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

The Prime Solution: Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins, and Win the Complex Sale
Jeff Thull
Dearborn Trade

Here in a single volume is a wealth of information and guidance for those attempting to achieve the objectives to which the subtitle refers: close the value gap, increase profit margins, and close on each complex sale. Most sales are complex, of course, varying only in terms of degree (e.g. length of cultivation/solicitation cycle, nature and extent of resistance, installation or implementation requirements) but everyone wants to preserve the greatest profit margin. According to Thull, meeting each customer¹s demands involves delivering optimal results, capable of leveraging value to the highest level of the customer¹s business; ensuring that the customer has identified and purchased the very best solution (i.e. the ³prime solution²) to the given problem; and provide solution implementation and value-enhancement strategies that enable a customer to achieve its anticipated ROI. He rigorously examines three essential, interdependent ³protocols²: value maximization, decision acuity, and return optimization. The material is carefully organized within three Parts: first, Thull explores the environment in which today¹s providers of complex solutions must compete; next, he translates the demands of today¹s ³solution markets² into protocols that define and inform all ³prime solutions²; finally, he explains how any organization (e.g. a local chamber) can develop and then deliver those solutions. For me, this book¹s greatest value will be derived from effectively applying Thull¹s advice as to how to avoid the high-cost disconnect between the value that products and services are designed to deliver and the value which customers actually achieve. For example, I think B2B is a misconception. Ultimately, all that matters is having a B2B2C partnership by which one business enables another business (its customer) to deliver maximum value to its own customers. Only those solutions which accomplish that are of prime importance to everyone involved.