Supplemental Materials from

Gary Kunath

VALUE BASED SELLING

10/8/02

As always in this space, we are not trying to summarize the speaker’s ideas, to extract the “key points,” or to tell you what was important in the presentation. Your judgment about what really mattered for you is the important thing: you heard the talk, you have your notes and the handouts, and you have the tapes. We are just offering some additional thoughts of our own that we hope might further expand the value you derive from the program.

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1. Gary Recommends.  

Here are three books that Gary Kunath recommends to deepen your ability to practice value-based selling. He contributed chapters to the first two of them.

Unlocking Profits: The Strategic Advantage of Key Account Management (by Lisa Napolitano, Mike Pusateri, and Ginger Conlon) Click Here

The Trust Imperative: The Competitive Advantage of Trust-Based Business Relationships (by Roger Dow, Lisa Napolitano, and Mike Pusateri) Click Here

Managing Customer Value: Creating Quality and Service That Customers Can See (>by Bradley T. Gale and Robert Chapman Wood) Click Here

2. A Resource-Rich Website.

The Strategic Account Management Association – of which Kunath is a director – maintains an excellent website, with many full-text articles and many links relating to all aspects of value-based selling. This link will take you there: http://www.strategicaccounts.org/public/career/index.asp

3. Getting Different.

Kunath reinforced something that has become a touchstone for our thinking about how the Masters Forum should add value to our members’ professional and personal endeavors. He echoed something Gary Hamel has been saying about successful businesses: that they don’t just focus on getting better; they find ways to get different.

Hamel says that there is no room for me-tooism in today’s – and tomorrow’s – dynamic marketplaces. Only the farsighted, imaginative, and persistent will succeed. “We have reached a tipping point,” he writes, “a point where the cumulative impact of social, geopolitical, technological, organizational and biological discontinuities has changed change itself. We are about to find out which organizations are truly resilient and which are not.”

We’ve heard that kind of talk before. But when you look around these days, you realize that as the “irrational exuberance” evaporates, the landscape that Hamel projects is increasingly the one in which we live. It makes his characteristically amusing aphorism – “On the road to the future, are you the windshield or the bug?” – more biting and less laughable.>

Kunath’s essential advice was: Get different. That idea was contained in the brief exercise he conducted when he asked you to notice everything white in the room, and then suggested that when you look for white you don’t really notice green – and it just might be green that really matters. Your sales strategies and your sales personnel have to get different. “That’s what your salespeople do,” he admonished. “They walk in looking for the white, because that’s what they know. But the customer sees the world in green.”

Kunath mentioned Gilbarco Veeder-Root (www.gilbarco.com) as an example of a company that has prospered from getting different. Gilbarco makes gas pumps and has grown to 42 percent market share from 24 percent because “they don’t behave like they sell gas pumps.” They offer end-to-end solutions for the specific problems their customers face. Somebody lost that 18 percent of market share; some of Gilbarco’s competitors are feeling like the bug, not the windshield.

If you listen to Kunath’s presentation again on your audiotape, you may notice how strong is the subtext about getting different.

4. Taking it to the Life Level (1)

As you may remember, it’s our view that the best business ideas often have application to your personal life, as well.

Kunath’s “three-box-model” says that a successful supplier has to understand what the client and the client’s customers care about – what keeps them up at night; what will be important to them in the foreseeable future; what they have to rely on to win. A salesperson must show how what s/he is offering relates to those concerns – and the best offers are built by drawing from all the resources the company has to offer.

There are two ways in which that model might relate to us personally. First, it reminds us that in communication with others, what’s on the communicator’s mind will be heard better if it relates not just to the concerns of the listener, but also to the concern’s of the listener’s primary influencers. For example, lecturing one’s children about right and wrong, or about how to act, is sometimes less than fully effective. In Kunath’s terms, it’s like the salesman who’s going to sell boxes because boxes are what he has to sell, regardless of what the customer needs. Sometimes the customer thinks he needs boxes, so he’ll buy them; often he doesn’t, so there’s no sale. It is likely that a parent who can relate to what keeps his or her children up at night will be more successful at imparting important information.

Taking that one step farther, there is a lot of research showing that in many situations, children are more influenced by their peers than by their parents. A 1998 book, The Nurture Assumption, made headlines (including a Newsweek cover story) with its claim that almost all of a child’s development is shaped by social interactions outside the home. (If you want to read more about the book and its author’s views, go to http://home.att.net/~xchar/tna/) So, just as a value-based salesperson wants to know about the customer’s customers, a parent might want to understand more about a child’s friends.

Steven Covey was almost certainly right when he said, “The one who listens does the most work, not the one who speaks.” “Listening” to the lives of those we want to speak to (or sell to) can make all the difference.

(And here’s a bonus thought that has always interested us. Michael Caine once said that the way an actor “sells” a role to an audience is not through what s/he says, but how s/he listens. Here are Caine’s words: “The greatest advice I can give to someone who wants to act in film is to listen and react . . . That's what it is, that's what movie acting is. It's listening, for God's sake, listening. And people don't listen. You see some actors on screen, especially inexperienced actors, their faces like that, waiting for their cue, and then they say their line. But if you look at a person when they're talking, their face changes as they listen to you.”)

5. Taking it to the Life Level (2)

Kunath urged us to view our organizations as a collection of resources that can be applied to solving a customer’s problems. You might note that the analog to that perspective is central to many approaches to personal development. A core assumption in NLP (neurolinguistic programming), for instance, is that you have all the resources you need to solve any problem you face – it’s just that we sometimes don’t know they’re there, or don’t know how to access them. (To read some of the fundamental principles of NLP, go to http://www.dianeross.com/nlp.htm -- one of thousands of web pages on the subject.)

Being able to view things as “collections of resources” is a capacity that comes to some people relatively easily, and for others is more difficult. In a classic Harvard Business Review article titled “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?”, Abraham Zaleznik said that one of the ways in which “leaders” are in fact different from “managers” is that leaders instinctively see organizations as collections of resources that can be directed toward a goal, whereas managers tend to accept organizational goals, boundaries, and structures as they are. You can read Zaleznik’s great article – for a fee – at harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu

6. Return on People, Revisited.

Remembering that Kunath said that “people value added” drives all economic value added, and that he said that HR functions are high on his list of those organizational units that have not “sold” their true importance within most organizations, we refer you back to last month’s “big ideas” page, where we suggested that you might look at Geoff Colvin’s Fortune article on measuring human resource contributions (www.ilr.cornell.edu), or that you might want to know about the “Return on People” analytical model constructed by a Minneapolis-based company, Personnel Decisions International.