What the Customer Wants You to Know: How Everybody Needs to Think Differently About Sales by Ram Charan

Author:Ram Charan [Charan, Ram]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781591841654
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Published: 2007-12-24T13:00:00+00:00

6

Making the Sale

Six months after Sturgis introduced its new approach to selling, Charlie was a new man. He passed the certi-fication to do value creation selling and was talking to customers with renewed interest. He found that some of his long-time friends in purchasing knew far more about their companies than he’d realized; what they didn’t know they were often willing to find out. Charlie was asking them different kinds of questions and getting greater insight into their businesses. He was also doing his own research, and though he was still shaky when it came to the financial information, he was getting better at sorting through it.

For the past several months, he had doggedly chased a new account and assembled a team of colleagues from various departments at Sturgis who were equally enthusiastic about value creation selling. They had helped gather information, some of them venturing to contact people in the customer’s shop for the first time ever. The sales team had met several times to analyze all the material they’d collected, and they’d pinpointed the customer’s concern about top-line growth. The customer was expected to deliver close to double-digit gains in sales under intense competitive pressure. Charlie’s team had brainstormed ways Sturgis could help the customer boost sales, in part by touting the technical superiority of its products using data the Sturgis team assembled, and they’d crafted a value proposition based on Sturgis’s ability to help the customer advance technologically.

Now it was time to present that proposition to the customer. It wasn’t just a matter of driving over to the customer’s headquarters and making a PowerPoint presentation. Indeed, the team would all attend, and they wouldn’t use PowerPoint at all. Instead, Charlie would make an introductory presentation, and then each team member would describe the portion of the proposition that fell under his or her department at Sturgis. Then Charlie would wind it up with a short but detailed explanation of the benefits the customer would realize, both physical and financial, with emphasis on meeting revenue growth expectations. The CFO was prepared to detail how those benefits would affect the customer’s income statement and balance sheet.

The team had rehearsed their presentations until they knew them by heart. They had also considered what questions the customer’s people might have, what objections they might raise and what changes they might want to make in the value proposition. Sturgis was prepared to make them, and the team would not be disheartened if they left the room without agreement on a deal. They knew they were on the right track.

After a sales team has used the VAP to craft what they believe to be the best response to a customer’s needs and priorities, it’s time to make the sales pitch. But presenting a value creation proposition to the customer is nothing like the typical sales call that most salespeople are accustomed to. In value creation selling much more work goes into preparation, in part because the sales call now involves a team of people whose presentations and responses to customer questions must be planned and coordinated.

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