Sales teams negotiate on price or on value. If you are an international manager operating in China, you probably want your Chinese sales teams to add value to the product offering. Value added sales in China usually means one of two things for your clients:

Raising sales
Lowering costs

It is rarely both – though many sales managers seem to think it is.

Now here’s the tricky bit – you have to understand how the client sees value, not try to make him understand your ideas about value.

Let’s look at two examples in China. Al is an advertising salesman for a major entertainment magazine in Shanghai. Bob represents a logistics consultant.

Al thinks his service is about raising sales for the advertisers in his magazine. Is he right? Sometimes. If he is selling to the owner or marketing manager of his prospective advertiser, then he is correct that his Value Added is the ability to bring more customers through his clients’ door. But what if Al is speaking with a media buyer – whose job performance is measured by how many people see her company’s ad or how many magazines their ad is carried in FOR A SPECIFIED BUDGET. Her job is not being assessed by how many customers walk in, but by how far she can make her budget go! She cares more about lowering costs. If Al talks to Ms. Mediabuyer about foot-traffic and revenue increase, she may very well assume that this is the wrong product for her.

What about Bob? Logistics & distribution are costs – and everyone wants costs lowered, right? Again, the real answer lies in figuring out the POV (Point of View) of the decision-maker. Logistics managers and operations people know how much shipping and warehousing should cost in a given market, and they will be very sensitive to controlling those costs. But what if Bob is presenting his marketing pitch to an MD and head of marketing who are going absolutely nuts because they can’t supply the second & third tier clients in Central China? They’re losing a fortune every day, and are willing to spend big rumbas for a solution that will allow them to SELL MORE.

There are two basic methods for attempting to learn more about a client’s POV. The first is guessing. You may get lucky – but more often than not you will guess wrong. That’s why the second method is better: JUST ASK HIM. Ask your client what his situation is and how your product or service could be useful. It may take a while, and he may not give you a useful answer right away. But China-based salesmen are all about building relationships – and this is a very useful thing to discuss over lunch or golf or KTV.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 8:52 am and is filed under Sales Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.