Holden Advisors Blog

As we enter the holiday season and life becomes more hectic, great service becomes even more important. If you’re like me and your holiday shopping tends to skew toward the end of December, getting a retailer to deliver the gift you purchased before the 25^th is almost as important as the gift itself.  It reminds me that great service – throughout the year – is an important part of a business’ value prop and shouldn’t be forgotten when buyers try to negotiate.

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum how lovely are your branches.

Dynamic pricing is a hot topic right now. With the advent of big data and IT quoting systems, many businesses are excited at the prospect of charging each customer at their willingness to pay for their product, rather than a flat or segmented price. As Bob Crandall, former CEO of American Airlines once put it “If I have 2,000 customers on a given route and 400 prices, I’m obviously short 1,600 prices." Think of all that money you’ve been leaving on the table with regular segmentation; if you could grab that, your profits would go through the roof!

Are you planning a price increase? Learn from Travis Umpleby via his video below on how to use one simple tool to conduct a stakeholder assessment and help your increase stick.

The holiday season is here. A time for decorations, family, vacations and charity. Over the past few weeks, I’ve observed several holiday giving anecdotes that were great reminders of pricing, value and sales tactics that can apply to any time of year whether you’re a non-profit or for-profit organization. Enjoy!

Recently, one of our clients—a sales executive at a leading chemical manufacturer—was facing a problem that we see time and time again in negotiations.  Our sales executive, let’s call him Bob, had submitted an RFP response for a contract renewal.  Bob’s customer came back and stated that a competitor had offered a significantly lower price.  To make matters worse, Bob was informed that if he didn’t reduce his price, all the business would go to his competitor.  Unfortunately, Bob’s feet were being held to the fire internally, as the customer in question contributed a significant amount of revenue.

81% of companies say they will compete mostly or completely based on customer experience (CX) (Gartner). At the same time, 72% of CX professionals do not feel their programs are very successful at driving business outcomes (MaritzCX). Does that mean those 81% of companies that plan to differentiate themselves are going to fail? It does if they’re using the same approach as the 72% doing it now.

Building off our recent video blog on the difference between use cases and personas, watch below as Tim Mullane explains how to go deeper to find actionable use cases within the same industry sector. The obvious use cases exist between application and industry. The trick is to look beyond the apparent applications to the use cases that support them. 

So there it is. Amazon’s year long quest for its second headquarters has finally ended with an announcement that the will be shared by two cities, Long Island City, New York and Arlington, Virginia. When Jeff Bezos first announced the plan for HQ2, he promised to scour the nation for the right candidate, soliciting bids from cities across that nation outlining their plans on infrastructure, education and, of course, the tax breaks they were willing to give to have the honor of hosting Amazon’s second home and the jobs and prosperity that would bring.

It's not just about knowing your customer, but also about really knowing your customer's product and how they plan to use it. In this video, Tim expands on Ellen Quackenbush's recent blog to illustrate how you should be thinking about and approaching personas vs. use cases.