Synopsis: Consumables / Label Division of an Equipment Manufacturer – Sales Effectiveness Segmentation Strategy

Our client captured approximately 10% of the potential label business used by their equipment. The wide range of customers, label materials, and applications made it difficult to determine where the best opportunities existed.

The client asked us to conduct in-depth, end-user research to understand:

  1. Where the 10% can from (i.e., where they losing the other 90%?)
  2. Map the market segments — showing where their sales activity was effective
  3. Understand customer needs as groundwork for improving sales effectiveness
  4. Match customer sale data and cost analysis to determine which sales where profitable

The initial research showed buyers who had recently purchased a printer were also purchasing labels – and were happy and expected to continue purchasing from the client.  Lost customers were happy with their current vendor giving no reason (other than price) as to why they would switch back.

The breakthrough can when we learned that the label purchase for common labels shifted from the equipment decision maker (who placed initial orders) to the supplies purchasing agent. Thus happy customers switched to uninterested firms, not because of what the client did, but because of the customers change of process.

Thus working with the client’s team we identified two strategies to maintain more of the business:

  1. For specialty label customers, on-going reminders/education about the value of the specialty material so that purchasing was less likely to switch to substitute.
  2. For all buyers, order reminders and ease of ordering tools that reduce the likelihood the equipment decision maker needs to or wants to give up reordering of labels to the purchasing agent.

While these go-to-market strategies took time to grow sales but they were much more effective in the long run than win back programs or pricing specials.  By targeting companies where the purchase behavior fit the client’s relationship with its customers (equipment decision makers) and using the right tools the sales force became more effective at winning the high value repeat business.

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