Marketing and Price
MBA511 : Marketing Management
Assignment#1
MEDIQUIP
On December 18, Kurt Thaldorf, a sales engineer for Medquip received a letter from Lohmann University Hospital thanking him for participating in the bid for a CT scanner and informing him that the purchase of this product was made form Sigma, a Mediquip competitor from Holland .
According to the article, it seems that Mediquip lost the sale before receiving the letter from the Hospital. We can say that Kurt Thaldorf lost the sale on July 30 when he met Carl Hartmann, the hospital general director in interim, and knew that the price Mediquip was proposing was not very attractive and his offer was “much above the rest” of the offers, especially those from Sigma and FNC. The main reason why Mediquip lost the bid is because the sales engineer focused on the technology itself and the technical specs of the CT scanner to explain why the price was relatively high, instead of working out a convenient price with the Hospital managers. The salesman was given “a second chance” to be more convincing and lower the price since the hospital staff was thinking that “all the companies claim they have the latest technology”. Kurt Thaldorf kept repeating the operating advantages of his system and didn’t really manage to satisfy his customers by proposing the “attractive price” they were expecting.
In order to win the bid, the sales engineer could have tried a different strategy by focusing on the price, even if his system was highly developed. In such a case, when there were other competitors that proposed basically the same technology for a lower price, the only way to win the bid was to come up with an interesting price that would have made Mediquip scanner look better in terms of quality and price and not only more expensive regardless of its operational advantages.
On the other hand, it could have been better for the hospital and Mr. Hartmann to decline the offer from the beginning since the price Mediquip had proposed
Assignment#1
MEDIQUIP
On December 18, Kurt Thaldorf, a sales engineer for Medquip received a letter from Lohmann University Hospital thanking him for participating in the bid for a CT scanner and informing him that the purchase of this product was made form Sigma, a Mediquip competitor from Holland .
According to the article, it seems that Mediquip lost the sale before receiving the letter from the Hospital. We can say that Kurt Thaldorf lost the sale on July 30 when he met Carl Hartmann, the hospital general director in interim, and knew that the price Mediquip was proposing was not very attractive and his offer was “much above the rest” of the offers, especially those from Sigma and FNC. The main reason why Mediquip lost the bid is because the sales engineer focused on the technology itself and the technical specs of the CT scanner to explain why the price was relatively high, instead of working out a convenient price with the Hospital managers. The salesman was given “a second chance” to be more convincing and lower the price since the hospital staff was thinking that “all the companies claim they have the latest technology”. Kurt Thaldorf kept repeating the operating advantages of his system and didn’t really manage to satisfy his customers by proposing the “attractive price” they were expecting.
In order to win the bid, the sales engineer could have tried a different strategy by focusing on the price, even if his system was highly developed. In such a case, when there were other competitors that proposed basically the same technology for a lower price, the only way to win the bid was to come up with an interesting price that would have made Mediquip scanner look better in terms of quality and price and not only more expensive regardless of its operational advantages.
On the other hand, it could have been better for the hospital and Mr. Hartmann to decline the offer from the beginning since the price Mediquip had proposed