Circuits Assembly - April 2008 - (Page 60)

Program Management on is larger pieces of business. It’s extremely difficult to close 100 new programs in one year. It’s much easier to focus on closing on 10 to 15 programs with significant revenue. The industry feeling is that it costs as much to manage a small program as a large one. The difference is, as you grow in size, your definition of “small program” changes. You advise to “sell the sizzle, not just the steak.” How? The biggest thing is by walking the talk. Give examples of things you’ve done. Customers don’t care about your sales revenue or number of employees or amount of equipment or number of factories; it’s, Can you solve the problem they need solving at the budget they have for it? Just saying you have great response time or lots of satisfied customers doesn’t give them much sizzle. Showing them how you’ve done it on programs of similar size and scope does. How much effort should a salesperson spend on dismantling the competition in the eyes of the customer? Very little. Customers don’t want to hear criticisms; they want to hear what you can do for them. The more they hear your solutions, the closer you get to winning the account. If you criticize the competition, the customer won’t believe you, even if you are telling the truth. What do you coach non-sales or executive staff on when prospective customers are doing site evaluations? I think the first thing is that it’s important for the sales person to determine the decision-makers in the account and their needs. The subject matter experts can then tailor their presentations to the prospect team’s issues. Then it becomes a conversation among peers about solving a problem. How important is the bid response time? I think there are two factors here. From what I see industrywide right now, and I ask this question in workshops, the average is about 2.5 weeks, and some regularly turn full turnkey bids in two weeks. I think you need to be close to industry standards, but I don’t think it’s worth turning them around faster if the quality of the pricing is going down. If you are at three weeks, you’re probably still OK. Over three weeks, there’s a credibility issue, unless it’s an especially complex project. Sales needs to pull in the right information to begin with, and a lot of what I’ve seen is salespeople who are afraid to go back and ask the customer questions. You’d be amazed how often that happens. Customers, for their part, often don’t like to give full packages because it might tip off contractors that they are shopping around. In the book, you warn about “assuming that small orders are the correct path to winning larger amounts of business.” It gets back to the risk equation. Some OEMs want to “try” before they make a large commitment. What I’ve found is if you go back to that OEM and say, “You want to see best pricing, I need volumes of X,” you get the larger order. If you send the signal that small orders are fine, you’ll get more small orders. “Prospects lie,” you warn. Should program managers do the same? If so, when? No. This is an industry in which if you embarrass the cus60 Circuits Assembly APRIL 2008 Decision Cycle Phases Status Introducing Company Awareness Probability Win Probability Unknown Building Relationships Preference Preference Unknown Establishing USP, Understand Project Scope, Quoting Identified "Needs" Identified 20-30% Understand Competitive Position Closing: 4-5 Months 40-50% Solution Deemed Competitive Closing: 2-3 Months Verbal Selection 60-80% Verbal Award 80-95% Figure 1. Decision cycle phases in the EMS sell process. tomer, they can lose their job. By embarrass, I mean failure to deliver or failure to warn. The best thing you can do is go back to the customer and say, “No, we can’t do that.” But a program manager shouldn’t come back with a big “no,” but rather come back with “I can’t do this, but I can do this or this.” Some program managers feel they can just wait until the product doesn’t show up and then they can talk to the customer. I say no. It’s better to give the customer the news early on. In your experience, what are the ideal media for marketing services? An integrated marketing program is very important. You have a scattered market that is jumping in and out of buying. It may be a two-year cycle. It becomes very important to have message timing that is hitting your prospect list in various ways. The decision team is pretty busy. They probably don’t want to be bombarded by email. Press releases and articles are very important, especially if they address a problem a potential customer is having. There’s some value in trade shows, but as I’ve written [see “Thriving in a Splintered Market,” circuitsassembly.com/cms/ content/view/5952/41/], right now with the way trade shows are splitting up, there’s some negativity because prospects are very dispersed and this hurts lead generation. Print magazines probably give you the best opportunity to focus on a specific target audience. In the purview of the prospects you are trying to target, magazines still give you a lot of opportunity. On the Web, it’s hard to know what you’re really paying for. I think directory listings can be helpful, but most people don’t shop by directory. It’s not the medium you use; it’s that you have a variety of media that allows you to touch the right set of prospects two to three times a quarter, and your message is such that you communicate the right things. If all you are advertising is on-time delivery, it might not be effective. But if it’s directly aimed at a solution, that can work. Also, with advertising, you can time when that message will appear and to whom it will appear. circuitsassembly.com http://circuitsassembly.com/cms/content/view/5952/41/ http://circuitsassembly.com/cms/content/view/5952/41/ http://circuitsassembly.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Circuits Assembly - April 2008

Circuits Assembly - April 2008 Contents Caveat Lector Industry News Market Watch Talking Heads Screen Printing Better Manufacturing Design and Modeling of High-Speed, High-Density 3-D CSPs and Memory Modules The ‘Big Brush Off’ Revisited Impact of Soldering Atmosphere on Solder Joint Formation Beyond Moore’s Law ESD Control For Class 0 ESDS Devices Growing Your Brand This Year’s Model Tech Tips Reflow Soldering Process Doctor Pb-Free Lessons Learned Getting Lean Equipment Advances Apex Product Preview Ad Index Assembly Insider Technical Abstracts

Circuits Assembly - April 2008

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