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What is Your Value Proposition?

In the last few months, we've been discussing how your products or services integrate into your customers’ businesses and processes. We've asked whether you can discuss these integrations intelligently as we think it's imperative that in order to sell professionally, you understand your customers business and their processes so you can intelligently discuss how your company can add value with your products and/or services. This ability is commonly referred to as being able to present a Value Proposition for each product and/or service and how they integrate with your customers’ business and/or processes. Have you developed formal written Value Propositions for each ...
Are You Able to Intelligently Discuss Your Customers’ Processes?

For those of you who sell products or services that are used within your customers’ businesses and/or processes being able to intelligently discuss how your products or services can impact and benefit your customers’ processes and business is essential for you to be able to sell. We believe it's impossible to develop a value proposition that relates to a customer without this skill set. It amazes us how many salespeople do not take the time to study their customers’ businesses and their processes. It's obvious to us, from our backgrounds, that this intelligence is essential. However, this intelligence takes a lot ...
Do You Know Why a Customer Should Buy From You? (Part 2)

Last month we asked the title question: “Do you know why customers should buy from you?” and we listed 4 bullet points. In today's newsletter we will want to discuss in more detail the first question we asked, which was: “Do you have a firm grasp of how your product or service integrates with customer processes and the value that integration brings to your customer?” The truly professional salesperson is a value-oriented salesperson. One who can communicate the value their company’s product or service can bring to the customer. It is virtually impossible to do this without understanding the customer's processes or ...
Do You Know Why a Customer Should Buy From You?

This seems like a fundamental question, but do you know why a prospective customer or customer should buy from you? We find many companies initiate market activities to a selected group of customers not really knowing the value they can provide to these customers. This begs a few fundamental questions: Do you have a firm grasp of how your product or service integrates with customer processes and the value that integration brings to your customer. Are you familiar with your customer processes and are you able to intelligently discuss these processes to determine if you can bring value with your product ...
Are You Replicating Your Successes with Lookalike Targeting?

It's surprising to us that the title of this article is not an integrated part of most companies’ marketing efforts. It just seems logical that if you had success marketing a specific product to a specific market and/or a specific process that your company would focus on these successes. It's not an easy process, it takes focus and commitment, but it can be done. It simply takes time and effort to analyze your company’s most profitable projects and or products and review and list the companies that were sold these projects and or products and do the research to determine other ...
Do You DO A Good Job Of Executing A Consistent Market Plan?

Do you have a “Market Plan”? At Strategen we define a market plan as the segment of the overall business plan that states: What you're going to sell. To whom you're going to sell it. How you were going to execute this plan including all market communications that may be necessary. Developing this kind of plan, in the detail that's necessary is a formidable task. However, in order to develop new markets and penetrate existing markets this kind of detail is necessary. Have you ever tried to write down, in detail, exactly what you sell? Have you ever tried to write down, ...
Are You Happy With the Performance of Your Manufacturing Team?

Do you have a set of metrics to determine the performance of your manufacturing team? Are these metrics broken into subgroups for each manufacturing department? Another way to ask the question is how do you know if you're manufacturing team is performing at peak performance? Are there key performance indicators that you should be measuring to determine manufacturing performance? In our experience we've discovered 2 performance metrics that, if measured for each sub function in manufacturing, can provide a good picture of overall manufacturing performance. Those metrics are staying within budgeted hours and completing the function (or delivering) on time. Many manufacturing ...
Do your product/projects meet your customers’ expectations?

The title of this newsletter “Do your products/projects meet your customers’ expectations?” Is a critical question that you should be asking constantly in your business. The first question I would have for you is how do you know if your products/projects meet customer expectations? Do you have the infrastructure in place to measure customer satisfaction? The infrastructure may be different for a product-oriented business versus a project-oriented business, but the results need to be the same. We need the infrastructure to be sure that we meet customer expectations for every single product/project we ship. That implies that you understand, up front, ...
Are your projects completed at or below budget expectations?

Completing projects or delivering products at or below your budgeted cost expectations is critical in meeting financial projections for your company. While this is intuitively obvious, our experience tells us that the metrics required to determine this on a real time basis is something that is not necessarily an active function within all businesses. Do you have the metrics in place to determine accurately your cost performance for your projects or your products? Are these metrics reviewed in real time? And do you have a feedback system that incorporates these metrics into a “root cause” and “corrective action” evaluation and solutions ...
Do your projects ship on time?

Delivering on time, in our experience, is a measure of quality. And in order to ship/deliver a product or project on time we believe it is imperative to track this metric and report it for every function that has any responsibility for a product or project. I guess the primary question is do you measure shipment or delivery on time? Is it an important metric in your business? Do you measure and report the sales function “turning over”/releasing an order with all the required information to the next business functions in a timely fashion? For example, in capital equipment markets, does ...