What the Customer Wants You to Know: How Everybody Needs to Think Differently about Sales by Ram Charan

From the Publisher

From the bestselling author of What the CEO Wants You to Know—how to rethink sales from the outside in

"We have to face the truth: the process of selling is broken. Customers have more choices and are under intense pressure. Yet few companies are facing this reality. When they don't, a lingering malaise sets in."

More than ever these days, the sales process tends to be a war about price—a frustrating, unpleasant war that takes all the fun out of selling.

But there's a better way to think about sales, says bestselling author Ram Charan, who is famous for clarifying and simplifying difficult business problems. What the customer wants you to know is how his or her business works, so you can help make it work better. It sounds simple, but there's a catch: you won't be able to do that with your traditional sales approach.

Instead of starting with your product or service, start with your customer's problems. Focus on becoming your customer's trusted partner, someone he can turn to for creative, cost-effective solutions that are based on your deep knowledge of his values, goals, problems, and customers.

This book defines a new approach to selling—which Charan calls value creation selling—that while radical is nonetheless practical. VCS has been battle-tested in companies in a variety of industries, such as Unifi, Mead-Westvaco, and Thomson Financial. It will enable you to:
• Gain a deeper knowledge of your customer's problems
• Understand how your customer's company really makes decisions
• Help your customer improve margins and drive revenue growth
• Connectsales with other key functions such as finance and manufacturing
• Come up with new customized offerings
• Make price much less of an issue

VCS gets you out of the hell of commoditization and low prices. It differentiates you from the competition, paving the way to better pricing, better margins, and higher revenue growth, built on win-win relationships that deepen over time.

Someday, every company will listen more closely to the customer, and every manager will realize that sales is everyone's business, not just the sales department's. In the meantime, this eye-opening book will show you how to get started.

Publishers Weekly

Charan (Know-How) skillfully and efficiently offers a tutorial on upgrading the productivity of any size company's sales force. His answer: evolve salespeople from "order takers" to knowledgeable ambassadors who approach customers armed with cost-saving solutions they will be happy to pay for Charan's method involves "Value Creation Selling," which at a broad level means reconfiguring a sales force's orientation toward customers' profitability before its own success. The author recommends fostering in salespeople the skills and mindsets of a general manager and equipping them with a "value account plan," or "the document that defines the value proposition and the business benefits the customer can expect to get from it." Charan walks readers through the process of "fixing the broken sales process" with a combination of diagrams and anecdotes from real companies, all while applying the concepts and actions to a booklong case study of a fictitious software company, Sturgis Corporation. The book serves as a practical guide to competing with aggressive price-cutters in today's market. (Jan.)

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