Just about every course on solution selling tells you that you need to have an intimate understanding of your customer’s or prospect’s business and a deep understanding of their pain points in order to succeed. You should spend time with them getting their detailed requirements documented so that you can then play back to them how your solution can meet their needs.
Great idea! We should all do that. But here’s a different idea – spend time with your customer’s customer! If you understand what they need, you will better understand what your customer needs from you.
One of Avanti’s customers recently replied to a big RFP. Joe Farage, owner of Buffalo Printing Co., western New York’s largest digital printer gave me a call last week to say that he had been shortlisted and needed to give a presentation to the Selection Committee. Joe knew that his competition would be rolling through with their slide deck of a long list of big equipment, infrastructure, years of experience in printing and marketing services. He realized he would need a way to differentiate Buffalo Printing Co. from those folks so he asked some of his strategic partners, including Avanti, to join him in the presentation.
I, of course, jumped at the chance to help. Buffalo Printing Co. leverages most of Avanti’s modules and has one of the most automated workflows out there. I was all set to present my usual deck of slides hyping JDF certifications, a long list of software modules, Avanti’s Platinum partner status with Xerox, automation, etc. However, just chatting to the folks on the Selection Committee, it became immediately clear to me that they really didn’t care about any of that stuff. They were from the Marketing and Communications department of a large enterprise. They couldn’t spell “JDF” if you spotted them the “J” and the “F”, nor did they want to know. Joe did a great job of facilitating the meetings and asked each member of the Committee to give him one word to describe “printing”. He received words back like “quality”, “time sensitive”, “accurate”, “unique”, “appealing”, “fast”, “on demand”.
While they bought a lot of it, print was just something they purchased because they had to; not because they wanted to – it was just one of many things in their marketing arsenal that they used to get their message out and create awareness for their Brand.
What they cared about was trying to manage impossible turnaround times. For example, they talked about the issue of managing large RFP’s for their field folks, where changes are made to their proposal, right to the very last minute, but multiple copies of the final product still needed to be printed, bound, shipped and on someone’s desk, potentially across the country, before the deadline; people not having access to the most current version of a form or document; managing large files submitted by folks who really don’t understand what “print ready” means; giving over 20,000 employees the ability to submit jobs from anywhere at any time; the cost of out of date collateral, printed and sitting on a shelf in the warehouse; and managing the complex chargeback billing for printing across multiple lines of business, divisions and geographies.
Hearing those issues made it very clear to Joe and the rest of the team what our message needed to be and, while it will be a while before a decision is made, I think Joe hit the ball out of the park.
The “win” for Avanti is also clear; knowing what Joe’s prospect needs makes it much easier for us to understand what Joe needs from us, in turn, to be successful.
Give it a try! Ask your customer if you can go on a call with them to one of their customers.
