FORT LAUDERDALE, FL–(Marketwire -03/22/12)- Jaynie L. Smith, CEO of marketing/management consultancy, Smart Advantage, Inc., follows up her best-seller with “Relevant Selling: Research Proves Customers Value More then Just Price” (www.smartadvantage.com), a guide for taking the guesswork out of sales and marketing.
“To become relevant, businesses need to discern and address what customers really value,” Smith says. Surprisingly, less than 10 percent do.
Her company analyzed more than 150 customer surveys to learn what customers rank as their top buying criteria when choosing a seller of a particular product or service. While many executives and sales people guessed low price would top their customers’ list of values, they were wrong. Customers ranked things like “on-time delivery,” “customer support” and “durability” as their No. 1 value in nearly every double blind survey.
Understanding what is relevant to their customers is essential for any business to free itself from price-based negotiation, Smith writes.
“They need to learn — not guess — what their customers most value. If it’s a weak area, they need to improve,” she says. “If, or when, they are strong, then their marketing messages need to convey that strength in quantifiable terms, such as ’98 percent of customer calls are returned within 30 minutes; the other 2 percent within 1 hour.’ With relevant messages, customers minimize price as an issue.
“They have then used their customer research in two valuable ways: to make their company more operationally relevant to customers and to let customers know they’ve can and have delivered what the customers want.”
“Relevant Selling” is already getting rave reviews:
“In a world where most, and I mean most, selling is irrelevant selling, Jaynie Smith’s Relevant Selling’ can mean the difference to you between profit and loss,” writes Jay Conrad Levinson, author of the Guerrilla Marketing series of books, which have sold more than 21 million copies.
About Jaynie L. Smith
Jaynie L. Smith is CEO of Smart Advantage, Inc., a marketing/management consultancy whose clients range from mid-sized to Fortune 500 companies. She consults with executives to help them define their companies’ competitive advantages. Her first book, “Creating Competitive Advantage” (Doubleday Currency; 2006), is in its 11th printing and ranks in the top one percent on Amazon.com for marketing/management books. She holds undergraduate and master’s degrees from the New York Institute of Technology.