to analyze sales in a new way.

Traditional sales statistics answers the question what has been sold. This is somewhat interesting but normally it doesn’t bring very much new insight to the table.

With clever BI-tools (like Tableau or QlikView) it’s possible to slice the data in a way that will give you a better understanding on what’s tending and who is really doing profitable sales. But this still doesn’t answer the big question… With ordinary sales statistics one can tell WHAT is selling, but it doesn’t answer the question WHY?

A CPQ solution makes it possible to keep track of all quotations. This opens up for analysis where one can compare successful quotes with the less successful. This type of analysis will give concrete measures on what products that has been offered and make it possible to compare it what has actually been sold.

The analysis gives the possibility to reduce the product portfolio based on what has been part of actual quotations and if it has been sold. This gives a rating per sub-component whether a certain product is providing adequate value on the market.

The analysis also answers the question where there is possibility for new business. By understanding the type of deals that are refused by customers gives great input for product development.

This video (found on the Tacton Youtube-channel) introduces the concept of CPQ analysis.