The Inovis Blog

Talk is cheap. Most every company I know has a core belief “Customer success is important to us”. Its obviously easy to say and VERY hard to implement.

Lets look at what makes customers successful in our B2B software world:

1. Provide a great, competitive product that provides good value and does as advertised.

2. Support customers as quickly and efficiently as possible when they run into problems, without making them jump through hoops.

3.  Educate prospects & customers with relevant, useful and contextual information so they can make the right choices and decisions.

The reason we are being open about what we do, who our competitors are, what our pricing is, how customers are being successful with our products is because we know you as a customer have multiple options.

We did the leg work to help you get all the information you need in one place (open on our website). In every customer meeting I have been to, pricing and competition comes up within the first 30 minutes. Rather than the old school “We’ll not talk about the competition because we are focused on the customer” nonsense, customer’s really want to know who your competitors are and how you plan to differentiate your offerings from them.

We’ll keep pushing the envelope on new and fresh thinking and ways to educate you (our prospects and customers) better.

Your turn: Tell if its useful or we should change our approach?

image credit: SheplaysSports

We know when companies dodge our invoices beyond our terms it isn’t good for the bottom line. It turns out that extending Days Payable Outstanding (DPO) to our suppliers isn’t so good for business either. In a recent post on Sourcing Innovation entitled Buy Now, Pay More Later, Michael Lamoureux makes a good argument for paying your bills on time.

Late payment puts extraordinary pressure on suppliers, especially smaller ones desperate for cash. If the supplier becomes insolvent and goes out of business, your supply chain will experience major disruption.

Additionally, firms will incur significant extra costs for interim financing that drive up their cost of operation. Long term, you’re just driving up your prices.
Instead of extending DPO, there are other strategies to lower cost of operations, such as:

• Improve forecast accuracy through EDI visibility
• Optimize through just in time (JIT) production
• Optimize electronic supply chain communication to increase speed-to-revenue realization

The bottom line: Being an extended-payment bully will only cost you more in the long term.

SQUINT YOUR EYES AS YOU LOOK AT THE PICTURE:

Would you like to see what Mukund Mohan is made of? What about one of our products? Leave us a comment and tell us what you’d like to see and what it’s made of.

This week’s question is:

How can Inovis make its solutions and services better? What additions or alterations would you suggest?

 Leave us a comment and let us know!

Image borrowed from:  www.nativeenglishteacher.blogspot.com/