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The mechanical and plant engineering industry faces a stagnation in the new machinery market and is relying on innovative business models such as subscription to overcome these. In this business model, individually customized solution packages are offered. The success of these models depends directly on the future success of the customer, making the selection of the right customers crucial. The aim of this paper is to identify the criteria that indicate the suitability of customers for subscription models. While there are individual descriptions of suitability criteria in the existing literature, there is a lack of comprehensive consideration of customer relationship, customer company, and customer market, as the extensive consideration was not necessary in the transactional sale of machines until now. Therefore, in this study, expert interviews are conducted with companies in mechanical and plant engineering that offer subscription models. The results show criteria that are used to evaluate customers in the six main categories of creditworthiness, market potential, benefit potential, feasibility, relationship, and sales effort. In total, 24 criteria can provide insight into the suitability of the customer for a successful subscription relationship. These criteria are intended to develop target systems that meet the requirements of different stakeholders in the customer and thus support the economic viability of these business models.
Pricing is one of the most important, but underestimated tools, to enhance a company's profitability. Especially value-based pricing has a high potential to reach higher levels of satisfaction because it equates the needs of providers and customers. Even though, it is a well-known price model and promises higher satisfaction, many companies struggle to implement it. Especially the manufacturing industry is characterized by cost-plus pricing and competition-based pricing. However, especially for digital products these pricing strategies are insufficient. Therefore, this paper aims at exploring the design fields for value-based pricing of digital products in the manufacturing industry. To achieve this, the basics of digital products and value-based pricing are explored. Furthermore, an expert workshop is conducted that follows a framework for value-based pricing consisting of four consecutive steps analysis, price strategy, pricing, and market launch to capture the design fields. This paper concludes with limitations, and practical and research implications.
Industrial companies are moving to a solution driven business by offering smart product service systems (Smart PSS). In addition to an existing portfolio of physical goods and technical services, companies develop new digital services and combine all three offerings to an integrated digital solution business. While the development of new digital services does not pose any major challenges for companies, the successful sale of Smart PSS does. Due to changing customer requirements and value propositions of a solution, the sale of Smart PSS requires new design principles for the sales organization compared to the simple sale of physical goods or technical services. While there are already many publications on the topic of industrial sales in research, the description of Smart PSS in particular represents a new field of research. The combination of both topics is therefore not only interesting from a theoretical point of view, but also has a particularly high practical relevance and impact for industrial companies. This paper therefore describes on the one hand, which characteristics can be used to derive customer requirements for Smart PSS and on the other hand, which effects these requirements have on the sales organization of the industrial company. The design principles give recommendations for the organizational structure, the resources, the information systems and the culture of the company depending on the targeted customer type. In order to identify and describe both the customer requirements and the design principles, two morphological boxes were developed based on a literature research and semi-structured interviews with industrial companies. The paper gives an outlook on the different characteristics of the design recommendations and describes first best practices for the successful transformation of the sales organization.