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88 • The 100 Greatest Ideas for Building the Business of Your Dreams

Solution

So far the emphasis in the qualification process has been on buyability. We need
now to turn to the sellability side. The business of your dreams is concerned with
the long-term relationship with a customer, which in turn is concerned with deliver-
ing customer satisfaction time after time after time.

The proposed solution should have a number of attributes. First and foremost
it must solve the problem or assist the customer to exploit the opportunity. Next it
must represent good business for the selling company. The main measures for this
are profitability and risk.

The three subsidiary questions are:

Is your solution valid?

It is unlikely in a complex project that any solution offered will meet every single
detail of the customer's specification. Most decisions of this nature have some com-
promise built in. The key for the selling team is to ensure the validity of its offering
and agree this with the customer.

Is the risk of your being able to deliveryour promises acceptable?

Insist that the people in your team who are responsible think through the imple-
mentation carefully. After all, we don't want to bet the firm.

Is the project profitable now or through future sales?

In complex selling you must make an estimated profit and loss account for each
individual project. You will have to, of course, if your sales people are motivated by
selling gross margin. The level of profit required will obviouslyvary projectby project.
At the most profitable end will be repeats of previous sales of high-value products;
while at the low end will be loss leaders where the whole reason for the sale is that
other orders will flow from this one.