Are Your Customers Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem?

by Stephen E. Heiman, Diane Sanchez with Tad Tuleja

We're big proponents of a process we call Joint Venture Selling. The basic difference between Joint Venture and traditional selling is the difference between exploring solutions and pushing product. In championing Joint Venture, we're not saying you should never talk about your product or service. In order to relate it to the Customer's Concept (his perceived solution to his problem), you'll have to talk about it at some point. We're only cautioning you against getting stuck in the telling mode, as traditionally trained salespeople are tempted to do. Adopting a Joint Venture approach insulates you from that temptation. It also makes you alert to the dynamics of the call, so you're better able to determine when it's right to be laying out product specs and when it's more appropriate to listen to your customer—in other words, when you should be shifting from Giving Information to Getting Information.

Here's a perfect example of Joint Venture Selling and its benefits: A friend of ours, Dave, had some carpentry work done several years ago. It was complicated trim work, and the carpenter he hired was, at the time, the new kid on the block. Dave wasn't entirely confident about the outcome, but the young carpenter came through beautifully. It wasn't just that he knew how to handle a hammer and saw. He actively involved Dave and his wife in the design and construction of the work. He went over blueprints with them, invited them to inspect the work in progress frequently, and made absolutely sure at every step of the decision–making process that the trim was a perfect fit to their mental picture. "When he put on the finishing touches," Dave told us, "it was exactly what had been in our mind's eye. He had done the cutting and the planning, but the finished product was ours."

That's ownership. But it was only half the story. About two years later, after the carpenter had become well established, Dave hired him again. This time the work wasn't so great. The carpenter had by then taken on three helpers, and one of them was not up to scratch. Halfway through the second project, Dave started to spot obvious defects in the workmanship. But because the carpenter had established such a sound Win–Win relationship with Dave on the previous job, his reaction was very different from what it might have been with someone else.

"If anybody else had put that kind of work in my house," he confided to us, "I would have canceled the contract on the spot. With Jim, I had such a good history of working together that I bent over backward trying to keep him on board. I went to him directly, pointed out my concerns, and gave his firm a week longer than I would have given anybody else to resolve the problems. We worked it out together, and a project that once looked like terminal trouble turned out great."

The lesson is clear. By making your customers part of their own solutions, you make an investment in the future that no amount of quick fixes could ever match. In Joint Venture Selling, the input of the customer leads to long–term business commitments.

Adapted from The New Conceptual Selling Stephen E. Heiman, Diane Sanchez with Tad Tuleja © 1999 by Miller Heiman, Inc., All rights reserved with permission of Warner Books. Inc.