What the Customer Wants You to Know:

How Everybody Needs to Think Differently about Sales

by Ram Charam

This book came to me highly praised, and having seen what an effective speaker Charam is, my expectations were greater than normal. All I can say is that, while there are some approaches and points that are very useful—particularly the sections on account planning—the book’s overall thesis seemed to me a recap of 20 years of value-based selling.

Let’s start with what is useful. I would argue that chapter four in this book, focuses on developing the value account plan, is the best chapter in the book. Many books talk about the need for account planning and a few give templates and approaches to such planning. Charam goes one step further, providing three critical items that must be in each “value account plan” as well as real examples of each of those three items. The three items include:

• A concise description, or snapshot, of the customer
  • Basic information and contacts
  • Total picture of the customer’s business
  • Decision making in the customer’s shop
• A value proposition
  • Customer need
  • Your offerings
  • Your financials (business case)
• The benefits of the value proposition expressed in physical terms—saved dollars, increased cycle time, etc.
  • Your proposed offering’s total cost of ownership

Charam emphasizes the need for the salesperson to network both with various functions inside his/her own organization—such as working with finance to analyze the customer’s five year balance sheet—as well as networking with the customer to make sure the value proposition remains on target. Again, the real value here is not in the theses but in the real-world examples Charam provides to make his case for developing this sort of value account plan.

Charam does make one excellent suggestion, although I doubt many firms will take him up on it. He says that in order to truly understand why the value account plan is different, the executive sales officer has to go through the process of writing one. That means dealing with other internal functions and creating customer relationships. It’s an excellent idea because the executive has to know why this sort of planning is different and more time consuming, but I shake my head at the thought of sales executives having a free six months (for that is about how long it would take) to develop such a plan.

Account planning is, as I said, the most valuable section of the book. The rest of the book purports to offer a new selling style and I was more than prepared to hear about one. But unless I am somehow totally missing the point, what Charam calls value-creation selling is little more than selling value. Charam describes this selling by saying:

"No longer do you measure your own success first. Instead, you measure success by how well your customers are doing with your help. You’re not focused on selling a specific product or service; you’re focused on how your company can succeed in all the ways that are important to the customer. By tapping the many resources you have at your disposal to help customers meet their business goals and priorities, you are adding value."

Now God knows I cannot disagree with this point, but the question I ask is, How is this approach different from value-based or solutions-based selling? It seems to me that Charam has simply rewrapped value-based selling and is offering it as a whole new idea. It isn’t. This does not mean Charam’s isn’t a great approach. Nor does it mean that there aren’t companies out that still use the non-value-based selling approach. I just look at all the high-powered executive blurbs on the back of this volume which promise a “radically new approach to sales and business development” and I have to wonder if there is something I am not seeing.

Take a look and see what you think and let me know if you think I have missed the boat here. At the very least, your company could benefit from Charam’s excellent suggestions on account planning. The book is fairly inexpensive used on Amazon.

Reviewed by S4 Consulting

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