to give them insights either on their team, their customers, their
organization, or themselves that they otherwise couldn’t get from
other people. But salespeople must understand their customers,
their customers’ industries, and business in general to be credible.

Greg Shortell (Nokia): Too often, selling organizations create

solutions in a way that does not address what their customers
value. I will refer to somewhat of a humorous
case here where I brought in a specialist who
was talking to a very hardcore New York
banker about the solutions that he could pro-
vide or that our company had. Two or three
solutions were presented. Finally the banker
leaned back, looked at him, and said, “You
know, son, for you to have a solution, I need to
have a problem, and I don’t have a problem.”
There has to be relevance and value from the
customer’s point of view, other than that the
solutions perform a function for the customer.
With the Internet and all the information and globalization, the
value needs to expand beyond national boundaries and satisfy
challenges created by increased levels of complexity.

George Judd (BlueLinx): We’ve completely transformed the

way we plan, manage, and work with our top
1,500 major accounts. We develop a plan that
is focused on the customers’ team, their mar-
ket, their specific business, and how they per-
ceive value. The plan is reviewed at the senior
management level to ensure its relevance and
quality. These plans are communicated
throughout our organization and form the
basis for deployment, measurement, and even
resource allocation. At the heart of the plan is
value creation—value as identified by each
specific account. This comes from the field,
and it guides our efforts proactively into the future.

Mike Wells (Lexus): We recently made significant research,

communication, and training investments around the importance
of our brand to each and every member of not only our corpora-

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