Knowing Your Worth

By -

Skill Five Customer Value & Measurement

Salespeople carry a message of impactful customer service. Yet when pressed, very few of these Sales Guys can translate their service into dollars and cents. We at River Heights Consulting compare Value-Added selling to standing on a downtown street corner handing out five dollar bills. Some of the people you help may be homeless folks in dire need of a good meal and some of them may be millionaires hustling over to their club.  We prefer a focused and value-metric approach where you understand specifically how your service impacts the customer. Further, just like the loan you made to your brother-in-law last April, you need a system to remember the value you provided in the past.

In conversation after conversation I ask sales people these three questions:

  • Who is your most important customer?
  • What did you do to add value for them last week?
  • What did you do to add value for them during the week of January 23rd, 2005? 

The answers to the first two questions are always spontaneous and quick. It’s the third question that separates the good from great. Rate yourself based on this scale.

1 - Sometimes provide “value-add” service with the products you sell. When making sales calls you often present the feature without thinking about the benefit to the customer.

3 – Regularly provide “value-add” service to your accounts. It sounds corny, but features and benefits is a regular part of your selling vocabulary.

5 – Provide “value-add” service and sometimes use examples of this service when making sales presentations. Often the benefit you describe has nothing to do with a product.

7 – You provide service, and can convert your service into dollars and cents. You will present the dollar savings to key customer contacts. Before talking about a product, you attempt to think about the payback to your customer.

10- The gold standard in selling. You make it a habit to record the dollarized value of your “value-adds” to customers at all levels. On a quarterly basis you present your customer with information that confirms and reinforces a measurement of the service you provide.

 As always, we would love to hear how you scored on this little quiz….

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Dance of Onboarding: Integrating New Hires into Your Corporate Culture

By -
Image
Have you ever tried to waltz or swing dance with someone who couldn't match your rhythm or didn't know the steps? It can become a clash of styles or cultures, or, worse—somebody gets their toes stepped on. A similar thing can happen when a new hire doesn't quite 'get' the culture. Much like dancing, though, skills can be learned. I recently facilitated a panel on Cultural Quotient (CQ) where we discussed best practices for increasing CQ. This involved intentional learning, self-awareness of physical cues such as body language and personal space, and the willingness to adapt to new cultures. I have some amusing stories about what not to do based on experiences with insensitive former colleagues. However, it's more productive to focus on how employers can improve the onboarding experience and subsequently enhance retention and employee engagement by welcoming people into their corporate culture. Maybe someday in person, over drinks, I'll share a funny story o
Read more

50 Questions for Distributors

By -
Image
Last week I wrote an article titled “Six Questions that Demand an Answer.”  Sharing the article with a few trusted advisers, I received one consistent bit of feedback best summarized by this response. “Frank, I agree these are questions we must ask ourselves; they caused me to pause and ponder.  I used them as an exercise with my team to think about our overall strategy.  I believe taking the time to think about our business from an outside perspective to be justified and worthwhile.   Sometimes it’s hard to do this subjectively.  I would like to see more questions just like these.” The following is my first round of questions.  I have put them into categories to make them easier to digest.  Some will apply to your position, some will not.  I suggest spending a moment visiting these topics with members of your own team. A note:  The readers of this blog come from a variety of backgrounds, hold a diverse collection of positions within distribution and come from a number of
Read more

Ship and Debit Programs

By -
Image
Special Pricing Agreement and Thoughts about Ship and Debit Programs Click here for a brief tutorial on Ship and Debit Programs. Special Pricing Agreements (SPA) have been around for a very long time. The concept is simple; a manufacturer uses their distribution channel as a vehicle to service a customer who requires very low pricing to match some commercial situation. The details of the commercial situation aren’t really all that pertinent. They can arise due to customer potential, competitive pricing pressure, or supply contracts driven with large mega-corporations. The point is normal distributor margins no longer support the selling price and the distributor plays a critical role in providing some service to the customer. In years gone by, distributors involved in these situations purchased products earmarked for the special priced customer at sub-distributor price levels. The freshly purchased (at lower than normal cost) products were either brought “into stock” to sell
Read more