Making positive customers’ goals and filters measurable builds stronger professional and personal relationships—and price and delivery-resistant barriers to competition. Customers can look back on any sale they completed with you and measure how your solutions met or exceeded their goals. Your last sale is a reference for the next one, even if your contacts or sponsors change. You always can point to your documented performance. Remember, you want to be a business partner who helps customers to achieve long-terms goals, not a product vendor who satisfies random short-term needs.
Market Development
In market development, your sales responsibility is to turn neutral or negative customers into positive ones. If you are a new sales hire, you also inherit existing customers from senior salespeople who find them nonproductive (meaning dead ends). Inherit is probably the correct word because you seek to receive benefits from someone considered “dead” by others.
You apply the goals, measurable benefits, and systems of evaluations from your past successes in their market segments to them. Market development is ideal for MeasureMax because you:
Start with a blank slate. Unlike account development, no established method of conducting business exists (or very limited ones with your inherited customers) that might interfere with using MeasureMax.
Help customers make value measurable. You focus on goals, not products, to set you apart from competitors.
Use Spark Interest Statements, which highlight customers’ goals in specific market segments, as excellent icebreakers. They eliminate the usual randomness of initial contacts and the risks of pulse check hinges. You generate interest on the first call as a customer advocate, not a product one.
Sell top down. Again, unlike account development, you have no established pecking order. You can start higher with decision makers more receptive to change.
Avoid the constant and sometimes irresistible urge of the negative sell in which you start explaining why your products are better than those of competitors. Do not force customers to defend their existing suppliers and decisions to use them. Eliminate these sales traps by keeping a positive emphasis on the customers’ goals and how you help achieve them.
The following sales tools set MeasureMax into motion so that the quality and productivity of your selling efforts and the results in both account management and market development soar.
Note To spare you the effort of looking up the various sales tools in their respective chapters, a sample is provided for each one.
Create Product Profile Sheets
Create one Product Profile sheet for each of your products or services as instructed in Chapter 2. To simplify matters if you have numerous ones, just do your top five with their top three features (or, at least, all their unique strengths). Then, do one for your key competitors, but list only their unique strengths. Make a separate profile for your company strengths. Treat them as universal features that might fit on every sales opportunity.
Use a pay-as-you-go strategy; create a new profile when the customers’ goals and filters from MP 2: Measure Potential dictate. (Go to the www.measuremax.com Web site to download the Microsoft Word templates for these tools.) Samples of Product Profile sheets are shown in Exhibit 9-1 and Exhibit 9-2 on the following pages.
Product Profile
Product: Predicto Services
Features
(Adjective/Noun, Specific Characteristic, 2 to 3 Words)
Benefits
(Verb/Noun, Time or Money; 3 to 5 Words)
Value
(MV or (PV)
Focus
(Internal; External; Both)
Unique Strengths
(Y Or N)
Value Rating
(1 or 5)
Variance alerts (on-site monitors)
Prevents unscheduled breakdowns
Measurable value (calculate the costs of downtime)
Both. It ensures uninterrupted shipments to their customers (E) and saves money from lost production (I).
Yes
5
Analogy for Variance Alerts: It is like the low-fuel warning in your car. You look for a gas station before your tank hits empty.
Exhibit 9-1: Product profile sheet.
Competitor Product Profile
Our Product: Predicto Services
Competitor Name: PricePoint Services
List Price $: (if known)
Product Name: Early Alarm Network
Gross Margins %: (if known)
Features
(Specific Characteristic; Adjective/Noun)
Benefits
(Time or Money; Verb/Noun)
Value
(MV or PV)
Focus
(Internal; External; Both)
Unique Strengths Only
Value Rating Of 5
Trends Tracker (remote monitoring)
Prevents unscheduled breakdowns
Measurable value (calculate the costs of downtime)
Both. It ensures uninterrupted shipments to their customers (E) and saves money from lost production (I).
Yes
5
Exhibit 9-2: Competitor’s product profile sheet.
Develop Your Market Profile Sheets
Create one Market Profile sheet for each of your individual market segments as instructed in Chapter 3. If you have numerous segments, just do your top five. Use a pay-as-you-go strategy with these profiles as well. Create them as you need them and before you do MP 1: Spark Interest.
This sheet builds on the Product Profile sheets, so only the first four rows have new information. A sample of a Market Profile sheet is shown in Exhibit 9-3.
Market Profile
Customer Name: Positron
Profit Levels: 30%
Market Segment: Global computer manufacturers
Economic Sensitivity: Cyclical
Annual Sales $: 3 Billion
Organizational Characteristics: 7/24 operations, high-dollar downtime, critical manufacturing tolerances, on-time deliveries and inventory levels critical, sensitive to competitors, receptive to state-of-the-art technologies, revenues of $3 billion, 20,000 employees
# Of Employees: 20,000
Annual Growth Rate: 28%
Position: VP of Operations
Contact Name: Olivia Ontime
Current Use of Similar Products or Services in $: 2 million
Previous Success Stories: Advanced Computer Co., Star Computers, PC Power Ltd., and Computer Giant Inc
Potential Use of Similar Products or Services In $: 3 million
General Goal Category (broad groupings)
Typical Goals (more specific by position)
Benefits of Achieving Goals (in time or money terms; in parenthesis, insert an “I” for internal benefits, an “E” for external ones, and a “B” for both)
Systems of Evaluation (calculations used to determine if goal is achieved)
Products
Feature Rating and Their Benefits (insert a value rating of 1 for regular feature or 5 for unique strength)
Operations
Reduce downtime
Prevent production stoppages (B) and lost revenues (I)
Hours of downtime
Predicto Services
Variance Alerts prevents unscheduled breakdowns (5)
Top Two Competitors
Competitor Product
Competitive Unique Strengths
PricePoint Services
Early Warning Network
Trends Tracker’s remote monitoring
Exhibit 9-3: Market profile sheet.
Use Quick-Entry Sales Management Sheets
No one likes to do paperwork—unless it is worth the return. You are motivated to fill out tax forms if you are getting a refund. Quick-Entry Sales Management (Q) sheets work the same way. Again, if you think of selling methods as diet plans, Qs are the scales you get on to see how they are working. With Qs, you know you are using the same scale every time to see how well you are doing.
Use them to measure, manage, and maximize your sales efforts in black and white, no gray areas allowed. Either you know the specifics of customers’ goals, filters, benefits, systems of evaluations, conditional commitments—and how your solutions match up to them—or you do not.
Use the two-page Qs for the first two phases—MP 1: Spark Interest and MP 2: Measure Potential. Think of them as loose-leaf paper with columns and rows you fill in. (A Microsoft Word template for this tool is also found on the www.measuremax.com Web site so you can fine-tune them to your selling situations.)
A Q sheet takes about ten minutes to complete before you use it, and about ten minutes to fill out after you leave your meeting with the customer. This twenty-minute investment changes the 80/20 rule to the 80/80 law. With measurable information, you can make 80 percent of filled-out Qs generate proposals that produce 80 percent of your sales. It is not 100/100 because 20 percent of your sales still come from commodity-driven customers who equate low price with high-value regardless of your efforts.
Use Qs to record and coordinate your sales activities by market segments, goals, projects, and by contact levels (one Q sheet per decision maker on the same sale).
Step by Step
Qs also guide you through MP 1 and MP 2 by reminding you to get the necessary specifics and their Measurable Phase Changes. Fill in all the information you know before the initial Spark Interest phone call. Leave blank what you need to find out for MP 2: Measure Potential. Once you complete MP 1 and MP 2, you enter in the missing information. You then review your sheets to reflect what you need to achieve during MP 3: Cement Solution and MP 4: Implement Agreement.
Typically, you see patterns emerge when you use Qs as self-management tools. You usually are consistent in what information you make measurable and what you do not. Review whether you are asking the right questions to find them out. If you are asking the right questions, but still are not getting specifics, review your wording and reread Chapter 5. In addition, consider reviewing your Qs at your sales meeting to solicit group input and help. These reviews will help everyone improve his or her command of the process.
On joint sales calls, tell your manager and/or fellow salesperson what you want him to observe that you think you do well on a sales call (i.e., link customers’ measurable answers to the next filter that needs details). Also ask him to observe a specific sales skill (i.e., suggesting SOEs if the customer doesn’t know any to measure the value of achieving his goals) that you think you can do better. When you prompt someone on what to observe on a sales call beforehand, everyone’s sales increase. Like customers, salespeople also win when you manage their expectations.