The document discusses an interviewing approach called GPIV® that can give salespeople a competitive advantage. GPIV® stands for gaining information, developing insights, determining implications, and creating value for customers. It involves identifying customers' goals, understanding the problems preventing those goals, and exploring implications to develop insights and offer value beyond just solving immediate problems. Implementing GPIV® effectively requires workshops where salespeople practice the approach on real cases and develop communication strategies under coaching. When done well, it can change relationships with customers.

1. www.petercoeckelbergh.be Peter Coeckelbergh
21 January 2018
GPIV® an interviewing approach that gives you competitive advantage
Peter Coeckelbergh
19 January 2018
Most likely the most important core competence of consultants, account managers and sales people
is to gain “insight” in the organisation of their contacts and prospects. Acclivus Corporation
(www.acclivus.com) defines “gaining Insight” as “looking beyond the obvious”.
Those insights create the opportunity for the selling organisation to offer more value than your
competitors. This is exactly what will differentiate your organisation and create customer preference
and retention.
The structure below is inspired by the Acclivus model. It’s geniality lies in the simplicity.
We can see that there is a logic relationship between the information we have about our customer,
the differentiating insights we develop and the value we can offer to our customer. This proves that
it is no longer sufficient to just listen to your customers to make the difference. Hence the listening
capabilities of your organisation is the first and extremely important step.
Old school sales training would therefore teach people which questions to ask. How often did it
happen that I asked sales people what this meant for them? Too often the answer was limited to: It is
important to ask open questions.
My point of view is not to focus on the question but to focus on the information you want to have
about your customer or prospect.
Much of this information is available on internet, often on the site or on news sites. Financial
information can be found on specialised sites. A professional sales man should spend sufficient time
to look this information up before meeting the customer. This information however can be found by
InformaWon
Insight
Added
Value
Trust
Sustainable
RelaWonship

2. www.petercoeckelbergh.be Peter Coeckelbergh
21 January 2018
others as well. Besides the possibility to prepare yourself better than your competitors it does give
you a competitive advantage.
Therefore the role of sales man, account managers and consultants in this process of collecting
information is a very critical one. Your commercial staff needs to have advanced intelligence skills in
order to collect more information than your competitors. This requires besides correct attitude and a
certain intellectual level very specific communication skills, strategies and tactics.
In this paper we explore a very specific and possibly one of the most important ones.
Historically there many different theories on selling have been developed. You find a detailed
overview on https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/history-of-sales-methodologies.
In big lines you could say that the early theories consisted of identifying one or a other way in
identifying the needs of the customer and focussing in proving to the customer that you fulfilled all
of its needs. (Xerox – Professional Selling Skills - 1972).
In 1988, Neil Racham introduced SPIN selling. A methology that focuses on identifying the problems
of the customer and exploring with the customer the implicatons of these problems and the his
needs to solve these problems.
When I started training for Acclivus corporation I got new insights. Acclivus developed a questioning
approach that goes beyond the customer’s problem. What is the underlying reason to encounter a
problem of any kind? The answer is simple. Customers have goals they want to reach. Every single
thing that prevents them to achieve that goal is a problem for the customer.
A customer may want to grow. That is a goal. There may be a multitude of obstacles. Maybe he lacks
capital, maybe he lacks management capacity, may be he does not have the right know how, may be
he does not have sufficient market knowledge, may be he does not have sufficient production
capacity or IT capacity or several of these issues may occur at the same time.
Possibly this customer does not only to grow. He may want to grow profitably. He may want to
achieve a higher market share or increase its shareholder value.
It is very likely that when a sales man is called in, the customer only addresses one of his problems
only and looks for a solution for that specific problem. Even more likely the customer has already
identified a solution and just looks for the cheapest offer.
If the customer wants that that is ok. But where does it leave you a selling organisation? The risk is
high that you end up in a price discussion where in the best case you can discuss about the total cost
of ownership of your product or service.
It is therefore for a sales person to be steer a conversation in such a way that he is able to identify
the real goals of its customers and prospects. Goals may be as well at a corporate, divisional or
personal level. In all cases a multitude of goals can be identified.
Only if you know the goals one can understand which problems or obstacles the customer or
prospect perceives. Perception is the right word in this paragraph. Often problems are perceived and
are not real problems. Many times customers have overlooked problems or the solution to the
problem has become a goal on itself. Discussions on problems in relationship to the goals are very
often interesting to the customer as they give them new insights. These insights may have value for
the customer.

3. www.petercoeckelbergh.be Peter Coeckelbergh
21 January 2018
We borrowed from Neil Rackham the concept to link problems with implications. The bigger the
implications of a specific problem the more value you can offer your customer if you solve that
problem. Again here often the implication of a problem may be mixed up with the underlying
problem. Attempts to understand the implications of specific problems can again lead to interesting
insights, also for your customer.
Finally the next level your commercial has to achieve is to create Value for your customer. This may
take many different forms. Of course your service and product is a very important value contributor.
But your organisation my offer value in many different ways.
In our paper “Selling is facilitating the customer buying process” we show how the GPIV® approach
can be applied at very different moments in the buying process and shows how your company may
offer value long before you know which product or service you will offer your customer.
Another way of defining selling is “Facilitating that a customer achieves his goals”. In the paper
mentioned above we explain why and how you should evaluate with your customer to which degree
he was able to reach its goals. Possibly the customer has new goals or has modified his goals more or
less. New problems may have arised. New opportunities to create value for your customer may have
been created.
You no doubt ask yourself how you can implement the GPIN®. Many of you will think it is too
complicated. It is certainly correct that it is not going to happen automatically. If however you can
manage that commercial staff understands the power of the GPIN® approach he will start thinking
differently about his customer. Different thinking leads to changes in behaviour.
My biggest successes in implementing it was through workshops in which we applied the approach
on real cases and where the participants developed themselves communication strategies to get the
GPIN® from their customer. In some cases we applied to map Key Account Management. It must be
said that we only were successful implementing the method through intensive coaching by the sales
management and by repetitive workshops.
The results however were each time again successful and changed the relationship between the
participants and their customers.
For more information:
Peter Coeckelbergh
+32 498 11 00 80
www.petercoeckelbergh.be

4. www.petercoeckelbergh.be Peter Coeckelbergh
21 January 2018