Last session we discussed the importance of value compared to price. Today we are going to look at how the customer makes that decision. The circle of satisfaction is a graphical way of looking at the main influential factors in the buying decision.

We discussed earlier that quality is more important than price, so what is quality? Look the word up in a dictionary and you will find "Quality - degree of excellence" but that doesn't help at all. It turns out that Quality is a perception. It is not a fact it is a feeling.

So if quality is a perception and perception is a feeling how do you go about selling a feeling? In this section we look at the process of getting the message of quality across to the customers. Once the customer is convinced about the quality of your product or service they will expect to pay more.

So far we have discussed the process of selling, making sure that the customer understands the value of the product or service they are buying. Now we need to consider how we keep those customers once we have secured their business.

The more you know about the customer the closer you can become but what do we really want to know and how are we going to store that information? Your customer profile will solve this problem by storing personal information for you to access at any occasion. Your Contact Organiser will help you manage your customer contact.

We all know that Customer Relationship Management is important but which system to use. When I was a young sales person we had a "Tickler Box" to help us but what do we do today?

Key Account Management is all about getting much more structured in the way we close and control the major accounts. From managing our time to using the best systems we will explore what is special about the "Big Ones".

We started this section looking at the "Circle of Satisfaction". By now you should have a very good idea how this works for you. Many of the other things we have looked at over the last few weeks relate back to that because if the customer doesn't have a logical or emotional need, what we have to offer is of no value to them. For the last two weeks we have been discussing Customer Relationship Management but remember CRM is not software, it is a state of mind. While you may use software to manage your CRM, it is of no value unless it helps develop better relationships.