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Your Business is
Ruled by the Marketplace
"You don't decide what business you are in; the
marketplace decides that for you...
People will only buy what they want to
buy, or are afraid not to buy, at a given moment in time," write
Miles Spencer
and Cliff Ennico in their book "MoneyHunt".
Tailoring your business plan to what the market will buy is always a better,
more successful strategy than
developing a new product or service without
knowing precisely the customers for it and hoping that people would buy it
because it's good.
Creating Customer Value
From the customer's point of view, your company exists only
to
create value for them, to provide them
with results. In the
new
rapidly changing economy the nature of value is changing, involving new
ways to
price goods,
innovation and
emotion.
You need to think in terms of offers, to merge products and services, and to
be innovative to give customers a
value-added experience.
Modern Marketing and Selling as a Team
Sport
"Selling, in the old days, was largely and act of personal
heroism.
 The key to successful selling was knowing the products and the
customers. The effective sales rep would present his or her product or service
in the best possible light, forge a bond with the buyer, and triumph over the
competition," writes Michael Hammer in his book 'Agenda'.
"This approach has little to do with the way sales are made in
today's real world. Today's customers
don't want products; they demand solutions,
and solutions don't come in a box. They must be designed, fashioned to meet the
customer's specific needs. Making such sales takes a lot more than
personal charisma. Today's selling is
system selling, solution
selling, consultative selling; it entails analyzing customer needs, designing
alternative solutions, scrutinizing costs, developing and implementing systems,
and more. This is not the work of a heroic individual sales rep.
Modern selling is a team sport, and a complex one at that. Winning at it takes
discipline and structure. Making it up as you go along is a recipe for
disaster."
Case in Point
Coca Cola
Coca-Cola's national accounts program has long
been noted as a leader in integrated marketing, sales, and any other group
that might touch the customer. Coca Cola devotes to each national account a
team that includes employees from marketing, sales, support, operations, and
finance. They converge on a market, research the
culture, people, and sociology, and then debrief each other. Through
this process they understand their objectives and tasks better and are able
to
outsmart the competition.
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