Bill Gates in his book†Business @ The Speed of Thought†has written that a few years back the Microsoft Sales included a central customer database, which was used to evaluate the purchasing, patterns of individual customers as well as groups of customers. The Northern California District used the Microsoft Sales to analyze deployments for products such as Microsoft exchange, Microsoft office and windows. The team generated special reports with pivot tables to understand the number of licenses and the market saturation being achieved among the large customers in different customer segments.
Maneuvering the spread sheets to look at the national, regional, and district data and to look at industries or specific accounts, they realized that the Microsoft exchange was weaker in certain types of accounts than in others. They also found that in certain kinds of accounts the IBM’s Lotus Notes tended to be the main competitor, while else where the other products were the primary competitors.
This precise information helped the district put together programs to guarantee that Microsoft meets up the market challenge by sending their system engineers and consultants to the right accounts. This information also helped Microsoft engineers and consultants show up better prepared, having got more training on the chief competitor in an account so that they could answer tough questions about comparative strengths of their product versus the competitors’ product.
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