What the Customer Wants You to Know: How Everybody Needs to Think Differently about Sales »

RAM CHARAN is a highly acclaimed business adviser, speaker, teacher, and the author or coauthor of many bestselling business books, including What the CEO Wants You to Know and Execution. For more than thirty-five years, he has worked behind the scenes at Fortune 100 companies like GE, Bank of America, DuPont, Thomson Financial, Honeywell, Home Depot, and Verizon to help senior executives develop and implement strategic plans.

Ram Charan, who has gained fame for clarifying and simplifying difficult business problems and is the bestselling author of What the CEO Wants You to Know, teaches you how to rethink sales from the outside in.

Publishers Weekly

Charan (Know-How) skillfully and efficiently offers a tutorial on upgrading the productivity of any size company's sales force. His answer: evolve salespeople from "order takers" to knowledgeable ambassadors who approach customers armed with cost-saving solutions they will be happy to pay for Charan's method involves "Value Creation Selling," which at a broad level means reconfiguring a sales force's orientation toward customers' profitability before its own success. The author recommends fostering in salespeople the skills and mindsets of a general manager and equipping them with a "value account plan," or "the document that defines the value proposition and the business benefits the customer can expect to get from it." Charan walks readers through the process of "fixing the broken sales process" with a combination of diagrams and anecdotes from real companies, all while applying the concepts and actions to a booklong case study of a fictitious software company, Sturgis Corporation. The book serves as a practical guide to competing with aggressive price-cutters in today's market. (Jan.)