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control
    Medir el éxito de una venta
    Mantener el contacto con el cliente

     
    U n buen vendedor debe trabajar en función de las necesidades de sus clientes potenciales. El proceso de venta determina en buena medida el funcionamiento interno de la empresa y la producción. Para que la venta se realice con mayor agilidad hay que saber detectar errores, fijar objetivos y establecer medidas de control sobre todo el proceso productivo.
    Todo ello tiene un objetivo: fidelizar al cliente. Sólo hablaremos de una venta exitosa cuando aumente el porcentaje de ventas y, además, tengamos un cliente satisfecho. Si eres capaz de ver más allá de la primera venta, ¡enhorabuena! Habrás hecho un cliente para toda la vida.
Market-oriented variant management
    Customers want a
multifaceted selection
of products. But a large product range also raises costs.
    “The customer can have any colour he wants so long as it’s black”
was Henry Ford’s legendary quote when he brought his “Model T” on the market in 1913. Today, in the age of mass customisation, there are
virtually
no technical limits for the richness in variance of a product. The
boundaries
, however, lie in the cost, as corporate consultants Bettina Zimmermann and Sebastian Hohenfeld of Kucher & Partner in Munich explain:
“Customers indeed wish for a large number of differentiated products. But generally, they are not willing to pay for extras.”
    So variance is turning into a heavy cost factor, the corporate consultants
illustrate
by using the example of a parts manufacturer in southern Germany,
“Within eight years, the product mix depth has quadrupled . And every parts variance, in its initial creation, is ref lected in the budget with 5000 Euros, in addition to higher storage costs and expenses for tied up capital
.
”
    The solution to this uncontrolled growth of product lines was, until now, standardisation and
same parts management
. But it is also possible to control product line development via sales measures:
“It is important for the sales manager to become aware of the point at which the costumer’s benefit and the cost of a product variant correlate in a reasonable manner,”
explain the consultants.
    For that purpose, an appropriate instrument for analysis is necessary to find out
to what extent
the budget
complies with
the customers’ demands. Bettina Zimmermann and Sebastian Hohenfeld state, as an example, the range of product offers for carinteriors: individually adjustable back seats create relatively high costs for the manufacturer, but offer only a relatively small additional benefit to the customer. That is why it can
be neglected
as a variant in the offer.
    The sales managers find out how high the customers’ benefit is with the help of the so-called “
conjoint measurement
”, the key question being:
“If the customer has a special wish, how much money is he willing to pay to have it fulfilled?”
The
reckoning
: If the client shows a low willingness to pay, the need is low.
Three essential starting points
    In this variant management, there are three starting points: Right at the product launch, only such variants should be offered that the sales department
labels as decisive for success
:
“It is not about the technically doable, but about what the customer needs and what could influence his buying decision,”
the consultants say.
    In the second phase, priority is given to “variant
containment
.” Thereby, those variants are eliminated that were reported by the sales force as showing a declining demand. And additional variants are created that promise new sales impulses. At the end of the product life cycle, it is purely the budget that is important: Only variants that produced large sales figures are kept.
    The reduction of variants, however,
constitutes
a possible risk of losing customers. That is why, with the help of the so-called “customer satisfaction-flexibility-matrix,” the consequences of reducing the variants have to be