What the Customer Wants You to Know

How Everybody Needs to Think Differently about Sales

By: Ram Charan

Narrated by: Dick Hill

The best-selling author of What the CEO Wants You to Know teaches you how to rethink sales from the outside in.

More than ever, these days, the sales process often turns into a war about price: a frustrating, unpleasant war that takes all the fun out of selling. But there's a better way to think about sales, says best-selling author Ram Charan, who is famous for clarifying and simplifying difficult business problems.

Instead of starting with your product or service, start with your customer's problems. Focus on becoming your customer's trusted partner, someone he or she can turn to for creative, cost-effective solutions that are based on your deep knowledge of your customer's values, goals, and problems. This powerful book will teach you:

How to gain a deeper knowledge of your customer's company, including costs, values, and how decisions really get made

How to help your customer improve margins and drive revenue growth

How to focus on your customer's customers

How to work with other departments in your own company to customize better solutions

How to make price much less of an issue

Someday, every company will listen more closely to the customer, and every manager will realize that sales is everyone's business, not just the sales department's. In the meantime, this eye-opening book will show you how to get started.

©2007 Ram Charan (P)2008 Tantor

Critic reviews

"An insightful theorist." (Jack Welch)
"The most influential consultant alive." ( Fortune)

Solution Selling for dummies

Solution selling has been around for many, many years. I am disappointed to read such a basic, almost obsolete book from Ram. The title is deceptive, the book is not about what the customer wants to know. It's about the basic concepts in complex sales process and the essence of solution selling.

The book starts with a story of a salesperson who leads with product and price and does not even understand who plays which role in the sales process. I don't believe there are companies who hire such people anymore. I expect the most basic sales department to do much better.

I am returning this book.

Old Stuff

If you've been operating from a cave for the past 10 years you might find some new thought here but the notion of protecting margins by adding value is at least a 10 year old concept.

I was very disappointed in this audio book. I can do a lot better myself!
Chris Reich
TeachU.com

Rehash

I've heard this a million times, it is scary that my grandfather used to say all of those things. There is nothing new to this book unless you have been living in a cave for the last 20 years.