Value Creation Selling and Ram Charan
Phred Dvorak of the Wall Street Journal wrote an article this week about Ram Charan, management guru to the fortune 500,and his new book, What the Customer Wants You to Know: How Everybody Needs to Think Differently About Sales .
Mr. Charan generally writes on management issues, and a book on sales was a surprise for some of his readers.
But many very large companies approach sales in a traditional way that horrified Charan, and this book is intended to help them get on track. He calls his approach value creation selling and encourages firms to focus on knowing their customer and their needs, developing proposals to improve results for the customer, and expanding the sales approach to a team of contacts rather than relying on a single Rambo-style sales assault on major opportunities.
The concept isn’t new* but having a well-respected expert join forces to promote a customer-centric approach is the news and helpful.
Successful professional service firms and government contractors partner with their customers and design solutions to meet the needs of a variety of stakeholders. But many large firms in other industries are still using a dedicated sales force designed to “sell” rather than a team designed to uncover the breadth of stakeholder needs required to be successful.
If your organization is seeing these symptoms, you can help by directing executives to thought provoking material such as this book.
* See The Magic of Winning Proposals, and see What Changed Your Sales Cycle and Why? a white paper of mine from 2005.
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