You and your support staff are the essential partnering agents in Consultative Selling. Together, you compose a profit-improvement team for each of your customers. You, the consultant, are the leader of the team. You will partner with the customer business function managers whose costs you can reduce and with the managers of the customer’s lines [...]
Monthly Archive for December, 2009
Aconsultant’s job can be defined in three ways: Bring back sales, bring back customer information that can lead to sales, and leave behind alliances with top-tier decision makers. Sometimes a sale will build an alliance. More often, alliances help build sales. There are four levels on which alliances must be structured in a key customer [...]
In order to grow a customer’s business, you must get inside it. Unless you know it, you cannot grow it. No business can be grown from the outside. By being an insider, you can be in business together with your customer instead of just doing business as an outside supplier. The opportunities to be in [...]
For both consultative sellers and their customers, profit is the name of the game. While the game is the same, the role you play in it is very different from that of your customer. Setting profit objectives is the customer’s business. It cannot be abdicated, nor can the customer delegate it to anyone outside the [...]
Top-tier customer management rarely deals with vendors, and then only under duress. They speak different languages. Vendors speak price and performance; management speaks value and profit. Vendors speak of their competitors; management is concerned about its own competition. Vendors wonder when management will ever buy; management wonders when vendors will ever leave. Vendors who stand [...]
In just three sentences you reveal whether you are a consultative sales representative. In the first sentence, a consultant identifies a customer problem in financial terms—what the problem is costing the customer or what the customer could be earning without the problem. If you mention your product or service, you are vending and not consulting. [...]