Electrical power is the lifeblood of your business. You produce batteries, sensors, electrical wiring, lighting equipment or motors, generators, or transformers to keep electricity flowing for your customers. Then you'd fit into the category of electrical equipment and electrical components manufacturers and we know your sales challenges quite well:
Your business probably depends on efficient operations, economies of scale in purchasing materials and production, and of course, technological expertise. In addition, you try hard to balance costs versus customer requirements and short innovation cycles— all the while keeping a close eye on margins.
Let us have a closer look at where are weaknesses, risks but also the chances and opportunities of a business in the Electrical Equipment Industry.
We know that manufacturers in your sector employ different sales strategies that help them navigate the tricky market conditions. However, these strategies can also be influenced by the chosen business model. Here is a brief description of the various business models used to meet market demand:
As a manufacturer in the electrical equipment industry, you often use a mix of more than one manufacturing model. That makes sales scenarios extremely broad. You can offer customers stocked products, the option of modifying existing designs to fit their purposes, the configuration of complete solutions, or the production of custom design products.
Giving customers more ways to buy is an advantage. However, for every manufacturing model applied, the disadvantages you have to manage can start to pile up. If you use more than one model the likelihood of benefiting from a solution that ensures precise forecasting, fast configuration, and customer (partner and distributor) self-serve capabilities increases massively.
In other words, you should think about digitalizing the sales process to make it easy for customers, partners, dealers, or distributors to buy your products or solutions.
However, getting these features is not just buying best-of-breed solutions from multiple IT service providers. Going this route often leads to spending far more resources than you plan to. Integrating solutions from various vendors can take months, if not years.
And even then, can lead to an unsatisfactory outcome - for you and your customers.
That’s because solutions from leading IT solution vendors are not built with manufacturing in mind. To get the solutions to fit your electrical equipment manufacturing business, you would need to spend time (and money) tweaking the software and adding the functionalities you need.
Instead, you would observe much better results if you went for a solution built from the ground up for electrical equipment manufacturers. Such a specialized digital sales solution comes with the features you need out-of-the-box and can support all manufacturing models through one platform.
Valuable sales data Electrical Equipment manufacturers need to extract from their ERP
A modern digital sales platform can integrate seamlessly with your ERP, and extract relevant sales data to support your end-to-end sales needs with:
To find out more about how a modern manufacturing-focused digital sales platform can transform your sales process, download our Manufacturing Sales Handbook here.
Part of this blog post appeared in an article that was first published on the G2 blog