Meet “Bob”

Meet “Bob,” Bob is the diagram below. I wish I could take credit for the brilliance underlying Bob, but the credit goes to one of my favorite clients, a top performing sales organization in the semiconductor industry.

Bob is a discussion of virtually any type of business opportunity or challenge your customer faces. But it is probably very unfamiliar, because very few sales people assess their customers’ problems–and how they can help in this way.

The problem is, this is the way business managers in all of your customers assess their problems.

• The red represents financial losses of some sort. It could be lost revenue, lost customers, lost opportunity, threats. It could be investment or spending in getting something done (including the investments in solving a problem).
• The green represents returns, increases in revenue, growth, new customers, or the monetized results of what they are doing.
• The dotted line represents time to money or time to results.

Everything the customer wants to achieve and everything we do with the customer can be expressed in some or, ideally, all the elements of this chart.

• How can we reduce the negative financial impacts of the problems/opportunities they are addressing?
• How can we increase the returns they get from addressing these problems, opportunities?
• How can we move the dotted line to the left, reducing time to money or results?

Each one of the green and red bars may represent different specific areas in our customers business. For example, with this particular client, some of these models relate to new product development and launch, so some of the red bars represent product definition, product development, pre-production and ramp up. Some of the green bars represent fulfilling customer buying needs, manufacturing, shipping and services.

Their sales people are equipped to discuss each red and green bar with their customers, as well as to help the customer explore how to move the dotted line to the left. Some of those conversations (bars) are focused on development issues, some focused on manufacturing issues, some focused on product launch/sales/marketing, some focused on customer service/warranty.

The point is each of these have different meanings to people involved in the buying process, and the sales people are adept in having the right conversation with the right people at the right time. And these are business conversations, not semiconductor conversations.

This also equips them to have business focused conversations with senior levels of management. Where a design engineer may only be impacted by a couple of those red and green bars, as you go up the management food chain, they will have broader perspectives.

Being able to talk about Bob with each of their customers has shifted the conversations and value the sales people create with their customers. It changes how their customers think and engage them, and how they make their buying decisions.

Each of our customers has their variation of Bob. If we don’t understand it, if we aren’t prepared to engage them in discussions of how we impact their version of Bob, we are neither creating value with them, nor positioning our solutions in ways meaningful to them.

Our customers may have multiple versions of Bob. Bob may be different depending on the problem/opportunity. Bob may be different based on the industry/market segment their customers live in. Bob may be different based on the product/solution categories your customers are assessing.

But we all have Bob. We need to understand how we impact each red and green bar and how we move the dotted line to the left. We need to do this, because Bob is, ultimately, what our customers care about.

Do you know how to talk about Bob with your customers?

Afterword: Some may be curious about how Bob was named. It’s not an acronym. The B-O-B don’t stand for cool words. In developing this approach to engaging their customers, my friends didn’t know what to call this model, so they decided to call it Bob.