Look at you! You must be exhausted! After all, you’ve come all this way on this long, exciting journey. Want some water? How about a sandwich? Catch your breath. Don’t worry. I’ll do all the talking.
This whole adventure has been about adding value – for your customers and for your strategic partners, like Avnet. It’s been about winning customers, not just deals – and keeping them.
In a way, it seems like just yesterday that we were in the Dagobah swamp with Yoda, promising to DO, not just try. And what, exactly, will we do? Well, we’ll do what it takes to stand out from the pack of box movers, to put “value added” back in front of “reseller,” to entangle ourselves with our customers – in a platonic way, of course.
Once we left Dagobah, we found ourselves in the mountains, gazing on the RESS peaks: Resources, Expertise, Services and Specialization. In the shadows of those verdant hills, we maximized the application of our resources, leveraged our expertise, sharpened up our service offerings and contemplated the virtues of specialization.
But we didn’t RESS long. To find our way out of those mountains, we had to use algebra. The timeless and invaluable equation – “Q x A = E” – was our salvation. Once we understood that our customers’ acceptance of a solution was just as important as the solution’s bells and whistles, we knew we had to start asking questions to truly understand our customers’ toughest business problems. When we weren’t sure whatquestions to ask, we went fishing.
We got so good at asking questions, that we had to use the Bass-O-Matic ’76 to help us prioritize our customers’ problems and decide which ones we would NOT try to fix.
At that point, we realized that our brains were the powerful products in our inventory, and that we could use the skills of asking questions and prioritizing to become consultants and trusted advisors to our customers. We knew that the dreaded “C” word was the key to selling beyond the sale and adding value that would entangle our business with our customers’ for mutual benefit.
Oh. I see you’re still tired from this amazing junket. I’ll pause for now and let you get some RESS – er, REST. Next week, we’ll continue our look back and start planning our next grand adventure. Until them, an Epsom salt bath is just what those sore feet require.
Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant
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