Creating Revenue through Products that Sell Themselves II: Blending Technologies

In the industrial world, test instrumentation was ready for a change. And in a hyper-competitive market dominated a few major players, how could a smaller company compete? This was the project at hand.

Fortunately it was the dawn of the PC world and IBM was working hard to set the standards. We went to IBM and had produced an electronic interface that could attach a PC to the test instruments (oscillographic  recorders and digital transient waveform analyzers).

We then created a custom PC program, resulting in the first test instruments that not only were controlled by a PC, but importantly the PC could download the data for further analysis.

Building on the work done for the point of sale project discussed in an earlier showcase, we created the "D.I.S.K." series: Demonstration Instruction Support Kits that were distributed to every independent representative and salesperson, allowing the equipment to demonstrate itself and every feature.

Rather than add more salespeople and representatives this allowed a level of sales productivity and success unheard of to that point. Using our approach, design, and connections to other companies, entirely new products were developed to take advantage of the PC/test instrumentation connection, for both customer and sales benefit.

This created an enormous revenue opportunity and put the company significantly out in front of the competition, worldwide, and changed the test instrumentation industry forever.