Читать книгу Value Merchants - Nirmalya Kumar - Страница 14

Ultimately, there are three basic sales approaches prevalent in business markets. First is selling on price. Most firms are, however, not set up to sell on price because it requires relentless cost cutting, moving production overseas to low-cost locations, and trading low margins for (hopefully) higher volume. In this type of commodity business, purchasing managers tend to dominate customer interactions, and suppliers have little pricing flexibility. Suppliers can attempt to compete on price, but how many suppliers in a given market can have the lowest price? Just one. Not willing to accept this basic fact, suppliers pursue business through price cutting, often orchestrated by adroit purchasing managers.

To escape this exclusive focus on price, most suppliers pursue a second approach: they claim that they provide superior value—and deserve to be compensated appropriately. Unfortunately for the suppliers, most often this translates into “Trust us, our offerings are worth more.” The claims of superior value are just that—claims! These value assertions are not substantiated by any in-depth analysis on the part of the supplier and therefore cannot be demonstrated nor documented to customers. The result is that suppliers have little choice but to end up competing on price when pressed by purchasing managers. As shown in the IC case, this does not mean that the supplier is not providing superior value; it’s just that the supplier lacks the ability to prove its claims. Even if the supplier and the customer agree that the supplier’s offering delivers greater value than the competitor’s offering, they may have substantially different opinions of what this greater value is worth in monetary terms to the customer.

This brings us to the third approach, which we recommend and develop in this book. Customer value management is a datadriven approach to demonstrating and documenting in monetary terms the superior value that a supplier’s offerings deliver to customers. Competing on price may work if the company has the lowest cost in the industry and chooses to pass it along to customers instead of using this advantage to build differences that are valuable to target customers. But, for most companies, customer value management is a more viable way to enhance business performance. Surprisingly, though, only a few progressive companies follow this approach. Let’s consider the experience of Sonoco.