It's Not Luck - Eliyahu M. Goldratt [78]
“Nice understatement.”
He grins at me. “Look at the next one, ‘Usually buyers don’t exactly have a delightful history with printing companies.’ ”
“This is not just an understatement, this is a British understatement,” I tease him. “Did Pete write this one?”
“Of course. Now, do you agree that each one of these starting conditions leads to the same conclusion, ‘It is likely that a buyer will greet a conventional presentation of our win-win offer, not with enthusiasm, but with deep skepticism’?”
“Unavoidably,” I agree.
“Now, look at it from the point of view of Pete’s salespeople. They knew that our offer would definitely be a great deal for the buyer. He pays the lowest prices, he is holding surprisingly low inventories and he doesn’t suffer any obsolescence. At the same time, they were far from sure that this offer was good for them. They were not sure at all that they were going to get more sales. Under this frame of mind, how do you think they reacted to the buyer’s skepticism?”
“They are giving him what he really wants and he plays hard to get.” I can envision the situation. It’s funny. “I hope they were professional enough not to give their opinion in too many words.”
“No. Like I said, they are professionals, but there is something called body language. You can imagine that from there the meeting went downhill.”
“Yes, I can. So what did you do differently?”
“The first thing was to guarantee that they would have enough time to present it properly. We made sure that the meetings would be minimum half-an-hour.”
“I see, that’s what you mean by, ‘The salesperson and the buyer meet without time pressure.’ ”
“Correct. Now our salesperson starts by presenting the buyer’s Current Reality Tree.”
“Wait a minute,” I say. “What Current Reality Tree are you talking about? I don’t remember that Pete did any Current Reality Tree. He started directly with the buyers’ cloud.”
“Correct, but as it turned out, we couldn’t escape doing it.” Noticing that I’m still confused, he elaborates. “When Pete developed the solution his intuition was strong enough to allow him to jump some steps. But when we tried to figure out how his salespeople could explain it to the buyers, the only way was to go back and construct all the trees according to our generic map. You’ll see in a minute.”
“So one way or another the entire work must be done. Interesting,” I say, not fully understanding why. “Let me see the Current Reality Tree of Pete’s buyers.”
He hands me an additional page. “No surprises,” he clarifies. “Basically what we discussed when Pete presented his solution to us. At the bottom are the printing company policies, and you see how we rigorously derived all the buyer’s UDEs. The idea is that our salesperson reads it, from the bottom up, to the buyer. Since it begins by pointing the finger at us, the buyer is not displeased with such a start to a meeting. This is important, otherwise he will tell the salesman to cut the crap and give the offer. He will give it, and the spiral down starts.”
“Doesn’t the buyer have problems understanding the tree?”
“Not at all. Why should he? Everyone understands if-then. It is part of our language.”
He is right. I tend to confuse the difficulty of constructing a tree with the difficulty of understanding one. When the tree is written on a subject a person is intimately involved in, nobody has difficulty understanding trees, not even kids. Not even someone who has never seen such a tree before. “Carry on.”
“Then the salesperson supplements it with a numerical example, just to clarify the concept of price-per-usable-unit.” He hands me another page.
“Did the buyers have any problem with that?”
“No, not at all. As a matter of fact, they all regarded it as a very useful concept. They immediately started to use the term. I suspect they knew it all along, what was missing was just the verbalization.”
“I see. So, ‘The buyer follows with interest.’ That’s what you’re telling me?”
“Oh, yes, they commented, they remarked, but not one of them objected to anything