The Prime Solution: Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins, and Win the Complex Sale

by Jeff Thull

A snapshot of today's B2B selling environment: Sales cycles are chaotic and getting ever longer. It is impossible to predict results and plan for the future. Customer bases are eroding. Satisfaction... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0793195225
• ISBN13: 9780793195220
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Kaplan Publishing
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Thull's key to success - Over Promise, Over Deliver!

A profound truth is captured in a quote by sales strategist Jeff Thull who says, "Spectacular success is always preceded by unspectacular preparation." Thull wrote that his previous book, but expands that concept to a greater extent in his follow up book titled - "Prime Solution." Soundview highly recommends this book because it embodies the idea that there are many steps in the selling cycle that require constant attention as does the customer. In this latest work, Thull links unspectacular preparation with relationship development - which take a lot of time and investment, but tends to produce the intended result. Additionally, Thull offers insights and tactics to help solidify customer relations toward the ultimate goal of bringing congruency to what's promised and what's delivered to the end user. It's good advice for anyone who's willing to take it.

The Prime Solution

This book is real and relevant - it describes success and failures and a prescribed process to get beyond the solutions fad and posturing to transformed companies

Thull's Masterpiece (Thus Far)

Many of the same core concepts in this book were previously discussed in Thull's Mastering the Complex Sale: How to Compete and Win When the Stakes are High! However, what we have here is a much sharper focus on two of the three objectives specified in the subtitle: close the value gap and increase margins while winning the complex sale. In the Foreword, Greg Lewin does a skillful job of explaining the need for this sequel, offering his own conclusions about customer value: "[begin italics] First, value should be added to the customer's entire business, not just a specific part of it...Second, the value created for your customer should be easily identified and owned by your customer...Third -- and this is the main objective of Thull's Prime Solution -- the value you promise must be delivered...Fourth, the `secret sauce' is the heart and soul of your organization -- the people! [end italics]" According to Thull, Prime Solutions deliver optimal results which leverage value to the highest level of each customer's business, ensure that customers are provided with the best answer to the given problem, and provide solution implementation and value-enhancement strategies that enable customers to achieve the ROI that they anticipated. Presumably Thull agrees with me that getting beyond customer satisfaction and even loyalty to what is widely referred to as "customer evangelism" requires that what he calls "robust solutions" must be provided consistently, time and again, whatever questions must be answered, whatever problems must be solved. To sustain that relationship, therefore, Thull recommends three separate but interdependent protocols: value maximization of product, process, and performance; decision acuity which enables customers to recognize -- and thereby appreciate -- the tangible benefits of the solution(s) provided; and optimization of a measurable ROI. I agree with Thull that what he calls the Prime Solution Cycle (please see pages 179-194) requires a cross-functional effort; that is, communication, cooperation, and collaboration between and among all areas within the provider's organization. In Part I, Thull explores the environment in which complex solutions must compete. Then in Part II, he shifts his attention to an analysis of how to translate the demands of that environment into the three protocols which define, guide, and inform prime solutions. Finally, in Part III, Thull responds to a question which each reader is probably asking as she or he arrives at page 125: "How can my organization develop and then deliver prime solutions to our own customers?" Four chapters are devoted to Thull's response. First, he recommends a process of discovery and engagement which will reveal opportunities among those prospects currently experiencing insufficiency of the value offered. Next, diagnose and quantify what is needed. Then, design and produce what will fill (solve) the given need. Finally, deliver, measure, and improve on the solution(s) I

Making the Complex Sale Work for Both Parties

Some sales are not complex. You need gasoline and you find a station based on location or price or perhaps a brand name. But other sales are much more complex. When you are selling a product that doesn't yet exist, Boeing's next airplane perhaps, or Intel's next computer chip the task is much more difficult. You have to sell yourself, you have to sell your company's history, and the buyer has to make a decision based on other factors such as past experience with the company. The problems come when the seller presents a value proposition, and the customer buys, that the resulting solution cannot deliver. This book continues the story begun by the author in his best seller, Mastering the Complex Sale. It could well be titled, Delivering the Promise Made in the Complex Sale. The book is filed with stories from the real world where complex sales have paid off for both the seller and buyer. Well written and informative.

The key to profitable growth

Almost every company states in their mission that they are "customer-focused". It is "what" every company aspires to be, but in my experience, very few companies know "how" to accomplish this objective. "The Prime Solution" tells you "how" better than any book or article I have read in 30 years of business. Research has shown over 90% of innovation arises from new solutions to customer challenges. If you believe, as I do, that most organic and self-sustaining growth arises from innovation (product, service, solution, and/or business process), then a "roadmap" for bringing all of your functional resources together to meet and solve your customers' challenges will be the key to future profitable growth. "The Prime Solution" quite simply is that roadmap.