What’s your worth to the Customer?
I was once vying for a customer who could contribute five million dollars in revenue to the company. The competition was fierce and every one else was wooing him by simply dropping their price. I invited him for a face to face meeting. I asked him all about his business…how he ran it, where he wanted it to be in five years, how he up sold additional products into his existing customer base, where he went for new customers. You know, the questions that we SHOULD be asking every day. Once he outlined his plan for growth, I showed him, in black and white how working with our company would help his company retire quota faster, be more profitable and get his sales reps trained and comfortable with the products that they sold faster. I became his trusted adviser and his resource for future growth. I kept my price and my profit margin exactly where I wanted it to be, by delivering the tools he needed to grow his business just as he wanted to. I gave him value. And frequently reminded him of the resources he got simply by partnering with me to grow his business.
Don’t sell yourself short! The easiest thing in the world to do is just drop your price and be just like all of the others. Sooner or later, the “others” will be nothing more than carcasses on the side of the road. You’ll be stepping over them on your road to success because they couldn’t stay in business because they weren’t profitable…Present your value. Over and over again. Every day you must present your value.
Now go take some time to figure out what your value is! Write it down. Make a stack of index cards to carry with you. Every where you go. And practice your value statement. Over and over again. Practice at every opportunity. Keep those index cards handy and when you’ve got a spare moment read them. Memorize them. Know them forward and backwards. I always carry mine with me! You never know when you’re going to be presenting and at just the wrong moment, some piece of technology fails you and you must go on without your slides, but without your slides! During my very first presentation ever this actually happened to me! Rather than packing up and running out of the room, I flipped to the next index card and moved ahead with my presentation. Tap dancing counts in presentations.
Sometimes all the research in the world doesn’t paint the real picture, there’s where the hard work comes in. So there is a company whose single largest customer represented 7% of their business but the supplier was relatively inconsequential to the client they were a 1.3 billion dollar company and the supplier had a 200 million a year business. At the end of a six year contract it was determined that they had lost control over the relationship and went and put someone in place to “firm up” the relationship. All the web sites, annual reports and studying in the world couldn’t have made things any clearer than mud but then again it gave a great basis of a starting point. Sitting over cheap pizza and salads the few contacts in the account that they had a working relationship were sharing their concerns, a few hours later the same rep was sitting across from a SVP and two divisional president’s whom the supplier had never gotten to know. Their issues were very different. Many people would think at the top of their list would be increasing revenue or improving profitability but it came down to three simple concerns 1) They didn’t feel loved…not by the supplier and not in general. A little dedicated attention went a long way. Sure it had to have meaning to the customer but they realized that the people who had worked hard for them everyday did care about their business, so much so that they kept their head down and forgot to say thanks 2) They had had an exclusive territory before and the market had changed this was one that couldn’t be fixed by the supplier, the market had changed and something they had enjoyed since the beginning of time couldn’t be offered any longer regardless of their size or level of commitment. 3) They were challenged to keep current with the new offers it was a communication breakdown – in short it was a simply resolved by a twice a month 15 minute review call. As a point of fact the issues at the top were not what they issues in other parts of the organization were or even perceived them to be. The requests through out the organization had to be addressed but the ones at the top were the easiest to fix.
TIP: Understand your companies value statement as it relates to you. Keep a list of the great things that you’ve done for your Customer so that when he asks for a deeper discount, you can cordially remind him of training that you’ve done, for an order that you rushed for him, or a promotion that you gave him etc. Even our customers that we talk to every day need to be reminded of our value to their organization
