Know-How Exchange : Customer Behavior

Fiat,
In your industry, it is important that your approach be two fold. You need:
1) To establish relationships within the engineering groups of your clients.
2) To build connections to the production and quality control departments of clients.

Let, explore each of these in detail.

Relationships with Engineering and Maintenance groups within the organization
These are important as a first line of connection. These people have the power to veto your technical solutions. Comments like, "vision systems are hard to maintain" made to the production side of the client can stop your work dead in its tracks. So to can a suggestion that the work be put on a schedule for inhouse development. Once you have established credibility with the engineering/technical side, your real work begins.

Relationships with production and quality people help drive the financial impact of your solutions. Typically, the engineering side fails to understand the true impact of a good solution to the bottom line.

How do I suggest you accelerate the process?
I like joint meetings of technical and economic impact people. Case studies of previous clients also sparks good discussion within the customer's group. If you can be part of this discussion from the beginning, you maximize your chances of success.

If you would like to discuss this in greater detail, we do a lot of work with Systems Integrators and Automation Solution Providers. Contact me via my profile.

Having consulted with several clients in consumer durables (on marketing subjects), my suggestion would be to ASK THEM.

Both your when and what questions are unique to each company. There is no one-size-fits-all answer. You need to identify your ideal target company and then get to know them yourself.

If that's too difficult (or if you don't have time), it's possible to structure some market research that you can outsource. That's not a great solution, but it's certainly one option. What you'll find -- either way -- is that there's a wide range of answers, and that you'll miss just about everyone if you act on the average.