When was the last time you put your product or service to the public test?

This was a great interview on what is so great about the consulting business. When you see parallel situations where you can capitalize, take advantage, and get paid double, this is a great opportunity. We did the same; We create the certificate of trustworthiness and mail it to qualified prospects.

Before that, we did some additional work on this one. We came up with a ‘return on investment’ comparison between our steam engine and major competitors. We learned in the USP project that our steam engine lasted much longer in the field than the entire competition. So we put together a little ‘return on investment graph’ that showed how much money our customers were saving by purchasing our steam engines.

It is true that we did some additional work, but that was the “key” to help us integrate this reliability and get the free report. It is now offered on the web and by dealers. This free report shows how our steam engine makes more money for customers than any other.

Now the sellers, four of them; In-house sales staff submit free reports before bidding. They have distributors at the other end who work with the end users and use that free report in addition to the ROI analysis as part of the bidding process. That was a great integration in step 2. Getting the internal sales people to buy into this report.

Then with step 3, the database. We started getting distributors to use the report. We did more training on the USP and the ROI report. The alliances were also working with more distributors doing more marketing on their part. We went through all four steps and that ended about a year ago. Later, Rich got an email from Jack, the owner, and said, “Richard, I just want you to know that we are having a record year because of our USP and because the sales staff is scoring better, without wasting time on deals. they shouldn’t be. “

As you can see, what you want is a good USP. This helps eliminate leads that you shouldn’t be working with. What was happening here was that the Steam people were getting burned. Their engineering department, writing department, and design department were running low on offers they shouldn’t have submitted because they were all “price-oriented” buyers.

They didn’t care about the return on investment in a steam engine. Once the sales staff started using ROI reports. For example; a boy would call and say; “I want an offer.” The salesperson would say, “Before I make that offer, I need you to read this ROI report. Let’s go over it together first and see the benefits of our machine.” Guess what would happen if they didn’t complete that report?