From Mountain Guides to Manufacturing Guided Selling Systems – It’s All about Trust
Having spent much of my college years in the southwest I developed a passion for hiking and mountain climbing. Every weekend friends of mine and I would head out for the Chiricahua Peak, an old volcanic ridge that towers over 9,700 feet from the desert floor or Mount Lemmon, which towers over Southern Arizona. Getting to the top however of either of these, especially Chiricahua Peak with its meandering trails which had the occasional shy but very loud bighorn sheep looking for fresh berries and food, wasn’t easy. With a good guide, whether it was a GPS or with someone who had been down the trails, it was possible to get to the top of this 9,700 feet mountain in just about 3 hours. Yet without a guide, without insight into how the trails meander and intersect, and how to get to the top – well it would be easy to spend an entire day to just get out of the foothills.
When I think about those hiking trips now and consider how allegorical they are to guided selling strategies in channels today a few take aways emerge:
- Great guides have reputations that precede them; their credibility is from their results – guided selling systems need to do the same. From the first attempt to conquer Chiricahua Peak in a day, my friends and I quickly realized that the standard maps would not cut it. That’s when we went and got USGS maps, GPS coordinates and talked to geology professor who had made the trip in a day. Together all three sources gave us a route we could trust – and it needs to be the same with an excellent guided selling system.
- Guided selling systems need to meet you where you are and speak the language of the user. That would have certainly been the case if the geologic survey maps had only been written without compass or GPS settings; it would have been extremely difficult to stay on the right trail. So the question for guided selling systems is, how are they making you easier to business with? Are you leaving your prospects in the foothills when they want to get to the summit? Food for thought.
- Great guided selling systems, like great guides, make all their expertise available and also interpret what your interests are. I’ve heard from friends who have hiked to Machu Picchu in Peru how invaluable guides were, they brought the wealth of history alive on the way there. Guides are essential at the altitudes that a climb to that fascinating ancient city are too. And the question is, how can your guided selling system be invaluable? Does it provide excellent knowledge to your prospects and customers? Consider the guides of Machu Picchu – they deliver a wealth of guidance and keep hikers moving.
Bottom line: Guided selling systems can deliver the same and greater value to your prospects and customers across the entire product lifecycle than your best sales and service teams – and can help navigate them around major risk just like the guides do at Machu Picchu.
Filed Under: Louis Columbus' Blog • guided selling
About the Author: Louis Columbus is Senior Manager, Enterprise Systems at Cincom Systems, concentrating on assisting clients with their channel management, sales and product configuration system strategies. Pricing and revenue management strategies enabled through Cincom Acquire are also his key areas of focus. Louis is a former senior analyst with AMR Research where he served both companies adopting enterprise software and vendors with their product and go-to-market strategies. He has worked with enterprise clients on defining solutions to their channel management, order management and service lifecycle management strategies. He is the author of fifteen books on technology and two books on analyst relations. His book, Getting Results from your Analyst Relations Strategies, can be downloaded for free (http://bit.ly/yDKWs). Mr. Columbus also teaches graduate-level international business and marketing courses at Webster-Loyola Marymount University, Webster University and University of California, Irvine.