This is the story of how one manufacturing company–Tuff Shed–achieved a $7.6m bump in sales by introducing product visualization. It was a fantastic outcome, but not the only one. The company also achieved:
Follow on to find out why product visualization was such a gamechanger for Tuff Shed and judge for yourself whether product visualization is something worth exploring in your own business. If you’re a manufacturer of complex configurable products, the answer will likely be a resounding: “yes.”
What Is Tuff Shed? And Why Should I Care?
Tuff Shed, founded in 1981, is a company out of Denver, Colorado, that sells and fabricates-to-order garden sheds, garages, and other custom structures.
They operate over 150 stores and sell through 2,000 Home Depot locations in the United States. They also sell directly to consumers through their website (TuffShed.com) and the Home Depot website (homedepot.com).
To give you an indication of scale, Tuff Shed employs around 1,500 people and (according to reports) generates revenue of circa $350m.
Why should you care? Because Tuff Shed is a perfect model of digital transformation in action:
They’ve also managed to strike up a fascinating B2B2C business model with Home Depot that other manufacturers might wish to emulate.
What Is Product Visualization (in Tuff Shed’s Case?)
Product visualization is a vague term covering any technology that visually communicates products to customers (generally in photorealistic renderings.)
The ability to show customers what a custom product will look like before they commit to a purchase is an important one–it aids decision-making and increases customer satisfaction (everything is agreed upon from the outset–no nasty surprises.)
But product visualization is only one part of the engineer-to-order equation. Manufacturers need to integrate immersive product visualization technology into their sales, engineering, and manufacturing workflows to achieve the best ROI. Tuff Shed was able to accomplish this by investing in a visual CPQ solution.
Why Is CPQ Central to This Story?
Product visualization is most impactful when it’s used as part of a CPQ solution.
Traditional CPQ Software Works Like This...
CPQ (configure price quote) is software that automates much of the sales process for companies that sell configurable products. Manufacturers program product and pricing rules into the back-end of the CPQ, and these rules dictate how products can and should be assembled.
Instead of sifting through hundreds (or even millions) of product options when configuring products for buyers, all sales reps need to do is enter certain customer information into the configurator. The CPQ then outputs a product and price optimized for that use case.
Benefits of CPQ include accelerated sales cycles, fewer errors, less back and forth between sales, engineering, and the shop floor, and faster ramping of new sales hires.
Visual CPQ Uses a 3D Product Visualizer and Product Renderings
Visual CPQ is a little bit different than the more traditional type of CPQ software outlined above. Firstly, visual CPQ can be used by sales reps or end-customers, and, secondly, products are configured by interacting with a 3D product visualizer rather than text.
A 3D product visualizer (also known as a visual product configurator) is a graphical interface that displays interactive 3D product renderings. Users can zoom in and out, move products around, and drag and drop to change anything from materials to dimensions, colors, and parts—the result: a buying experience that’s highly immersive and user-friendly.
How Did Tuff Shed Use 3D Product Visualization to Its Advantage?
Tuff Shed Before Product Visualization
Tuff Shed sells a wide range of products with thousands of options. Each has its own set of rules and dependencies. Selling garages and other modular buildings mean abiding by strict building codes that regulate all aspects of design. Technical knowledge requirements made finding and training sales reps difficult and introduced complexity and risk of error at every stage.
Before product visualization, sales reps worked alongside customers to configure products manually, talking them through the various options before sending sketches over to engineering for approval. The problem was that sales reps configured products that weren’t viable from an engineering perspective or sent napkin sketches that engineers didn’t understand (cue endless back and forth.)
As part of a broader digital transformation process, Tuff Shed decided to codify all of the product and pricing rules that had lived in sales reps’ heads, automate their manual sales process, and provide a more interactive buying experience across a range of channels. Product visualization was the key.
Tuff Shed After Product Visualization
Tuff Shed used Epicor CPQ to create an interactive 3D product configurator. With the configurator, users can scroll through every product and option in the catalog until the perfect selection happens.
Users can spin their structure round, drag and drop windows and doors, and even drag objects like lawnmowers into the space to make sure they’ve got enough room in their shed for what they need to store. All the while, the CPQ is recalculating and displaying prices in real-time, giving customers all the information they need to make a snap purchase decision.
Tuff Shed embedded their 3D configurator into their eCommerce store for any visitor to use. Prospects carrying out research and weighing up their options can educate themselves about the Tuff Shed range and often end up selling to themselves in the process.
What’s unique about Tuff Shed’s approach is that they’ve broadened access to their configurator beyond sales reps and their website. They’ve enabled Home Depot customers to use their configurator by positioning tablets, pre-loaded with the Tuff Shed configurator, into Home Depot stores.
Through their relationship with Home Depot, Tuff Shed has captured a valuable customer segment that usually shops in physical stores. And have benefited from Home Depot’s enormous reach and the credibility of partnering with one of the world’s best-known brands.
In Summary
So, let’s conclude by answering the question posed in the title of this article: How did Tuff Shed increase sales by $7.6m (along with all the other benefits) by leveraging product visualization? It was a constellation of factors.
With product visualization: