A Relevant Strategy
By Joe Calloway
In the thirty years that I have been in business, I have never wavered in this belief: let me know more about the customer than my competition knows, and I will be positioned to win. As I look back on the business ideas I’ve tried that didn’t work, and there were a lot of them, the one thing that most of them have in common is a lack of relevance.
I believe that more customers and sales are lost because of irrelevance than because of poor quality, high price, or bad service combined.
In terms of selling, success results from the alignment of understanding customer needs with your own relevance to those needs. My greatest successes in obtaining new business or expanding existing business has always come from my ability to demonstrate relevance.
After having done it wrong for too many years, I finally saw the light and realized that the quality of the research I did before the sales call was what invariably created the win.
I got an email from the VP of Sales for an industrial cleaning company. He told me that they would like for me to submit a proposal to consult with them on ways to increase their sales, and that he would like to schedule an initial telephone call. In the call he opened by saying that he didn’t know how much I knew about his company, but that there were some changes going on that they needed some help with.
I responded by saying that I knew their new CEO came from an operations background, as opposed to the previous CEO who had a sales background. I also knew that they were successfully emerging from a bankruptcy reorganization and that they had completely redesigned their sales and distribution model. The other thing that I felt was important was that new government regulations about the use of cleaning chemicals was impacting everyone on their industry and driving a rethinking about the nature of the basic product and service that they were offering.
At this point, I was relevant.
I continued by saying that rather than submit a proposal for consulting services at this point, I would rather fly to their company headquarters and spend a day with him and others in the company who could help me gain a solid understanding of who they are, where they want to take the company, and how they hoped to get there. I’d be happy to do this on my own dime to help determine whether or not I was a good match for them. If I felt that I wasn’t the best resource for their situation, I’d be happy to recommend someone who I thought would be a better fit.
At this point I was extremely relevant.
He took me up on my offer and I flew to the city where their headquarters was located. When I passed through security at the airport, my contact was there to meet me. He offered his hand and said, “Welcome, Joe. I’m pretty sure you’ve got the job.”
Relevance. And, yes, I got the job.
You can be busy making lots of “Here’s my product isn’t it great!” sales calls and close 10% of them. Or you can make fewer sales calls but be better prepared, more researched and more relevant and close all of them.
My business isn’t a hobby. It has to make a profit. I can’t afford to go broke being busy. I prefer to get rich being relevant.
Never By Chance, the new book by Joe Calloway, Chuck Feltz, and Kris Young, is about creating success by design. Kevin Clancy, Chairman of Copernicus Marketing, says “Highly readable, loaded with innovative ideas and filled with seminal insights from both a consulting and CEO perspective, Never By Chance lays out a plan for aligning people and strategy to dramatically improve market share.” Order the book at engageconsultinggroup.com.
Re-posted from Jeffrey Gitomer's Sales Caffeine Issue 432 with written permission
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