Darst & Associates' Critical Customer Quiz(tm) Surpasses Quarter Million Mark
The Quiz is a sales tool containing twenty questions about a critical customer. Over 250,000 Critical Customer Quizes have been taken since 1987.
BOSTON/Hingham, MA (PRWEB) May 21, 2004
Darst & Associates, Inc., an internationally recognized performance leader in sales guidance and sales education, announced today their Critical Customer Quiz has surpassed the quarter million mark.
The Critical Customer Quiz is a twenty question customer knowledge tool designed by a C-level executive advisory board, and Darst & Associates in 1987. The Quiz has been translated into 13 languages, with over 100 tailored versions, to suit the needs of Darst & Associates' customers.
"What initially started out as a learning exercise for our R. A.V. E.TM Customer-Collaborative Account Planning program, the Critical Customer Quiz has blossomed into a separate sales tool for our customers, resellers, and visitors to our website," said Michael Darst, president and CEO of Darst & Associates, Inc. "Because of customer demand, we've developed sales meetings, keynote speeches, sales contests, and key account education programs based just on the Critical Customer Quiz. We never imagined the Quiz would take on a life of its own. We currently estimate the Quiz has been taken over 300,000 times, but we've only counted our customer usage to reach the 250,000 mark."
Based on the premise that salespeople need to develop awareness of their customer's business, the Critical Customer Quiz asks for basic information about that customer. Questions revolve around the customer's income statement, their customers, their competitors, their products and services, their suppliers, their owners, their executives, and their primary business challenge. Each of the twenty questions has a point value of five, for a total possible score of one hundred points.
"At first glance the Quiz looks simple, but in the thousands of individual results we've tracked, the average score is seven correct answers," said Darst. "That's not a good score, but we feel the Quiz is only a starting point for customer knowledge, not the end point. The real value comes in having a customer grade the Quiz for a salesperson. This allows a business dialog to develop, and prevents an info-dump of product and service features that have no bearing on a customer's business environment."
The Critical Customer Quiz is available free at Darst & Associates' website www. darstinc. com/critical_customer. htm (http://www. darstinc. com/critical_customer. htm )
About Darst & Associates, Inc.
Founded in 1985, Darst & Associates assists customers in building and maintaining profitable momentum. Their sales guidance services, sales education programs and eLearning services are customer-focused, practitioner-based, P&L driven, and tailored to specific customer environments. Darst & Associates maintains a global perspective by serving multinational corporations in a wide range of industry and service sectors. ...because performance is reality...
A media copy of the Critical Customer Quiz is available on request in Microsoft Word (R) format
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