Offer Benefits to Hold Price

Increasing competition from low cost imports, meant a manufacturer's infrastructure customers were only interested in buying at the lowest price. The company believed it could offer service and support with the potential to provide cost savings to its customers, but the customers were not interested.

Solution

Competitive Advantage implemented a project to identify cost saving opportunities and then make customers aware of these. The consultancy initially worked as a facilitator with internal staff to identify potential opportunities to take cost out of their customers’ business. Market research was then conducted amongst customer decision-makers. This gave an indication of what they considered to be major issues, and the progress each had made in addressing these problems.

Service offerings were then developed which provided real customer benefits. However the problem of making customers consider aspects other than price still remained.

The solution proposed by Competitive Advantage was to run a Customer Conference, using external speakers to present the arguments in favour of looking beyond price and showing how this had worked elsewhere. The consultancy planned and organised the conference, including post conference follow-up.

Benefits

Holding such a conference reinforced the company’s position as market leader, demonstrating a high level of competence.

The commercial team were invited to a number of customers’ premises to present a compressed version of the conference to a wider audience, expanding their network of contacts within each customer organisation and moving discussions away from price.