Before Meeting with Customer MP 3 Steps

Preparation is a key to success. The following three steps ensure that you highlight how you built the selected solutions from the customer's goals down, not your product's features up.

Step One: No Blanks

Review your Quick-Entry Sales Management (Q) sheet to determine what else you need to find out. Its format makes it easy to see what measurable details you know or do not know. Your knowledge of sales opportunities will be apparent. If you use loose-leaf notes (and can find all of them), how you piece your information together will probably differ for every sale. Yet, sales success comes from consistently repeating the same steps that achieve the same outcomes. Loose-leaf notes make that a difficult task. Q sheets do not.

Either way, be on the lookout for either sketchy (that is, immeasurable) or missing information. An unknown or vague goal, filter, or conditional commitment can doom a sale to failure. With unknowns, you gamble that any filter or goal you do not know will not affect the outcome of the sale. Again, you can call customers to get missing details. Be sure to provide them with new, relevant information when you do.

Step Two: Benchmarks

With your product selections, you seek to accomplish two objectives. First, you connect the features of your products that produce the measurable benefits of customers' goals. While you should strive to achieve all their goals, achieving the top-ranked one included in the conditional commitment is mandatory. Include as many unique strengths as you can. Do not forget how packaging or corporate-level features help you in this endeavor. Avoid any diluting features that do not connect to a measurable benefit.

Second, if you are not the existing supplier, make sure the measurable benefits in Column 2 can offset the assigned dollar value of price, delivery, supplier relationship, and cost of changing suppliers or products in Column 1. If you are the existing supplier, make sure Column 2 value can overcome the costs of doing nothing.

Note

If your product selection contains no unique strengths, question the validity of your Market Profile sheet. Without any unique strengths, you often end up doing battle with me-too competitors that offer low prices. However, you can still earn sales even without any unique strengths. Just show how the features of your products produce more measurable benefits than those of competitors.

Steven Smartsell starts with Olivia's only stated goal of reducing downtime. He fills in the details from the MP 2: Measure Potential section of his Q sheet (another strong argument for taking notes) into his Connecting Value sheet. He matches only the appropriate product features to her goals, measurable benefits, and conditional commitment. For illustrative purposes, Olivia has only one goal while your customers might have two or three goals (as in the water heater case study). A Connecting Value sheet becomes invaluable in matching features when you have more than one product that can achieve customers' goals. (See Exhibit 7-2.)

CONNECTING VALUE SHEET
Customer Goals	Benefits of Achieving Goals (Time or Money)	Systems of Evaluation	Products	Specifics of Features and Benefits (features are in italics)	Value Type and Focus (Internal, External, or Both)	Unique Strength/Feature Value Rating
Reduce downtime	Prevent production stoppages from 18 hours annually to 9, which generate savings of $360,000 annually	Hours of downtime	Predicto Services	Variance Alerts prevent unscheduled breakdowns	Perceived value. Both; it ensures uninterrupted shipments to their customers (E) and saves them money from lost production (I).	Yes/ 5
				Tolerance Checks prevents unscheduled breakdowns	Same as above	Yes/ 5
Conditional Commitment: Reduce the costs of $40,000 per downtime hour (SOE) to no more than nine hours annually (goal), save $360,000 (measurable benefit), begin in November and finish by December (start and completion dates), not exceed $1,080,000 budget (funding), get at least a three-year payback (SOE).

Exhibit 7-2: Connecting value sheet.

Step Three: Oops!

Be ready to explain any misses. These occur when your products do not fulfill all the requirements of the conditional commitments. Misses also occur when goals with measurable benefits have no features connected to them. You offset any misses with additional benefits customers did not consider. Steven Smartsell has no misses, but Chapter 8 provides several examples of the skills and strategies used to compensate for misses.