Note With positive customers, the cost of change can become a more formidable barrier to competitors if you attach measurable dollar amounts to these costs.
Your strongest support from positive customers occurs when your unique strengths achieve their goals and produce measurable benefits. Therefore, ensure that they know how your company helps them to achieve their goals measurably better than anyone else does. Again, measurable value builds barriers to competition and ensures that you exceed customers’ expectations. Remember, “Competitors do not win over your customers, you unwillingly lose them due to unfulfilled expectations.”
Note A good indicator of whether your customers fit the positive category is their willingness to write reference letters. These endorsements highlight the goals—and measurable benefits—you help them achieve. Use them with other potential customers in the same market segments. Provide them a sample reference letter to save them time and effort. In addition, nothing is worse than reference letters with grammatical and spelling errors, typos, and a failure to point out your unique strengths or documented savings. Treat hesitant reference letter writers as caution signs. They might not yet qualify as positive customers.
Neutral Customers
As their name implies, these customers do not prefer a specific company’s products and services. They are fair game for every salesperson, so they provide the largest number of sales opportunities. Yet, they are a neglected group because they have the most unknowns, such as how they select suppliers other than on a seemingly random basis. When you deal with unknowns, selling efforts increase although your prospects for success might not.
You usually wait for neutral customers to contact you first. At least you know they are serious about buying something—maybe even from you. You use the courtship selling mode with them. Your objective is to move them to the positive category or at least stop them from sliding into the negative category. If you can show them how the measurable value of your unique strengths matches up to their goals, you will achieve your objective. Competitors are planning to do the same thing, but they do not consciously think in terms of measurable value; you do. Thus, they do not stand a chance in the battle for the neutrals.
Negative Customers
They are long-term and loyal customers—of competitors. You use brinkmanship selling with them. With them, you always lose the battle of perceived value. They select competitors’ products with perceived value over your products with perceived value every time (so that is why you lost that last sale). Therefore, without measurable value, you have an uphill battle (lowest prices or meeting crucial deliveries) to make negative customers choose your products. Otherwise, wait for competitors to lose them. The “create-and-wait” strategy described later in this chapter helps you in this endeavor.
Now, let us examine the details of the nine filters.
Goal Motivation (Influencer)
The greater the measurable benefits of their goals (or how their performance is evaluated), the stronger is the motivation for customers to act quickly. Often, some compelling event occurs that heightens customers’ motivation to achieve a goal. For instance, a drop in a company’s market share by 10 percent increases its motivation to achieve the goal of improving marketing and selling efforts. Uncover the event, and you know the motivation—and how they measure it. For example, what does 10 percent equal in dollars lost?
Note A good question to ask customers to uncover goal motivation is, “What has prompted you to want to achieve that goal (fill in the blank) at this time?”
Moreover, introducing new goals with measurable benefits motivates customers to move out of their status quo. You do not need to wait for a negative event to occur for them to take action. To create demand you use goals that customers were not even aware were achievable. You help them calculate what the cost of doing nothing equals in dollars. Additionally, when finding out goal motivation, you often uncover the next filter of current situation.
Current Situation (Influencer)
Customers’ current situations influence the goals they want to achieve. They calculate the value of achieving proposed goals by comparing it with what value they receive from what they are presently doing to achieve those goals. Again, the greater the difference between them, the stronger is the goal motivation. Measurable value always makes it easier to calculate these differences, and it motivates customers to act more quickly.
Example
Billy Thomas, a plant manager, has a goal to reduce defects to 1 per 1,000 units manufactured. His current quality control program has a defect rate of 3 per 1,000. Linda Hart sells high-capacity production equipment. If Linda knew what an individual defect cost, she could determine whether Billy has a strong motivation to pursue this defect-reduction goal.
Plans (Influencer)
The courses of action customers consider in achieving their goals can provide you with valuable insight. They illustrate how much thought and investment customers are giving to achieving their goals. How much influence you exert depends on their commitment to these plans. The more highly developed the plans, the less you can influence them. You influence their plans by introducing new systems of evaluation (SOEs) that more accurately measure their goals.
Example
Billy plans to add a new permanent shift to increase production by 30 percent (goal) rather than buying new production equipment. Linda asks Billy how he decided between those two choices. He explains that when he calculated the labor costs—including fringe benefits, insurance, and overtime (SOEs)—compared with purchasing equipment, it made more financial sense. Linda shows Billy that if he includes training and turnover costs (additional SOEs), adding a shift might not be the most cost-effective way to increase production. In addition, leasing rather than buying new equipment to create positive cash flow (a new SOE) might be a more profitable course of action.
Plans consist of the broad methods customers are considering to achieve their goals. When these plans have specific products attached to them, you are dealing with the next filter of alternatives.
Alternatives (Influencer)
Customers might be considering specific products from your competitors to achieve their goals. This filter differs from plans because competition exists. It also means competitors are further along in sales opportunities than you are. These proposed products influence the goals customers want to achieve. As discussed in Chapter 3, customers often consider their goal to be the purchase of specific products.
Two reasons prompted the use of the word alternatives instead of the word competition:
When you think of competition, you naturally think of competitors in only your industry. Yet, customers often consider alternatives outside your industry. Many industries, not only yours, are trying to achieve customers’ goals better than you can and win whatever money is available. When you reference this filter to goals (“What other ways are you looking to improve reliability?”) and not to specific products, you will discover if any nontraditional competitors exist.
Example
Walter Jones sells air-conditioning equipment. Tara Stein, the operations manager of a hotel/casino, explains that there is a big push to improve profits. Tara is positive she can reduce electrical costs to improve profits. She tells Walter she is ready to buy his equipment because it provides a two-year payback, which is eight months faster than any other air-conditioning company.
A week later, much to his surprise, Walter learns that he lost the sale. Why? The facility manager of the casino used the funds for a new air-conditioning system to purchase four slot machines that provide a six-month payback. Walter did not lose the sale to any of his usual competitors. He and Tara lost her budget money to a slot machine. Join the crowd.
What could Walter have done differently? He should have asked Tara if the other departments in the casino were also examining ways to improve profits. Once he found out what they were, Walter could have asked her how the casino would fund the different initiatives. If Tara told him on a corporate rather than on a departmental level, he would have known that he was competing against nontraditional competitors vying for limited funding. He could have used SOEs that also included costs such as downtime and guests who did not return because of poor climate control in their rooms or gambling areas. These SOEs would have added to his electrical savings, further lowering his payback. In addition, leasing might have made positive cash flow another key SOE that favored his products.
When customers’ measurable goals match up to your unique strengths, you can outvalue anyone. Therefore, if you define your market segment correctly, your only competition is whether you can help customers prioritize and justify achieving their goals. Take great satisfaction when the competitors refer to you as the “competition.” Do not let customers think you consider other companies as competition.
Example
Rich wants to buy a sports car. He goes to a Chevy dealership to look at Corvettes. Rich is not certain what he wants. Inevitably, Marty, the salesperson, in trying to flush out Rich’s preferences, asks, “What other cars have you been considering?” Rich asks Marty which ones he thinks are similar. He says, “BMWs or Porsches.” Rich responds, “Thanks for the tip. I will get back to you after I check them out.”