The Prime Solution : Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins, and Win the Complex Sale

Rating:
Summary: The key to profitable growth
Review: Almost every company states in their mission that they are "customer-focused". It is "what" every company aspires to be, but in my experience, very few companies know "how" to accomplish this objective. "The Prime Solution" tells you "how" better than any book or article I have read in 30 years of business.
Research has shown over 90% of innovation arises from new solutions to customer challenges. If you believe, as I do, that most organic and self-sustaining growth arises from innovation (product, service, solution, and/or business process), then a "roadmap" for bringing all of your functional resources together to meet and solve your customers' challenges will be the key to future profitable growth. "The Prime Solution" quite simply is that roadmap.

Rating:
Summary: Turning Sales Promises into Reality for Systems Vendors
Review: The Prime Solution begins with the simple observation that most complex products and services that are provided to business customers either fail to work at all . . . or fall well short of the sales promises upon which the investments were made. Anyone who has been near a major corporation knows that sad reality.

The Prime Solution goes past that sorry track record to suggest in detail how vendors need to change their sales, product and service offerings to become effective in terms of the customers' realities.

I thought that the book went beyond what I had read before on this subject. Basically, you need a new business model that customizes what you do for each customer (like Dell does) and fills in for any weaknesses that customers have in using what you offer (either by offering the necessary training . . . or becoming an outsourcing supplier).

The positive examples, unfortunately, were few and far between. Based on my own research I know that there are a lot more examples. I suspect that Mr. Thull wanted to use examples as illustrations rather than to give readers a broad view of what can be done.

The negative examples were almost all in the systems and process areas (such ERP and CRM) so I felt like this book would mean the most to those who are systems providers or integrators.

The book has several weaknesses that limit its potential value. First, there's a lot of repetition. You will hear about value gaps repeatedly . . . more than you want or need. John Kotter's book is almost a "seminal" one. And so on.

Second, most of the book is taken up with describing where selling and value delivery used to be . . . and shouldn't be any more. This material should have been edited down by about 80 percent.

Third, most of the benefit in the book comes from the last three chapters. It would have been nice if that material could have been developed in more detail with more examples. As a result, you may feel like you are reading a book with content about equal to 2-3 business magazine articles rather than a whole book.

However, any systems provider whose sales force is still selling unfounded promises for organizations that haven't taken the time to figure out how to really help customers will certainly learn a lot of useful lessons for this book. Let's hope those firms make this book required reading.