How Your CAE Consultant Can Help You Land Sales

Working with a trusted CAE consultant can help you improve your sales process and customer relationships.

Your manufacturing supplier is in talks with a large OEM for supplying components for the latest model of their product. This is a big opportunity for your company, and you want it to go over well.

However, as you head into the next round of meetings, you’re faced with several challenges: You don’t have an in-house simulation team to demonstrate that your component will meet the OEM’s design and performance requirements; your cost estimates are based on previous projects and don’t account for several new design changes; you don’t have engineering experts in this particular field who can inspire trust in your client. What do you do?

You turn to your CAE consultant, of course.

If you haven’t worked with a CAE consultant—or if your consultant isn’t skilled in speaking with your clients on your behalf—then this solution may not have occurred to you. However, a good CAE consultant should be an asset to your organization far beyond their services as simulation experts. They should be your advocates in any sales meeting. After all, their work with you depends on it.

Here are five ways your CAE consultant can help you land more sales with OEMs.

1. Create more accurate quotes.

Nothing damages trust more quickly with a client than quotes that are wildly off base. If you estimate a project will require a certain budget in your quote, and then come to find the actual costs will significantly exceed that figure, you risk having to absorb those costs, or coming back to your client to renegotiate the contract.

Your CAE consultant can resolve uncertainty in the quoting process by giving you a line item value for their simulation work. They can also provide you with answers about what a specific component design might look like, which can help you understand the costs involved in producing it. With fewer unknowns in your own production process, you can be more confident about the numbers you present to your client.

2. Deliver more powerful presentations.

You’re preparing a presentation for a client. Wouldn’t you like to be able to include information about how your design will perform, based on actual simulations of that component?

Your CAE consultant can deliver just that. Working with your design team, your CAE consultant can show how your design  will perform under use loads, abuse loads and environmental stressors, how it will affect airflow, or how it might reduce noise, vibration, and harshness. This lends credibility to your presentations, allowing you to show the full capabilities of your design team based on the evidence of your simulations.

3. Answer questions quickly and with better information.

Even with a meeting enhanced by CAE simulations, your client may have questions not covered in your presentation. However, working with CAE specialists means you have access to those answers at your fingertips.

If an OEM wants to know more about the details you presented, you can consult your CAE team and provide specific answer that address their concerns directly. Your CAE team may even be able to anticipate some of those questions, and provide answers to you before you even enter your meeting.

4. Demonstrate proof of concept.

Do you have a new component design that will work better than the current model? Do you want to show that the product you’ve put together will meet the needs of your client? Is your client asking for proof that your model will work before they sign a contract with you?

These questions are precisely those which CAE was designed to answer. At its most experimental, CAE can explore new ideas, but it’s also about mitigating risk. Your CAE consultant can give you simulation models that show your design concepts will meet your client’s requirements. What could be more convincing proof than that?

5. Bring an expert to your pitch meetings.

We develop close working relationships with our clients.  From time to time, they ask us to accompany them to meetings with their clients. We’ve had cases where we’ve discussed an end client’s need in a meeting, gone home, and developed a new model that we could bring back within the week to address the concerns raised in that meeting.

This is a level of commitment that is hard to come by, but we understand the stakes, and believe that it is worth the effort. When a big contract depends on having answers to critical design questions, we are willing to go above and beyond to deliver them.

Your CAE consultant should be your best resource when showcasing your development capabilities to a customer.

When you search for a CAE consultant, you should look for an organization that can be true partners to you as you grow your business. This means finding a team who are willing to go the extra mile for your company—learn about your goals, work alongside your engineers, and even pitch your company in sales meetings as enthusiastically as if it were their own.

At CATI, we have frequently gone into sales meetings with our clients to present our simulations to the OEMs they intend to contract with. We’re aware that these OEMs have their own due diligence to perform, and want to know that the engineers behind the component simulations are competent and trustworthy. And they appreciate having an expert in the room who can help answer even the most technical questions they may have.

We can be that expert for you. If you have questions about our services, or if you have a pressing simulation need, contact us today. We can talk with you about your requirements and deliver the models you need in time for your next sales pitch.