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What The Customer Wants You To Know Ram Charan, What The Customer Wants You To Know, Penguin Group, USA, 2007 Purpose The purpose of the book is to illustrate the audience how wrong a selling process of some companies can be. Customers today have more choices and are under intense pressure, the sales process tends to mostly concentrate on the price, even though there are more effective ways to sell goods and series. The book addresses this and other sales problems and introduces a new selling technique, the VCS (Value Creation Selling). Today, companies that have great products and services but use the traditional sales process are facing problems and loose clients. The sales people are basically order-takers. In many businesses there are more suppliers entering the market every day.
Long-standing relationships and good products are certainly not enough any more. The author of the book suggests to start with customers problems instead of focusing on products and services. He insists that it is more important to become customers trusted partner, someone who can provide strategy solution, enhance customers value, achieve goals and address problems. The book attempts to guide readers to think differently on selling process to fit todays business world and explain steps that help companies be creative and different from the competition. Main Points Some sales people are wondering: My products have the cheapest price, my services are the best, and why does my business volume still remain the same?
Why isn't there a tremendous sales growth in my company? Today, customers want suppliers who can help them develop their business, improve earnings and act as partners. Book states, Companies today are no longer measure its own success. Instead, it measure success by how well customers are doing with your help. (Charon p. 6) Value-creation selling approach can create value for customers and help vender's and customer work as partners to enhance sales volumes and to find new chances. The most important message in this book is: seller today needs to devote large amounts of time, resources, and energy to learn about customers business or customers customers in details. According to the book, these questions need to point out the following questions: What are the customers goals?
Which financial measures are they most keen about? How do they create market value? How do they demand their products? Suppliers today enhance their businesses by helping customers improve their businesses.
To go beyond, suppliers should not only help customers, but also help customers customers. The new selling approach may take much longer time to achieve and generate revenues, but once the value chain gets going, the business will grow and opportunities will become infinite because suppliers have established trust and credibility with customers. The heart of the VCS is to obtain a detailed information from customers. Sales people need to find out customers opportunities, competitors, names of decision-makers in customers' organization, customers business culture and customers goals and priorities. After gathering this information, sales people can go ahead and build up plans as to help customers to solve problems and come up with selling strategies. VCS also suggests to develop the value-creation sales force.
The sales team needs to act proactively with customers. Leadership training is essential from the top to the bottom. Top management must make sure all managers master the VCS and implement the plan to the entire sales force. VCS approach needs the support of the entire organization. The rest of the organization needs to provide the quality, the skill mix and the responsiveness to support sales teams efforts. The communication between all departments is important and sales team must make the entire message transparent, let everyone work together.
The sales people need to act as leaders by pushing all the departments towards one goal and create linkages. Comments and Recommendations I think the VCS can truly help a company to achieve success with its customers. For example, I am a purchasing agent in a company that is not necessarily looking to purchase the cheapest possible product. What we are looking for is area services and suppliers who can provide long-lasting support and value-creating relationship. Ingram Micro is one of our value- creating suppliers.
We have had quarterly meeting with their sales associates over the years. We share our problems and our customers problems with them. Ingram Micro is able to prepare inventory base on our customers demand and also provide technical support thought out the product's lifespan. Ingram Micro is not the distributor who offers the cheapest price in the market, but we chose them as our business partners and now share our growth together with them.
Ingram Micro sales team customized their business strategy especially for us, which allows us to do better with our customers. What we have in the end is that the long term product prices have dropped, the lead time has shortened and now we have competitive advantage over our business rivals. Finally, I suggest the companies, which still have not implemented the VSC do so starting with one or two most familiar accounts. This will allow to measure the risks and know the organization capacity upfront, as the VCS approach requires.
Top management must convey the message downwards, look for the future and act as a leader in achieving long term, sustainable relationship with their customers.
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