Coatings World - October 2010

Business Corner

STRATEGIES & ANALYSIS BY PHIL PHILLIPS, PHD CONTRIBUTING EDITOR PHILLIPS@CHEMARKCONSULTING.NET

System development. Where value
selling begins: Part 2

The second
of a three-
part series
exploring
the topic of
system
selling.

Last month, in the first part of this series, we returned to the basic principles upon which Value-Selling is supported. There have been more than 100 books and countless articles discussing alternative selling techniques. A few of these titles may ring a familiar bell: Competitive Selling, Best Practices—Customer-Focused Solutions, The Grid for Sales Excellence, Growth Partnering— How to Build Your Company’s Profits by Building Customer Profits and Customer Centered Growth to name a handful.

In part one we said that there is nothing
worse in a sales situation than in trying to
market a naked product, or one that has been
stripped of its unique performance value. In
other words, it is a product or service that has
been stripped of its value. This happens when
an abundance of similar offerings are being
made available on the market. In addition
buyers compress these offerings even further
into a common and familiar phrase that says,
“your product is no different from a dozen oth-
ers we could use in our operation and for less
money.”
Remember the often used phrase, “the cus-
tomer is always right”? Well it is more accu-
rate to alter this phrase and to always remem-
ber that, “the customer is always right, some-
times.” Understanding this principle is the
first rule of understanding how customers
behave.

Customers are made up of many departments and individuals with as many different opinions about common issues as there are numbers of people. Therefore, to take one, two or even three of your customer’s individual judgments and use them for your direction solely is a path laid out in degrees of failure. Why is this true? Because the individual within your customer is only right sometimes. They may only see parts of the issue, problem

or opportunity. As a result, they are biased their direction is skewed.

So guess what it takes to fully understand what your target customer(s) really want and more importantly, what they really need? It takes you, the salesperson, to gain more comprehensive customer data, information, knowledge and wisdom, beyond the individuals in your single customer and yes, beyond their collective knowledge as well.

HOW DOES ONE BECOME
A SUCCESSFUL SELLER?

In the first four sentences of a customer dialogue, a successful sales person does these four things very well: • Identifies a customer problem in financial terms. That is, in terms of what the current situation (problem, issue, opportunity) is cost-ing the customer, or what the customer could be earning (gaining) without the problem;

• Quantifies a profit-improvement solution to the problem;

• Takes a position as manager of a problem-solving system and accepts single-source responsibility for its performance. In the course of defining the system in terms of the contribution its components make to improve customer profits, products and services are mentioned for the first time in this space; lastly • The fourth sentence proposes a partnership in terms of applying the system to solve the customer’s problem, or unmet need.

You may be saying this “system selling” must take a great deal of time. You may also be saying, “I don’t think I can afford the time to do this. I can’t cover all my accounts if I try this concept..” Well, you would be right!