RAYMOND PIROUZ

Author, consultant and lecturer currently teaching MBA Marketing Core at Ivey Business School

Bruce Coxhead should take a step back, evaluate his assumptions and start from scratch. He shouldn’t have to convince his customer to buy. If you have to convince your customer, you are in a very tight spot.

He is adopting a hard-driving sales orientation wherein he is focused on communicating features, benefits and, most important of all, the numbers (price, total cost of ownership, time to payback). The flaw in taking this approach is that he is orienting the customer’s decision criteria around what’s killing his proposal: price, total cost of ownership and time to payback. He is allowing his sales tactic to drive market positioning, with negative longterm consequences in terms of how the brand is perceived and positioned in the marketplace (especially relative to any competitors).

Is the customer actually looking for a profitable solution or is Coxhead? Is the word profit important enough to emphasize as it relates to the value he promises to deliver to his customer? Here is the completed, optimal question: “How can I propose the optimal solution for my customer so that price isn’t a key factor in their decision criteria?” If you can answer that question (or at least work on how to best answer it), I suspect you’ll have yourself a roster of customers happy to pay your asking price.

One of the most troubling aspects of Coxhead’s orientation is that he is willing to walk away from a sales opportunity and wait for “tightening standards around how industrial products could be recycled,” indicating that he finds the process of communicating the value of his product so difficult that he is willing to catch customers in a corner wherein regulations force their hand.

At this point, Coxhead has two choices: 1) Dig in his heels and wait for regulations to force the hand of his customers, which can certainly be quite a profitable option so long as the industry is highly regulated and he is the only brand competing in the space (or one of a few); 2) Take a step back, evaluate his assumptions and start from scratch with a customeroriented approach.