Is Your Firm Doomed to be Second Rate?

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  b.breeland@...04/26/07 Report as spam
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  Become a Broker?

  This research suggests that customers like to deal with a broker. The customer can make a request for anything within the broker?s area of expertise and the broker goes out and finds the best solution. This removes the ?heavy lifting? from the customer. As the broker develops relationships with the providers, the better they become at delivering the services. This seems very simple. I wonder if there are situations where this does not work.
  
  This is very good for the sales organization. The sales team is no longer limited to selling its own products that may not fit the customer?s requirement. Instead, the sales team has the ability to find the best match and present a solution to the customer. Good stuff!

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  DennisBoen04/30/07 Report as spam
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  Is Your Firm Doomed to be Second Rate?

  The gist of this article flies in the face of the recent article, "How to be a Strategic Vendor." That article addressed strategic reasons customers buy from, and stay with, a vendor. This article on Second Rate makes assumptions, but gives no solid answers. NOT controlling the product, its quality, its availability, and its technical enhancements makes for a difficult sale if there are other manufacturers in the competitive mix, which is most likely.

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  Geoffrey James, Sales Machine04/30/07 Report as spam
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  Excellent Point

  The above is an extremely perceptive comment.
  
  To clarify, the companies in the Chally study aren't simply distributors of commodities, but value added resellers. So the "product" that they're selling is actually a bundle of physical objects (like copiers) from other companies along with a set of custom services.
  
  In other words, you can be a strategic vendor even if you don't actually design and manufacture anything. For example, if a medical devices distributor sells medical testing hardware from a separate firm and bundles it with a set of services (training, maintenance, etc.) which guarantee that that the hospital will get a certain result (such as a more profitable and accurate testing process), they could easily become a strategic vendor. Especially if nobody else is offering those exact services and guaranteeing that result.