What's the difference between a salesperson who is looked at as a vendor and one who is looked at as a business resource? In many cases, it's their ability to position the Business Fit, which is one of the fundamental elements of the IMPAX Process and one of the most important concepts in all of selling.

What is Business Fit? First, let's look at what it's not. It's not Product Fit. Most salespeople are very familiar with Product Fit, where we do our needs analysis, learn about the customer's application and find out what they need in a solution. We use Product Fit statements to tell them we have what they need. Here is an example of a typical product fit statement, "You said that you need a state of the art technology that is platform independent, and we have a technology that has been heralded as leading edge and has been proven to work with the top 9 industry accepted platforms." This type of Product Fit statement is often used when dealing with evaluators, who care about the specifications and prices of products and solutions.

So what is Business Fit? It's a series of statements that describe how, working together, our relationship can help the customer to attain some of their objectives, implement key strategies, and/or address important issues. It's based completely on research. We take what we've learned about the customer's business and figure out how we can leverage our solutions, people, knowledge and experience to help them do better business. Here is a possible Business Fit statement, "We feel that our relationship will support one of your critical strategies, the creation of additional competitive advantage, as our combined market coverage would result in an unprecedented ability to reach new prospective customers." This type of Business Fit statement is critical when trying to build a value based relationship with senior level decision makers, who care about the health of their business.

Although both Business Fit and Product Fit are important, they have different purposes. In order to truly sell our value, we have to make sure we effectively position the Business Fit with senior level executives who can buy our value!