Accelerating new product introductions into 2009 is a strategy that large and small companies alike are aggressively pursuing.  Microsoft, who plans on delivering Windows 7 by the end of this year, to auto manufacturers racing to get hybrid and electric vehicles launched to differentiate themselves and thousands of other manufacturers, the highest priority strategy today is getting new products out quickly.

New Product Launches – The Undiscovered Competitive Advantage

Turning new product launches into a competitive weapon is critical in these uncertain economic times.  One just needs to consider Apple Computer and their relentless product roadmap of iPods, iTouch and iPhone models to see how an aggressive new product introduction strategy can lead to dominating a market.  It is for many companies the greatest competitive weapon they have, many not seeing its full value.

Making Every Product Launch Count

With 25% to 35% of total revenues of a typical manufacturer being used for marketing, it’s time for a much greater level of accountability and focus on making product launches a competitive weapon.  There are those companies who have a standardized process for managing product introductions – and just going through the motions of these process steps is not enough anymore.

Focus and intensity on making new product introductions the critical catalyst for growing new business is also crucial if new business is going to be generated.  Start looking at how you can completely transform your product launch process and gain greater sales by working more collaboratively with channel partners, distributors, dealers and resellers.

Making Every Product Launch Count

In one manufacturer there is a 16-week process for launching products that every cross-functional team member in the organization has memorized.  The product launches get executed yet there is no passion anymore, no intensity to excel and use the launch process as a means of gaining market share. Many organizations are like this – and they need a wake-up call to start competing again with their product launch process.

Here are some key take-aways to transform your product introductions from being routine to becoming a competitive weapon:

• Getting suppliers involved as early as possible in the design process. Too often, even for companies including Apple who compete using product introductions, supplier involvement is the most critical.  Don’t just stop there however; go after insight into how to make your product introductions more effective by creating a Channel Advisory Council to seek out ideas on how to make each product launch count.

• Get your channels to have skin in the game – with every launch. What differentiates those companies weathering the economic storm right now is that they have created such a strong level of trust and coordination with their channels that their entire marketing and selling strategies execute flawlessly in conjunction with one another.

• Measure, monitor and manage to a common set of channel metrics. This is another differentiating point of best-in-class companies when it comes to managing new product introductions – and turning them into strong competitive weapons.  Using a channel collaboration system can significantly improve this entire process.

• Foster competition in your channels regarding new product selling performance. Using a channel collaboration system to nurture competition between channel partners in terms of their selling performance is what Cisco, GE, and all auto manufacturers rely on.  A little competitiveness in terms of sales ranking with channel partners can go a long way to getting stronger results.  Encourage sales competition and reward the top-performing teams, make them champions.  You will be well on your way to changing your entire channel culture for the better.

Bottom line: Resolve to use product introductions as a competitive weapon – an opportunity to preemptively gain market share based on your latest product development. Top performing companies including Cisco, GE and others encourage competition and ownership of product launches in your channels as well – and give every channel partner a voice in the process – and then push for accountability to turn product launches into a competitive strategy that wins.

What exactly are complex manufacturing companies looking for with Enterprise Integration software? That is the basis of any EI software creation, and a question that demands answering. Based upon a study released in 2008, there were significant issues with EI technology that complex manufacturers had tried in the past:

1. 60% of respondents stated that their enterprise software was difficult or almost impossible to use. Only 9 percent of them characterized their applications as easy to use.
2. Almost 65% of respondents said that usability was a primary or secondary factor in selecting their enterprise software
3. Most companies surveyed stated that software usability was defined by how much a software tool makes it easier to do their job, and the degree to which that tool can be immediately understood without a manual or training
4. Respondents expressed a strong desire for applications that aid in collaboration
5. Respondents wanted applications to tie in with online tools
6. Respondents wanted a greater degree of personalization in their user experience

In essence, it can be derived from the survey that complex manufacturing companies have the need for useable enterprise integration software and applications with specific usability improvements. There is no sense in rolling out an incredible powerful tool if no one in your company understands how to use. No matter what your company spent on the product, how widely you rolled it out or how efficiently it decreases your processing time, none of that matters if your people won’t use it.

Cisco dominates its industry as a result of it, Dell, HP and Lenovo, and even BMW with its Mini also share this common trait: they all have the ability to take highly specific, customized requirements for their products and quickly transform them into deliverable products.  Cisco completely re-defined their ERP system to be more demand-driven, enabling their manufacturing, sales and channel partner organizations to track customized product orders as they were completed.

Redesigning their entire ERP system to allow for greater flexibility in responding to product configuration workflows, Cisco quickly revolutionized its channel management strategy and was able to continually monitor its financial contribution to the company’s profitability

What Differentiates Successful Companies

What all these successful companies have in common is first the ability to quickly quote then deliver non-standard product configurations to both direct customers and channel partners.  Second, there is a constant, unrelenting focus on how to make the quote-to-order process as efficient as possible.  Third, each of these companies, especially Cisco and Dell, never stop looking at how quoting accuracy impacts their bottom line.  As a result, these companies and others like them have been able to tie back their quote-to-order and product configuration performance to financial measures or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

An example of just what is possible when a company revolutionizes its qoute-to-order strategy while committing to measure its resutls is shown in the Summary of Product Configuration Key Performance Indicators below.  These series of KPIs were gathered from  AMR Research, Gartner and other research firms’ studies to illustrate just how powerful of an impact qoute-to-order and product configuration  strategies can have on the financial perfomance of companies willing to change.

Bottom Line: 2009 is the year to revolutionize your channel management strategies and make qoute-to-order a major contributor to your revneu growth and profitability.

The surest path during a recession is to invest in and even overcompensate in making those strategies, processes and systems that directly interact with and enable conversations with customers as efficient and streamlined as possible.  Given the choice between spending a dollar on increasing customer loyalty by making your company easier to do business with versus not doing anything, it’s clearly better to err on the side of earning customer loyalty using analytics.

Analytics are often used in customer service and service management departments for resource planning and forecasting, managing the service management system to optimal levels, also for defining schedule and route optimization, in addition to Fleet Management. All of these strategies for using analytics lead to exceptional internal efficiencies – but let’s face it – this economy has sent a very loud and clear signal – it’s a very critical time to keep the customers you have and gain new ones through exceptional, over-the-top service. Using analytics to lock down customer loyalty is possible, profitable and a strategy forward-looking company in a broad range of industries are pursuing today.

Consider the following key points about how analytics can be used to make service more customer-centered and capable of fulfilling the goal of locking down customer loyalty:

Service Level Agreements (SLA) need to be exceeded during this recession – and analytics can tell you if you can or not. Instead of just “getting by” on the measures of performance you commit to customers on, go after the ones specifically in your SLAs and do an exceptional job on them.  When it comes time for contract and service renewals, your service strategies aimed at delivering exceptional performance can form the foundation of keeping the customer.

First time fix percentage needs to continually go up, even faster right now. Do you know what your first time fix performance is?  Get a hold of that figure and track it down and then begin to create a time series of it.  Chart it over time, work with your service department to figure out how to drive this figure up.  Consider it a leading indicator of customer loyalty.

Attack manual processes that cost you money and automate them over the Web instead – now. Consider the fact that your customers live in a 24/7 world, why force them into a 9 – 5 world that is further constrained by when your RMA Specialists are at their desk.  Automate the RMA process online.  QVC, HSN and other mass merchandisers who must make multichannel management work to survive are doing this today.  On the tech side specifically in the B2B arena, HP and IBM are masters of this as are dozens of component suppliers.

Get your service act together and create a dashboard to measure performance. Realize that service is the path to locking down customer loyalty in this recession.  Get a dashboard together and start measuring how youa re doing on a set of key measures of service performance.  Resolve to do whatever it takes to drive up these measures of performance – because they are measures of your ability to keep customers loyal.

Bottom line: Want to lock in the loyalty of your customers during this recession?  Use analytics to measure how you save them time and respect their unmet needs by trying to anticipate their needs with more targeted and efficient services strategies.  When in doubt exceed their expectations on SLAs and measure – and celebrate that.  That’s where the future of any company’s viability is.

Initial marketing budgets for 2009 have already been completed in nearly all companies, and according to surveys of these budgets, industry after industry is showing a flat-lining or reduction in marketing and channel programs spending.  Many of the industry and national press covering these surveys serve them up with a healthy dose of pessimism and gloom-and-doom, and it can be downright depressing if you just limit your world view to this instead of spending face time with your channel during this critical time.

Instead of just letting your perspective of this economic downturn by jaded by the continual stream of negativity that paradoxically seems to drive up viewers and readership, challenge yourself to get out with your distributors, resellers, dealers and large direct accounts and go on sales calls with them, listen to their complaints, and look for ways to serve them.

Here are a few ideas on how to survive this recession while strengthening you channels:

1. Now is the perfect time to turn your competitor’s weaknesses into your strengths. Canon dominates high-end camera sales channels today because they took the time to thoroughly understand the needs of channel partners in their industry and deliberately set out to surpass their competitors’ lack of support for sales reporting, pricing exception management and new product launch execution.  Canon sent nearly a dozen managers to distributors, retailers, dealers and service centers to understand how this channel worked.  After months of interviews the team got back together, planned their channel strategy and promptly took channel share from competitors.  Now is a great time to do this in your industry as well.
2. Use any slow time to transform your company into being truly customer-centric. Now I am not talking about the CEOs who get on CNBC and talk about how “customer centric” their companies are when they are in fact more self-serving with their procedures, pricing strategies and product lifecycle decisions.  No, this is where a company completely re-defines and re-orients their processes, procedures, systems, roles of critical people in their organization, aligning them all to be focused on being more transparent to customers.  A big difference in saying a sound bite on CNBC versus doing extensive process redefinition, yet companies who make this commitment now stand a better chance of surviving.
3. Give your channel partners a seat at the product and strategy development table. Creating Channel Advisory Councils is a great use of time today, focusing on getting your senior management together with your channel’s senior management teams. One manufacturer did this and invited an expert in supply chain management and Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) and area that was making order rates drop due to inefficiencies.  During the advisory council the VMI issues were closer to being solved and within ninety days of the Council meeting they were solved.  Getting face time with channel partners’ senior management turned out to be the turning point in resolving long-standing VMI problems.
4. Always be looking to create service champions, even throughout your channel partners. The more companies I’ve talked to and visited the more you can see the slowdown in the faces of everyone; sometimes it looks like people have just given up.  Fight back against this fatalistic attitude by celebrating exceptional service.  Hold company meetings and give out awards for exceptional service, presenting a $100 American Express Gift Certificate is a nice touch. It’s so sad to see economic fatalism kill some people’s careers by letting them slip into not caring anymore.  Go out and resolve to celebrate exceptional service now in both your own organization and your channels’ organizations as well.  This is not a “rah rah” kind of motivation by the way, it is saying “thank you!” to the people who still care and extend themselves to excel in their jobs despite the economic downturn.  These people deserve to be celebrated.

Bottom line: Everyone is struggling, go after those pain points of your channel partners, solve them and strengthen your own company at the same time.

The catalyst of any successful customer experience is trust.  Earning trust from customers takes a consistent, passionate level of commitment to delivering customer experiences above expectations.  Keeping and growing that trust with a customer, whether it is in B2B- or B2C-based industries, is difficult yet attainable even during a recession.

No One Ever Cost-Reduced Their Way to Customer Loyalty

Many companies are cutting drastically back on the very staff they need to deliver exceptional customer experiences, while others are reinvigorating, redirecting their staffs to concentrate on delivering over-the-top service that far surpasses customer expectations. These latter companies are using the recession as a galvanizing force in their companies to focus everyone on keeping their existing customers and winning new ones with exceptional, excellent service. Companies who see the recession as a rallying point to passionately serve their customers more responsively, completely and with greater focus than ever before are staying financially viable today.  No one ever cost reduced their way into exceptional customer experiences.  Instead it takes a new perspective, the focus on using these difficult economic times as a reason to show customers why their trust is warranted, valued and respected.

Thawing B2B Spending With Over-the-Top Service and Concern

During a recession B2B marketers face the daunting task of keeping the key decision makers in their top accounts from freezing in fear or panic and not spending or doing anything.  What’s needed is for B2B companies to extend their expertise, even for no charge, and go into their key accounts and work to help them overcome their biggest problems today.  Retention strategies like this in tough times don’t lead to immediate sales.  They do send a powerful message that any B2B marketer doing this is in their clients’ corner for the long-run. Retention strategies often unearth other areas of the company that can use existing solutions in place, already sold.  Helping B2B customers get more value during these times is a brilliant strategy to stay relevant to them during this recession.

The Only Security Is Exceeding Customer Expectations Daily

In better economic times, companies will often define mutually agreed-upon benchmarks and then put bonus incentives and salary raise multipliers in place if the expectations are exceeded.  This sends a powerful message through any B2B-based organization, and that is do whatever it takes to get performance consistently above the B2B customers’ target levels of performance.

Now the galvanizing force has to be not only these metrics but the fact that both the B2B marketers’ and their customers’ viability is on the line.  For B2B marketers, its’ time to fight for your customers by pitching in to solve their problems even if it doesn’t lead to immediate increased sales.

All B2B marketers aspire to be trusted advisors; the ones that gain this level of confidence with customers have done the hard work of making sure their entire organizations back up strategies, plans and tactics that consistently deliver experiences that surpass customers’ expectations.

Strengthen Your Serve With Knowledge

To learn more about how customer experiences can be improved from both a B2B and B2C standpoint, begin by subscribing to Paul Greenberg’s blog, as Paul is an excellent and entertaining author and speaker, and is founder of the Line56 Group. His blog entry on December 6th specifically focuses on customer experience in recessionary times.  I also recommend subscribing and regularly reading David Meerman Scott’s blog WebInkNow.com and one of the best books I’ve read all year on the subject, Tuned In, by Craig Stull, Phil Meyers and David Meerman Scott. There is also the excellent book, Managing the Customer Experience: Turning Customers Into Advocates by Shaun Smith and Joe Wheeler.  I also read Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research’s blog, Customer Experience Matters, in addition to John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing Blog and Marketing and Strategy Innovation Blog.  There is much being written today about the impact of social networking on the customer experience.  Dr. Andrew MacAfee has a blog that is excellent in this area and the broader issue of Enterprise 2.0’s impact on customer centricity in organizations, and Ross Dawson’s Trends in the Living Networks.  Finally I subscribe to Harvard Business School Knowledge Blog and the blogs of analyst and advisory firms active in this area as well.

There are many typical and common modules that interface within an ERP system process.

Typical Modules in ERP Systems

Manufacturing module: Supports manufacturing related activities such as plant engineering, scheduling production and materials requirements, managing workflow and processes, quality control and cost control.

Supply Chain module: Ensures that supplies are timely, of acceptable quality materials and kept within proper inventory limits. This module also streamlines efficiencies by providing control for purchasing functions, supplier performance monitoring and supply projections.

Customer Relations module: CRM processes work to improve services provided directly to customers and to use the information in the system for targeted marketing and sales purposes.

Financial and Accounting module: Ensures proper invoicing, accounts payable and receivable, cash flow management, cash flow control and general internal accounting ledgers.

Guided Selling module: A functional guided selling solution is one that provides the customer with complete prices, margins, texts, illustrations, lay-outs etc. In addition, the technical specification of the solution (such as bills of materials and routings) is generated for manufacturing and distribution without outside system input. The proposal specific functions of Guided Selling are product configuration, technical calculations, commercial calculations and document generation.

Knowledge Management module: A comprehensive whole-business approach to contextualize data from every division to enable every division access to the data that they need for an entire project lifecycle.

With so many different modules needed for each corporation, you can see how an Enterprise Resource Planning initiative is complex even when it is compartmentalized. You can also see how different modules controlling different divisions have an inherent need to interface in order to keep the business running efficiently as a whole.

In the beginning of Enterprise Resource Management initiatives, the experts of the day sought to find a solution to integrate business applications in order to deal with the many different corporate functions that, until then, had operated more or less autonomously. A typical ERP implementation had to deal with multiple modules for manufacturing, accounts receivable, accounts payable, quote-to-order, human resources and so on. These modules were, under the ERP method, enabled to exchange information among themselves and, of course, their users.

The Problems Faced with Traditional ERP:

Traditionally, ERP initiatives dealt with structured data as traditional applications did, but met with problems when a business chose different vendors to supply different modules across the corporation. If you look at the way that software and even hardware was purchased piecemeal, depending on what fit the company’s budget and structure for that division, it is no surprise that many different vendors were used. If, for example the AR department chose to not use the same vendor for their module as the Quote Processing division, then their divisions couldn’t “talk” to one another unless the different vendors capitulated and helped write a new software tie.

This use of different vendors often meant that businesses had to leave different modules out of the ERP initiative process unless they had in-house software techs that could write an interface that correctly worked with both modules.

You can see how the ERP solution offered was a radical improvement upon the previous process, which was really no process at all, but also how ERP more fully showcased the inherent faults of non-cooperative vendor modules.

Current economics combined with crowded global markets at their most cutthroat levels have lead businesses to re-focus on ECM tools and practices that had been pushed aside for more definitively concrete ROI efforts. The fact is that during periods of economic growth, underlying economic considerations are often marginalized as the race to keep pace with demand takes the front seat. It is when the economy turns and businesses are faced with decreased demand against increases in costs that ECM efforts once again become a focus area for top execs and front line managers alike.

Best practices utilizing ECM technologies should be a considered a priority at all points in a business’ lifecycle, just as ROI is a deciding factor at all times. Traditionally the issue has been that businesses failed to fully capture the actual ROI benefits of ECM-enabling technology, and therefore lost the fight to keep it in focus.

If benchmarks are correctly measured for ECM projects than correct projections and later, actual returns, should be readily measured and reported on.

Why is there a rush to look at ECM technology in today’s economy?

Businesses and corporations are being faced with downsizing on an almost unprecedented scale in the growingly troubled global market. Once the ways in which a company can maintain its systems and processes with less actual manpower is by correctly utilizing ECM tools to help facilitate the automation of manual processes.

The current market is an excellent opportunity for your company to consider investing more heavily into ECM related products and processes.

The next twelve months is going to be pivotal not only from the economy’s standpoint but also from any given company’s ability to achieve their most critical customer-centric objectives as well. There is no time to be incremental in ones’ approach to achieving any goal in these difficult times.  It’s time to double-down on effort, vowing a level of intensity not seen in your company, in many cases, ever.

Sure, it’s painful right now in many companies.  But just letting this downturn happen and wreak its havoc is just not acceptable.  For customer-facing strategies to stand a chance of actually delivering on the promise of what they are designed for, you need to keep these points in mind:

Embarrass Your Company Into Accountability. One manufacturer now posts the percentage of their channel management projects completed, and the results achieved from them, on the front page of the Intranet site everyone sees every morning.  This company, a producer of Aerospace & Defense products, had struggled with accountability.  No more.  Project managers now openly compete with one another.

Require Marketing, Engineering and Senior Management to make at least three customer visits every ninety days. If you’ve been in channel marketing any length of time you can tell those on your team who know what both customers and channel partners want or don’t want.  You know those team members on your team who know unmet needs and those that think they know unmet needs.  There is a tremendous difference in these people.  Strive to turn your entire staff into the former; those that truly do know and understand customer unmet needs.  It costs airfare but it’s a worthy investment in customer retention, get in front of customers as often as possible to gain a better understanding of their needs versus competitors.

Use Customer Advisory Councils as a strategy for customer retention. It’s common sense that the companies that are going to emerge from this recession stronger are the ones doubling down on customer retention right now.  Getting to know the really tough problems their customers are creating strategies to help them out – even if it means selling nothing in the short term – are earning trust and respect right now.  No one writes about it because everyone involved is so busy solving customer problems. Make a point of getting your sales teams focused on these difficult problems and harnessing your best services teams to solve them.  This is the catalyst of a good customer retention program.

Second, get a Customer Advisory Council going – you can set one of these up for under $70K and given how hotels are hurting right now, you could even strike a better deal than that.  Get your top customers out for a week and get their feedback on new product ideas, get a thought leader involved and invite VP-level and above from your customers to the event.  Have your VPs and C-level execs do the invitations personally.  Turn it into a brainstorming session of how to excel in difficult times.

Bottom line: Time to go big or go home when to comes to fighting for your customers in these uncertain and troubling times.  Get focused on customer retention and advisory councils that can bring in the critical insights you need to create new enhancements to your channel management strategies – and this is the essence of truly fighting for a customer – being in their corner when times are tough like they are right now.