Industrial Installed Base Playbook

Over the course of the past few years, we’ve met or spoken with over 1000 (yes, a thousand) Industrial OEMs to understand their pain points vis a vis Installed Base selling. What’s interesting is that we have seen the transformation from the early years when we were met by looks of puzzlement (“why would you do that?”) to acknowledgement (“yes, we realize that we’ve ignored this goldmine for many years”) to companies now looking for ways to tackle the opportunity.

A few big impediments get in the way of capturing this opportunity – not the least being “there’s only a few customer-facing OEM employees, and there are thousands of customers who have bought their product over the years”. In other words, how to make it scalable and repeatable.

Everyone underestimates the challenge – after all, how hard is it to really create a list of all your installed assets? How hard is it to know everything that the customer has done? And how hard is it to train our “inside sales” teams to proactively sell to the Installed base?

Turns out, way harder than it looks from the outside! From poor data quality, to conflicting customer and asset data across multiple systems to building repeatable automated analytics etc – every company we met struggles with these issues.

And that’s before operationalizing actions with playbooks etc. After repeated requests like “can you share best practices with us?”? Or “what should we prioritize to get the initiative off the ground?” Or “who is the best at Installed base selling?” – we decided to “open source” our own playbooks for anyone interested in Installed Base selling. In other words, download and use. But in the spirit of open source philosophy, we will make these playbooks available to those willing and able to contribute to growing the content, and sharing with everyone else. We will serve as the “moderator” to ensure quality remains high, relevant content is curated in the right categories and we can edit the playbooks appropriately. More importantly, we will acknowledge new content publicly in the updated playbooks.