Business Corner
STRATEGIES & ANALYSIS
BY PHIL PHILLIPS, PHD
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
PHILLIPS@CHEMARKCONSULTING.NET
System development. Where value
selling begins: Part 3
The last
of a three-part series
exploring
the topic of
system
selling.
In this, our third and final column con- sidering Systems Value Selling, we want o address the topic of Positioning. That
is, positioning in your customer’s mind that
you and your company’s capabilities alone
are the resource “go-to” organization for
problem salvation and opportunity considerations. Simply speaking, you are the customers profit improver.
The Systems Value Seller (SVS) achieves
this profit improver position by affecting the
customer’s processes in two ways:
• Reducing the contribution a process makes
to cost; or
• By increasing the contribution a process
makes to earning new sales revenues.
The SVS’ method focuses on the ultimate
end benefit of systems, not their components
and costs. Therefore, the SVS’ identification
must be with the end-game profit improvement and not with products, equipment, services or even with systems themselves. By being
identified with the deliverable objective—
profit improvement—you have cast yourself, as a
Systems Seller who understands his or her
customer’s total economics. This is power
indeed since you and your customer have the
same profit-improvement objective.
The added benefits forthcoming from a successful SVS experience is that the process professionalizes the seller’s mission by expressing
it in business management terms, not sales
talk. This gives you the seller the same language as the customer.
POSITIONING AND SERVICE
To say that a SVS is “customer oriented” is cor-
rect, but a gross understatement. The SVS
must be the ultimate in customer orientation.
If the tables were turned and you are now the
customer, what would you want a SVS to look
like as a package of capabilities?
ULTIMATE OBJECTIVE
The SVS’s ultimate objective in this selling
