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Usually ships in 1 business days | | | | | | 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
? Connect sales 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.
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| | Product Details | | Author: | Ram Charan | | Hardcover: | 192 pages | | Publisher: | Portfolio Hardcover | | Publication Date: | December 27, 2007 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 1591841658 | | Product Length: | 8.3 inches | | Product Width: | 5.76 inches | | Product Height: | 0.74 inches | | Product Weight: | 0.6 pounds | | Package Length: | 8.1 inches | | Package Width: | 5.4 inches | | Package Height: | 0.9 inches | | Package Weight: | 0.15 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 21 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 21 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 found the following review helpful:
 Your customer wants strategic value not commodities Jan 19, 2008
By Craig Matteson
I really enjoyed this book on sales. It is a topic with forests of books in print. Many cover the same core principles, while others have found ways of putting swamp gas in print. This is one of those that has something good to say and does it concisely.
We have all heard and experienced the vastly increased competition, the compressed product life cycles, the adoption and dismissal of business strategy fads, and much more. Here Ram Charan introduces his idea about the Value Account Plan and not trying to compete on lower prices and thinner margins.
The idea is to get to know your customer intimately. You have to use everyone in your organization and gather everything anyone knows about your customers. What does their org chart and reporting structure look like? How do they make decisions? Who are the strategic decision makers? What are their key concerns? There is obviously much more to know and the point is to gather it all, put it together and the look at it to see your customer clearly. Where there are gaps, work to fill them in.
Once you really understand your customer, you can match and tailor your resources to provide value in ways that your customer does not yet expect or understand. You can match your expertise and products to help your customers accomplish their most strategic goals and make yourself a partner in their success instead of a purveyor of commodities at the lowest prices.
I think it is a terrific book and approach. But it means organizing your sales effort through the WHOLE company rather than just beating up on the account rep and his or her boss. Are you up for it?
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
17 of 22 found the following review helpful:
 Nothing New Here. Feb 03, 2008
By Chris Reich
"Business Physicist and Astronomer"
This book could have been written 10-15 years ago. In one sentence: protect margin by adding value through service. That's it. The material is so basic and repetitious that I found it very tedious to just finish reading the book in hopes of learning something.
If you want easy to read business books with current thinking, take a look at Seth Godin's collection of offerings.
Regrettably, many books are now being hyped by a "system". Authors have a few friends post rave reviews to pump duds. This is one of them.
Chris Reich
15 of 20 found the following review helpful:
How Value Creation Can Transform the Selling Process Dec 27, 2007
By Robert Morris
In all of his previous books (notably Execution co-authored with Larry Bossidy and then Know-How), Ram Charan focuses his attention on how to achieve and then sustain superior organizational performance. Another earlier work, What the CEO Wants You to Know, is an excellent companion for What the Customer Wants You to Know because it helps those in sales - as well as those who supervise them -- to understand the customer's business more broadly. In fact, the inspiration for the Customer book came from the CEO book. Charan explains in it why traditional sales approaches are unable to satisfy what customers want salespeople to know: How their business works and how they can make it work better. "The heart of the new approach to selling is an intense focus on the prosperity of your customers." Value Creation Selling (VCS) is the foundation of what Charan recommends.
He notes that VCS is "sweepingly different from how most companies sell today in these five ways: "First, you as a seller and your organization devote large amounts of time and energy - much more than you do today - to learning about your customers' businesses in great detail...Second, you use capabilities and tools that you've never used before to understand how your customers do business and how you can help them improve that business...Third, you're going to make it your business to know not only your customers but also your customers' customers...Fourth, you have to recognize that the execution of this new approach will require much longer cycle times to produce an order and generate revenue...Finally, top management in your company will have to reengineer its recognition and reward system to make sure that the organization as a whole is fostering the behaviors that will make the new sales approach effective."
In this volume, Charan examines these and other issues in great detail and with meticulous care. Having briefly identified the "what," he then devotes most of his attention to HOW. For example:
1. How to fix "the broken sales process"
2. How to become a customer's trusted partner
3. How to formulate the "Value Account Plan"
4. How to create a Vale Creation Sales Force
5. How to make the sale
6. How to sustain the VCS process
7. How to take VCS to the next level
Earlier I referred to Charan's somewhat more narrow focus as he explains why traditional sales approaches are unable to satisfy what customers want salespeople to know. That's true but it should be noted that Charan views the VCS process - if properly formulated and then effectively implemented - should directly or at least directly involve everyone within the given enterprise. In fact, because the VCS process is information-driven, he strongly recommends that external sources also be utilized to obtain the information needed about each customer and its business. Those sources include online and electronic business media as well as vendors and research analysts within the given marketplace. Thorough as always, Charan even suggests what kinds of questions should be asked to determine specific information needs and objectives.
Organic growth is at the top of every company's agenda. Many growth strategies do not get the right mileage because the sales function remains in the previous age. This book proposes value creation selling as a way to differentiate any business from its competitors. It enables the sales forces to break out from what Charan considers "commoditization hell." Here's a key point: When a customer sees that the selling company is creating value on a consistent basis better than anyone else's offering, the sales force has a better chance to sustain more profitable pricing.
Near the conclusion of the book he observes: "Transforming a sales force from transactional selling to one that creates value for the customer is a long journey...Every part of the company has to put the customer first...Virtually every company will have among its customers some who are progressive and fully understand the value of collaborating with their suppliers to the mutual benefit of both. Start there, and don't turn back...Above all, value creation selling will spur your company to come up with new ideas and innovations that will continually differentiate it in the highly competitive business environment of the twenty-first century. It is the pathway to a prosperous future."
Charan then offers an appendix that can help each reader to diagnose the state of value creation selling in her or his own company, once the VCS process is underway. He recommends that this self-audit of 15 key components be evaluated using a scale of 1 to 10 (from "definitely not" to "definitely yes") and that it be completed four times a year. This same self-audit can also be used to assess the company in relation to its competition.
After I read this book and then began to organize my thoughts about it before composing this review, it occurred to me that everything Charan recommends is also relevant to business development initiatives because prospects as well as current customers favor those who have obviously made a great effort to know how their business works and how they can make it work better. Granted, current customers are generally more inclined to share information than are prospective customers. Nonetheless, in my opinion, those in sales who do their homework gain a decisive competitive advantage because of their "an intense focus on the [prospect's] prosperity."
If you share my high regard for this book, I urge you to check out the aforementioned What the CEO Wants You to Know, Execution and Know-How as well as If Only We Knew What We Know co-authored by Carla O'Dell and C. Jackson Grayson, Patrick Lencioni's Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, and Creating New Wealth from IP Assets co-authored by Robert Shearer and other members of the National Knowledge & Intellectual Property Management Taskforce.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 Not Sales 101 but Basic Sales 100 Feb 26, 2010
By OpenHeart
"OpenHeart"
This book has taken a basic Sales Class and provided new terminology to old techniques with really nothing new at all. To go out and find a few companies that were using the wrong tactics and then turned it around using the right tactics is not a new miracle cure for the industry. Their main theme called "Value Creation Selling" has been around for many decades. The book is not wrong in what it is teaching but it is stuff that I learned under a different title many years ago. Not quite up to Dale Carnegie standards. Your money would be better spent on a book called "How to Win Friends and Influence People". This is not a waste of time but is really nothing new.
4 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 Yesterday's News Feb 18, 2008
By Loyd E. Eskildson
"Pragmatist"
Ram Charan has authored some excellent books - this isn't one of them. It's basically a reminder of something fundamental that should have been undertaken long ago.
The basic message is that instead of focusing on your product and the customer's typical price fixation, get to understand the customer's situation - his problems, goals, and how you and your company can help improve their margins and revenue growth. To achieve this, one also should get to know one's customers' customers.
Follow-up to insure this is taking place is important - Charan suggests doing so in sales review meetings. The bad news, however, is that more and more products have become commodities - thus, price will remain the focus, no matter how much you'd like to do more for the customer.
See all 21 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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