3. Helping our Customers Understand
our Value
“What sets the best suppliers apart is not the
quality of their products, but the value of their
insight—new ideas to help customers either
make money or save money in ways they didn’t
even know were possible.”
Dixon, Adamson - 2011
4. Main Concepts
Teaching for Differentiation – Stand out from the Crowd
Tailoring for Resonance – Credibility
Taking Control of the Sale – Make a Difference
Be bright, be brief and be gone…
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5. First things first – What is our Value
Proposition?
We need to arm our teams with compelling
business cases
Customer
Developed through insight from
Business Plans
Outcome Driven Solutions (ODS)
CONOPS/Subject Matter Experts
Cultural Exchange Program
Joint Customer Innovation work-shops Competitors Our Company
Consistently delivered and is easy for our
Customer to understand
Requires Us to Truly Understand our Offerings
6. The Template
What We Want to Share with You
The Warmer…
Reframe the Problem
Why Does it Matter?
Emotional Impact
Paint the Picture of the New Way
Build a pitch that leads to your solution,
not with it
6
8. What we want to share with you
Needs to be focused on the problem the customer is
trying to solve not our solution
Needs to focus on what the Customer is going to get
out of the presentation
We need to demonstrate we have a deep expertise in
their business and we will teach them something they
did not know coming into the meeting
We’re not here to “sell”
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9. The warmer…
State the customer’s challenge
State what we have seen at other Companies /
Countries / Services in a similar situation
What you want from this slide is to start the
conversation to discover the customers needs
Time to Validate our Assumptions
9
10. Reframe the problem
Start to change the way the customer thinks about the
problem they are trying to solve.
Graphics / Tables are good
The test for this slide is the customer saying “Huh, I’d
never really thought about it that way before.”
This must be focused where we have a value proposition
Customer Agreement is the Kiss of Death
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11. Start building the solid business case for why it
matters (This can be a couple of slides)
Use data that we have gathered using our expertise to
“drown them” in rationale why this makes sense.
Continue to teach the customer based on our Subject
Matter Expertise something about their business /
CONOPS they did not know before you walked in the door.
This must again be focused where we have a value
proposition
11
12. Add Emotional Impact
Just in case the customer is still skeptical
Make it personal. Example:
Describe a scenario and say something like “would you let
your son or daughter go into harms way with…”
Describe a scenario that emphasizes the waste caused that
the customer can directly relate to.
This has to be credible and believable, they need to see
themselves in the picture you are painting.
Pictures are Worth 1,000 Words
12
13. Paint the picture of the new way
Start to describe how we can help
Here is where we can start to talk about our solution
How it solves the unique issues we have laid out earlier in
the presentation
Analysis of Alternatives if possible is very powerful as it
does the customers job for them
This is the First Time We Discuss our Solution
13
14. Wrap Up
Not a new way of selling
Understand customer’s business better
than they do
Selling with “selling”
Add value to our offering without the
additional cost…Except for our
competition!!
www.linkedin.com
/in/chipgilkison/
14
Editor's Notes
Note: This is a suggested path. Often times the group dynamics, the product/system/service or unique market scenarios take the facilitator on a different path. The facilitator should be highly flexible yet understand the end goal is to provide the sales team a highly useful tool (as outlined in the “Opening Remarks” below.Introductions: - 5 minutesOpening Remarks: - 10 minutes First! PIB Then paint the following scenario: It’s 15 minutes prior to a customer meeting. The customer calls the Rockwell customer contact and states that they would like a presentation on a Rockwell product line that is additional to the original topics of the meeting. The customer contact quickly gets on line and downloads the challenger sales presentation, quickly reviews the content and is sufficiently prepared to deliver the value proposition for the INITIAL customer meeting. This presentation is non-technical (that can come later), it’s tailored to take the customer on the prescribed emotional path and is, in and of itself, simple enough with intrinsic insight for any Rockwell employee to quickly understand and deliver the value proposition.It is unlikely that we will leave this session with a complete Challenger Compliant presentation. Past experience indicates the initial draft usually takes several weeks and undergoes improvements as more customer contact occurs. This workshop is designed to instill the concepts of its development so the team can create the customer presentation independently. Marketing will be leading this message development.Current Customer Presentation Review – 1 Hour The customer account manager, LCVSM or even Engineer runs through a current customer presentation to familiarize the facilitator and the team with the product/service/system. The workshop members should be prompted to write down individual needs on post-it notes.Message Scope Development – ½ HourThe need for this part of the workshop has exhibited itself time and time again. The purpose here is to clearly define to which customer audience the initial draft is intended. If not done to a certain level of specificity, the message development is more difficult to control. Once this is defined, the workshop facilitator can more easily keep the team on task.Break – 15 minutesUnarticulated Needs – 1 Hour Facilitated activity: 1. Write down all customer needs on post-its and place on wall 2. Group those with affinity 3. Move unarticulated needs to another location. Review chart #4 prior to this task. The facilitator needs to scrutinize the unarticulated needs heavily to ensure they are within the value proposition space. 4. Determine which unarticulated need the value proposition message will be developed around. The message scope development activity above usually plays a large role here as the particular customer the presentation is intended for usually simplifies the identification of which unarticulated need to emphasize. Multiple unarticulated needs may be used in a single presentation as long as they are strictly complimentary and do not dilute the message. Also, different customers may be better affected by different unarticulated needs.Message Development – 1 HourReview Micro-DAGR example
