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Does Your Customer See Your Value As a 3? Or a 10?

March 24, 2010/in Mindset /by Bill Caskey

Just completed training for a company where most of their customers see them as 3’s rather than 10’s. Allow me to explain.

In the graphic, you’ll see two boxes…a 3 box and a 10 box on the outside. This is an illustration I drew today in a training for a company who often gets defaulted into a commodity. In other words, when it comes to “proprietary value” their customers see them as a 3 on the proverbial 1-10 scale.

In other words, what you really are is a 10–but your prospects and customers fail to see you there. You do “big box” work but they see you as a “small box” supplier. So what will you do about it?

One method is to educate your customer so they know “how to see you.” If they’ve become accustomed to you showing up when there’s a bid–or begging for business–or just answering calls, then it’s no wonder they see you as a 3.

As I told me client today, if you get the call when your customer is thinking about expansion or strategic planning or the highest level of value, then you are close to a 10.

But if you’re one of five bidders, then you have no relationship…and you’re likely a 3–or lower.

Recommendation

Make a list of the things that you do that most customers fail to see. Don’t overlook the little things…like one of the account execs today schedules quarterly meetings with their clients to make sure the client is getting the most out of the equipment they buy. That’s huge. Do they know that? Do you send a report of your findings up to the C-suite?

What are the other things that you do for your 10 clients? Now, go to the 3’s and educate them a little. Tell them how others use you–how they get the most value out of you.

And remember, if you’re thought of as a 3, it’s your fault, not theirs.

I Hope You Aren’t KEEPING Buyers From Buying – Like One BMW Dealership

March 22, 2010/in General Tips /by Bill Caskey

My wife really needs a new car. She just went back to work full time for her (telecom) company and she needs a new ride.

Since I have a BMW, I suggested she go and drive the X3 (small SUV).

We walked into the BMW dealership and asked if we could test drive one. We were told that our name in the database was assigned to a sales person who was busy with a prospect at the moment so we wouldn’t be able to drive one.

WHAT??!!!

“You mean if I had $40,000 cash and wanted to buy that car, I couldn’t because “my salesperson” was busy?”

“That’s right, sir.” (And here I thought the auto market was struggling. Guess not). So we gave her our number and told her to have “our salesperson” call us. He never did.

So here’s my question to you: Do you practice “sales prevention” anywhere in your company? I know your answer will be a quick “NO!” But think about it for a moment. I’m sure the BMW dealer would answer “No”, too. But he actually does prevent sales…by his systems (or lack of).

Think about the following ‘points on the path to a sale:’

When the prospect first calls in to talk to someone….how does that sound? Does the prospect get “engaged” or just passed through? Does your voice mail system work to ‘help the caller?’
When you go out to the first call–do you send an agenda in advance? Do you have an agenda with you? Do you follow up with notes after the call? (I find most sellers fail miserably at these.)
When you come back to the office, so you take a few minutes to take notes so you don’t forget to follow up, or the important points?
When you go back out to meet with that person, do you lead with an ‘historical review’ of what you covered the first meeting–and any open items? Or do you just start in and hope you’re in the same place?
Are you constantly educating the customer as to where they are in your sales / their purchase cycle? Or, do you just assume he’ll follow you blindly?
And, when I go to your company website, does it help me sort out what I’m looking for…or give me mountains of links?

So, before you answer NO to my question above…answer those. I hope you’re practicing “Sales Facilitation” rather than “Sales Prevention.”

By the way, we ended up at the VW dealership, test drove a Tiguan (Oh, how I hate their model names) and she loved it. No X3 in her future.

When A Sales Person Gets Nervous, Bad Things Happen

March 18, 2010/in General Tips /by Bill Caskey

Had a frantic call from a client who had proposed a solution to one of her prospects. Earlier this week, she got an email from the prospect who “sounded like he was having second thoughts about the deal” she had proposed.

Luckily, she called me before she called him.

What I found was someone who was ATTACHED to a “Yes.” Not a good place to be.

We worked through the process and what had happened. His email sounded not like someone who was backing out–but as someone who was confused and overwhelmed.

My Recommendation

Call him and have an informal conversation with him—without trying to convince him — or defend your solution. Just talk.

Say, “Herbie, I received your email. Am happy to talk through some of your points. It sounds like I haven’t explained things very well to you. Is this a good time to talk?”

Very simple. Elegant. No pressure. No attachment. I’m all for being aware of yellow flags–and listening to what’s NOT being said as well as what’s being said– and addressing them, but sometimes you just need to relax.

What’s the Conversation in Your Customer Strategy Room?

March 4, 2010/1 Comment/in General Tips /by Bill Caskey

by Bill Caskey

On any given day, there are tens of thousands of sales organizations who sit around in their strategy rooms talking about how to target the next account, how to make a conquest list, how to “get the deal off of the street.”

But I often wonder what those conversations sound like in the customer’s strategy room. It’s probably not, How do we get a deal? How do we get the Smith Group to do business with us? How do we get the value that the Smith Group has in our organization? Their strategy rooms are probably filled with discussions about how to reduce cost, how to be better operationally, how to achieve and execute goals, etc.

So my question is, how are you inserting your conversation in their strategy room? And the answer is, you probably aren’t. And you’re not because you don’t have solutions to the problem they’re talking about. It’s just you’ve never thought about your solutions in the context of what they’ve discussed in their strategy sessions.

Case in Point

We have a client in Arizona who is an electrical contractor. They know that the conversations going on inside the General Contractor’s Office are:
•    How do we get the job done faster?
•    How do we reduce our cost?
•    How to improve safety of the jobs?
•    How do we satisfy our customer so that they hire us for more business?

So across town, my client needs to be having those exact conversations in their strategy session, and then figuring out a way to insert themselves in the customer’s room. One way we recommended, and they’ve had success at, is writing a series of articles about what we know to be the general contractor’s biggest problems on the job. In this case it was safety.

So my client wrote a special white paper/report on the 10 Most Common Accidents on a general job site and how to prevent them, and they did a calculation on what a 10% decrease in job time loss equated to in the bottom line.

You don’t think that was important to the customer strategy?

Then they proceeded to print the article and send it to a couple dozen contractors who they knew were having those problems. Now when the contractor passes that out inside their next strategy session, my contractor’s name will be on that material and will be seen as a valued resource to them accomplishing their strategies, not as a vendor who sells products.

So what are you doing to get inside your customer’s strategy room? It’s not all that hard as long as you think about what problems you solve in doing what you do, and how the solving of those problems leads to the customer discussion of, How do we accomplish our goals? How do we meet our customer demands?

How do we grow our business? If you can do that, you now have inserted yourself into their dialogue, and everyone wins.

Blog Authors

June 1, 2006/2 Comments/in General Tips /by Bill Caskey

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Bill Caskey: mailto:[email protected]

Bill is a sales development leader and experimenter. His ideas about selling are convictions about life, money and meaning. He has coached sales professionals and executives for over 20 years. And his philosophies and strategies have fueled explosive growth in sales and profits for clients. Click here to learn more about Bill Caskey.

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Caskey Video Blog: The Fundamental Shift

April 14, 2006/3 Comments/in Mindset /by Bill Caskey

In our last newsletter, we hinted that soon we have our newsletters enabled with multimedia. Well we are at Caskey, as an Easter treat for our loyal readers are giving you a preview of our video-blog. What is a video blog, well like a blog a video blog is a individual discussing a certain subject, usually in form of a brief essay. A video blog is like that but instead of using either text or html we are using web video to discuss a certain topic.

The subject of our first video blog, is a brief introduction to the concept of “THE FUNDAMENTAL SHIFT” , a term we use extensively in our sales training. This short video is presented by Bill Caskey. We hope you enjoy it.

Click here to download FlashPlayer

This video blog is best seen on a broadband connection

THE TRUTH SETS YOU FREE

January 27, 2005/in Mindset /by Bill Caskey

I got a call from one of my professional services clients, who said an 18-year client said he needed to check other vendors–said the price was getting too high.

Wow! Not an easy call to get–and he asked me what I would do. Here it goes:

Acknowledge the truth. You can’t MAKE HIM NOT CHECK them out, can you? Of course not. So go have a meeting and say this: “Mr. Client, I want to acknowledge your thoughts about looking elsewhere. That may be a good idea. After 18 years of a relationship, sometimes people grow weary — the relationship goes stale — nothing new — just the same old service. So I would encourage you to look elsewhere. It will be healthy.”

Then, follow that up with: “But I do have one question. Is it really the money (which he told him it was) or is it something different–like service or value or something we missed?” Then, I would suggest a brainstorming session with their senior managers to see how, or if, there is a way to reduce the fees. There may not be. But you at least have to be open to it.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe your fees have crept up too quickly. Maybe they aren’t getting as much value. But you can’t know that until you have an “exploratory meeting” at their site. You cannot be defensive at this meeting. It is a meeting based on finding the truth.

Go into it with high intent–really wanting to help the customer solve the problem. NOT trying to ‘keep the business.’ By surrendering you get stronger.

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