I am loving the questions coming into the community. Every one of these increases our common wisdom. This one is about how to package services to do promotions and discounts.
I am in the process of building a service catalogue for my company and would like to get your opinion on how promotions and discounts should be handled. My company offers a variety of services to both Business and Residential customers and from time to time the Sales/Marketing teams will launch promotions and offer discount dependent on the customers request if the customer is bundleing serveral services into one purchase. I have a few ideas in my head of how it could work but am looking for guidance on how to choose the best practice.
My first question is in relation to promotions
- Should the promotion be detailed in the service offering for the promotional period and then removed at the end date?
or Should the promotion itself be a seperate service offering where as it has a limited shelflife and would be archived one the promotion is over? or Have you any other suggestion?
My second question then is in relation to discounts
- Would you mention in the service offering that the sales person may offer a discount if services are bundles together?
or Would you not mention that because this will be customer facing and then everyone will expect a discount?
or Would this matter as the although the service catalogue is customer facing via the web, service request forms, this part of the service offering could be screened from the customer and applied at a later date by the sales person manually or even by a sales promotion code?
or Have you any other suggestion?
As you can see, I'm a bit unsure as to what direction to take, but any advice you could give me would be really appreciated. Thanks, droche2110
The full thread and a great discussion and answer are here:ForumTopic211 - ServiceCatalogs. (Free, registration required)
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