All customers are not same

Products manufactured has no value, until sold and money due realised. Conversely, selling if not tuned to a product, it remains a heroic act. It can therefore be said that it is the alignment of selling behaviours with sales tasks i.e. critical to managing performance of the organisation.

Selling behaviour alignment has come into prominence as research conducted to find out reasons of failure of start-ups. It is found that nearly 44000 companies were founded in the year 2000. Out of them, fewer than 6% achieved more than $10 million in revenues by 2010 and fewer than 2% more than $ 50 million.

Companies generally begin with the ‘Product Performance Advantage’ – advantage that product drives into the market, finding a gap in a product category. This advantage is diluted slowly as other products or even new products in the same category start filling in the gap and companies first fail to comprehend reasons of their product failure and eventually not able to build on their initial product performance advantage by translating their strategy into business development initiatives. In other words, failure at the end of a leadership team to define core competencies of the organisation and their core customers.

Business development is driven by selling skills tuned to buying behaviour of core customers.

There are lots of ways to sell but an organisation has to choose a specific way, appropriate to the organisational strategy and core competency. Here comes the rule of ‘understanding target customers and their buying behaviour’.

All customers are not same.