In this age where providing quick pricing can often get you the project, speed alone may not be enough to get you the account. First, make sure that you are chasing the right type of accounts – those that you have a clear competitive advantage with. And before you present the price, ask how does your company evaluate deals and new opportunities – whose filter do you use to say this is a project or account worth chasing or not? What does that cross functional group that evaluates deals in your printing company look like? The basic concept of deal scoring is not new. What is gaining traction though, is the desire for print business owners to make sure that the right deals are crossing their threshold.
All Customers Are Good
I have a saying, “all customers are good, some are just gooder than others.” So, who defines what a good customer is in your organization? Sales undoubtedly has their opinion, operations should have a say in this, and your finance department I’m sure would like to weigh in on what makes a good customer. The challenge at times in getting these groups together is that they all speak their own language relative to customer quality.
One idea is to identify the key “good customer, or good deal” attributes that makes sense for your business. Over and above your targeted vertical markets, break it down further. For example, they could include gross profit percentage, capabilities fit, repeat or programmatic work, customer lifetime value potential, and how well they pay and what’s the risk of doing business with them. You could apply a weighted value to each of these attributes to determine the composite score. That score, in turn can determine the pricing approval path in your company. For example, A–level deals: the rep has the authority within standard pricing to get to work and close it. For B–level deals: these require Sales Manager approval, with a finance department review before submitting pricing. Finally, for C–level deals: they get either approved, repriced, or declined at the deal desk.
The Deal Desk
Again, this concept isn’t new but also isn’t widely practiced in the printing industry. The deal desk is that team that gets together and allows your system to become real. It’s a standing cross functional team that reviews exception deals, resolves cross functional pricing issues, and accumulates the institutional learning that improves the deal quality score as mentioned above through objective feedback to all parties.
In addition to reviewing the C–level deals, this group is also charged with evaluating the larger, enterprise level accounts that have recurring, programmatic work. Winning these accounts is much more than delivering a price in a timely fashion. It’s having the ability to articulate how you’ll manage the account from the ingestion of files through to final execution to properly, seamlessly meet the customer requirements.
This cross functional group should meet weekly to tackle a rigorous agenda. In addition to the enterprise account opportunities, the agenda includes a queue of other exception requests, and a review of any lost deals from the prior week. The input from leaders in sales, finance, operations and estimating could all be part of this group.
Don’t view this as a bureaucracy, and just another wasted meeting. I believe if you do this correctly, it’s just the opposite. It creates a fast, transparent forum that replaces the messy hallway negotiations that currently results in slow quoting response times, and inconsistent pricing.
Mike Philie helps owners and CEOs in the Graphic communications industry validate what’s working, identify what needs to change, and create a practical path forward.
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