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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.

In the second sentence, a consultant quantifies a profit improvement solution to the problem. If you mention your product or service, you are vending and not consulting.

In the third sentence, a consultant takes a position as manager of a problem-solving project and accepts single-source responsibility for its performance. In the course of defining the project in terms of contribution to customer profit, you are able to mention products and services for the first time.

If you are selling as a consultant, it is easy to predict what the fourth sentence must be. It will be a proposal of partnership with your customer’s managers in applying your system to solve the customer’s problem.

A consultant’s problem-solving approach to selling requires helping customers improve their profits, not persuading them to purchase products and services. To solve a customer’s problem, a consultant must first know the needs that underlie it. Only when a customer’s needs are known can the expertise, hardware, and services that compose a system become useful components of their solutions. This is the difference between servicing a product and servicing a customer. It allows your relationships with customers to be consultative rather than the simple sell-and-bill relationship that characterizes traditional customer-supplier transactions at the vendor level.

The ideal positioning for a consultative seller is customer profit improver. You can achieve this position by affecting one of a customer’s operating processes in two ways: reducing its contribution to cost or increasing its contribution to sales revenues. A consultative seller’s primary identification with profit improvement rather than with products, equipment, services, or even systems themselves gives the sales approach an economic objective. It focuses attention on the ultimate end benefit of a sale, not its components or cost. This gives you the same profit-improvement positioning as your customer has. It also professionalizes your mission by expressing it in business management terms, not sales talk.

Selling Return on Investment

From a customer’s point of view, a consultative sales representative is an integral part of every sale. Unlike product vendors, who are identified as a part of their own company and therefore do not go along with the sale of their product or service, consultative sellers are embedded in their systems and are "packaged" along with them. Although a piece of equipment may endure longer than the equipment vendor does, the consultative seller generally goes on making an important contribution to customer profit long after the original system has been installed. The seller’s durability with a customer aptly defines the vital role a seller plays over and above the other elements of a consultative system.

A consultative sale is not the sale of products or equipment. Nor is it the gift of so-called "value-added services," which are actually cost-added services, since their dollar value added to customer operations is almost always unknown and their cost is almost always unrecoverable by attempts to price them. A consultative sale is the sale of a positive return on the customer’s investment: the economic impact of what is sold and not the components of the sale itself.

The most difficult challenge to consultative sellers is to stop selling products and start selling the added financial values that they can contribute to a customer’s business. This requires more than merely substituting one vocabulary for another; it means substituting one mindset for another. Before this can be done, however, you must first undergo a desensitization to traditional product affiliations.

Most sales representatives metamorphose into consultants through a two-stage process. The first stage is to forsake performance benefit orientation for financial benefit orientation. This is akin to the classic features-versus-benefits conversion that all vendors undergo. It is the next order of magnitude. But in Consultative Selling, performance benefits are insufficient reasons for a customer to buy. Performance benefits describe what a product is; they are its operating specifications. Consultative Selling requires a seller to describe what a product does; these are its financial specifications. It is the end accomplishment of a product’s performance benefits that must be sold.

The second stage in translating performance benefits to financial benefits is the calculation of their dollar values. These values, referred to as incremental profits, are the consultative seller’s stock in trade.

Product desensitization starts with awareness that systems selling is a translated dialogue. All systems components, including the systems seller, must be translated into a customer value. Hanging out a laundry list of systems components is meaningless unless their individual contribution to the customer’s incremental profit is quantified. Mentioning product, elaborating on the technological superiority of equipment, extolling its construction characteristics or other qualities—all are meaningless unless their incremental contribution to the system’s capability for profit improvement is quantified.

Translating product performance benefits into incremental profit benefits is the way consultants must think. "What is the contribution to customer profit?" is their key question. They sensitize themselves to bottom-line thinking because they have learned that intermediate-line thinking fails to accomplish two key objectives: to position their customers as clients, since a client is a bottom-line beneficiary; and to position themselves as consultants, since a consultant is a supplier of bottom-line benefits.

Nothing will deposition a seller from a consultative stance faster or more certainly than lapsing back to a preoccupation with the product. It is the consultative seller’s deadliest sin and an ever-present pitfall. At a customer’s top tier, it can be fatal. The word product rather than profit lies poised from long habit on the tips of most vendors’ tongues, ready to undo them. The best way to avoid slips of the tongue is to learn to use the new frame of reference in parallel with the old one and translate as you go. Whenever a product is mentioned, define it immediately in terms of its contribution to customer profit. This is what customers do; they listen for the numbers. Consultative sellers must become sensitive to this need and deliver the benefit that customers seek: quantification of the dollar values they will receive, not enumeration of the products or their performance specifications.

Talking Money

In order to consult with customer operating managers on how they can improve their contribution to profits from an investment they make with you—in something you may call your "solution"—you must counsel with them in their own terms. These are not the vendor’s terms of product features and benefits or price and performance. They are, instead, the basic language of business management in its most elementary form: Business Management 101.

At the customer manager level, "business-ese" is the only language spoken. It is transaction talk, the language of money being transacted. It is charged with action verbs: funds being invested, investments being returned, cash flowing, payback occurring, profits improving, costs being reduced, revenues being increased, and market share being gained. But these are simply ways of expressing what is happening to the subjects of these verbs, the dollars themselves. Customer manager talk is money talk.

What do you have to know in order to "talk money" well enough to be conversant in "business-ese?" There are two requirements: to know how money is classified and to know a customer’s current money base of costs and revenues and how much you can affect them.

Classifying Money

Money is classified into six major categories:

1. Investment—what customers pay out.
2. Return—what they get back on what they pay out. The rate of return is the ratio of return to the investment.
3. Payback—when they get their investment back.
4. Net profit—what they make on their investment or their increment over and above payback.
5. Cost—an investment on which there is no return.
6. Opportunity cost—the profit they could have made on a different investment.

Analyzing the Customer Money Base

Consultants ask for incremental investments, money that is over and above the basic fixed-cost investments in the business as a whole. In return, they propose incremental profits. Incremental investments are discretionary. Customers choose among them on the basis of the best combination of muchness, soonness, and sureness that meets their needs.

Most consultative sellers propose incremental profit improvement. The rate of return is calculated only on the incremental investment in the proposal, which tends to make it exceedingly high. The customer’s total investment in the business as a whole, or its total corporate return, is irrelevant. Consultative Selling takes place in the arena of a customer’s microeconomics.

For that reason, the customer’s balance sheet and income statement are neither causes nor effects of Consultative Selling. They will rarely, if ever, suggest leads. Equally rarely will they be impacted by a consultative seller’s incremental improvement of any one business manager’s contribution to profits. Yet, for the individual business manager whose profits are improved, the consultant’s contribution can be a matter of life or death.

The consultant’s micro impact makes a customer’s annual report and 10-K interesting background reading but generally unproductive in targeting leads for Profit Improvement Proposals.

While it is true that all improved contributions to corporate profits flow to the corporate bottom line, they cannot be found there in annual or quarterly reports. In businesses of medium size on up, incremental profit improvements are subsumed in total profits. This makes annual or quarterly reports worthless as score-cards. For the same reason, they are also worth very little as lead targeters. Even when individual lines of business are broken out separately, the breakouts are almost always too large to be able to identify operation-specific cost problems or revenue opportunities for PIPping.

As background for operation-specific lead targeting, only the income statement offers anything of value. It shows whether profits are going up or down. The president’s letter tells you the official reasons why. It may also indicate corporate priorities into which you can tie a PIP’s business fit.

The income statement also lets you learn if total earnings are growing by giving you the information to calculate profit margins. If you divide annual net income by annual sales for the past three years, you can see if margins are shrinking even if sales volume has been rising. This tells you that business is being bought rather than sold and that your profit improvement projects must be structured to help restore income.

If you divide the cost of goods sold by total sales, you may see additional evidence that profit improvement is needed if cost as a percent of sales has been rising over the past three years.

The ability to interpret an annual or quarterly report’s data, more so than the data itself, is a key resource. When a customer announces an earnings gain of 15 percent, it is easy to see it as a growth company. But if you compare the rate of earnings growth to revenue growth, you may see that earnings are growing faster than revenues. If so, earnings are coming from cost management, especially cost-of-sales management, and not from sales. The challenge to grow the top line, which is the key performance indicator of a growth company, is going unmet.

If you want to predict how likely it is that top-line growth will increase in the short term, you can try to estimate the short-term growth potential of current sources of revenue. In the case of Hewlett-Packard, most of its growth revenues are from low-margin products like personal computers and printers that are subject to continuing price erosion. If H-P’s market continues to shift to lower-priced models, both revenues and earnings growth will come under increasing pressure.

The data you need to qualify and quantify a customer’s consultative needs cannot be found in reports. It is business-line-specific and business-function-specific and consists of two categories of data:

1. In a profit-centered line of business, what contributions to its revenues and earnings being made by its critical products and services can you affect? What is the gap between the current contribution of a product or service and the line managers’ objective to increase it? Can you help them close the gap enough to make you a compelling partner?
2. In a cost-centered business function, what are the current contributions to the function’s costs being made by its critical factors that you can affect? What is the gap between the current contribution of a factor and the function managers’ objective to reduce it? Can you help them close the gap enough to make you a compelling partner?

When you know the answers to these questions, you will be ready for your first conversation in "business-ese" with a customer manager. Your objective will be to reposition both of you: your customer into a client and yourself into a consultant.

Moving the Deltas

Businesses traditionally focus on moving tons, barrels, cases, and carloads. When they become consultative sellers, they move the deltas—the differences between the improvement they can contribute to a customer’s costs or revenues and their current amounts.

Consultative Selling is a strategy of incremental business improvement, delta by delta, over the commercial life of a customer partnership. Each PIP proposes an added delta, which is its product.

If a customer’s current cost of carrying inventory is $2.5 million a year and a PIP proposes to reduce it to $2.0 million, the consultative seller’s product is the delta of $0.5 million in savings. If a customer’s current sales are $10 million and a PIP proposes to increase them to $15 million, the seller’s product is the delta of $5 million of new revenues.

Each successive PIP must be tasked to improve the incremental gains of its predecessors. In this way, a customer’s business improvement can be continuous, and that business’s consultative sellers will never be out of work.

The incremental nature of consultative sales also affects customer investments. For the purposes of cost-benefit analysis, a customer whose current cost of sales is $100 million and who invests $5 million to reduce them is incurring an incremental cost of only the $5 million that is chargeable to the consultative seller. The customer is not liable for the total current cost; the seller’s responsibility is to make the incremental investment of $5 million reduce the cost of sales more than it adds to it.

Defining a delta as an increment is not meant to minimize it. Deltas that are too small may not be considered compelling enough for a customer to fund. The return involved may not be worth the investment, even if if is only a little one that will be at risk for a short time. Nor may a small investment be worth allocating a manager’s time against it.

On the other hand, blockbuster deltas that encompass several increments at once may not be considered credible or, if they are believed, manageable. Very few customer managers are experienced in realizing rates of return of several hundred percent.

Suppliers’ deltas are their differentiators. Their cumulative average becomes the suppliers’ norms. When they are repetitively achieved over time, they brand the suppliers’ offerings by quantifying their value. Not only does this set them apart from the competition, but it also positions the suppliers’ business in their markets. They come across as the number one or also-ran cost reducer or revenue gainer for the operations and lines of business to which they are dedicated.

In Consultative Selling terms, customer relationship management (CRM) is the management of a continuous stream of deltas moved into a customer’s operations. No matter how many other ways suppliers relate to their customers, improving customer profits is the single most important transaction that can occur between them. All else is parsley around the steak.

Norming Your Value

When you average your added values on an application-per-operation-per-industry basis, you come out with your norm for your ability to add value to that operation in that industry with that application: your normal value. A norm is the composite of your consultative expertise in improving customer profits. Consultative sellers who sell from their norms are routinely able to say provocative things to their customers:

"According to our norms for the optimal layout for a print shop of your volume and type of production," 3M can say, "your current layout is depriving you of up to $1 million in profits every twelve months of operation."

"According to our norms for an optimal receivables collection system for food processors," AT&T can say, "you can improve the profit contribution of your current system by an average of $500,000 a year."

Norms are the consultative penetration tool. All consulting professionals work from norms, whose metrics represent their track record—their single most important possession and the foundation of their reputation. When their norms are the industry standard, they can use them to issue a "norm challenge" against a customer’s current norms as well as competitive norms. The challenge develops leads. Here is the standard of performance for this critical success factor in this business function or business line, it says. How do you compare? If my norms are better than yours, ask me how I can bring you closer.

IBM sales representatives apply their norm templates to the manufacturing operations of pharmaceuticals makers like this:

Our model design for automating a process like yours can help you reduce up to $200,000 in labor. According to our norms, your manning is excessive by five workers. Your control process is also slower than our standard in spotting and alerting you to deviations from specification. This will be reflected in added costs for quality assurance, scrap, and downtime. You can avoid these costs by computerizing your product testing and quality assurance. The difference between our models in these areas and your operations can yield you up to three quarters of a million dollars in the first year.

Unless you know the norms that a customer manager uses to make decisions and address them head-on in your PIPs, you can never achieve a one-to-one acceptance ratio of PIPs proposed to PIPs closed. Airbus learned this lesson when it came to Bob Crandall, when he was CEO of American Airlines, to propose a purchase of its 600-passenger jet based on a lower cost per seat mile than the Boeing 747. Crandall never looked at the Airbus cost-benefit analysis. Because he rejected the criterion on which it was based, it was irrelevant whether or not its numbers added up. "Big planes pay off only when they fly full," he said. "People don’t want to get into an airplane that has 600 people and go to a place where they have to stand in line for two hours to get through customs." As a result, he concluded that "the fact that it’s cheaper to fly per seat doesn’t make any difference. The real cost is how much it costs per passenger."

Airbus may turn out to be more accurate than Crandall in assessing the market for big planes. It makes no difference. Crandall may be wrong about cost per passenger being more important than cost per seat. It makes no difference. As long as Crandall’s key performance norm is cost per passenger, that is where—and only where—he will look for a signal to buy.

Your norms announce what is special about you: You know how to improve the profits of certain types of business operations. You know the standard specifications of what their profit values can be for these business functions; indeed, you are probably the discoverer and maker of many of them. If customers already exceed your norms, you can help them maintain competitive superiority. If your norms are better than a customer’s current performance, you can help bring the customer up to your standard values.

Your norms—not your products—must become your consultative stock in trade. You sell consultatively by superimposing them over the current norms of customer businesses. A customer’s new product norm may be only a plan. It does not matter. The plan contains a pro forma financial projection of the business-to-be. This is its as-if norm: as if it were up and running. Your norm is an if-then model: If the customer adopts your solution, then the customer norm more nearly approaches your own. The customer becomes improved.

At any given time, you can assess your competitive advantage as a consultative seller—in other words, the value of the net profits you normally contribute to your customers—by checking out your norms according to three criteria:

1. Are they better than enough customers’ current performance? If so, you will have continued proposal opportunity.
2. Are they better than your customers’ industry average performance? If so, you may have a competitive advantage over other consultative sellers to bring customers up past their industry average.
3. Are they better than or as good as each customer industry’s best practices? If so, your norms are the industry standard of performance for all customers who want to achieve best practices.

Templating Proposable Leads

A consultative seller’s database must be compartmentalized into three modules that he or she can scan left to right to target proposable leads:

• Our Norm
• Industry Average Norm
• Customer’s Current Norm

For the seller, Our Norm must be better than Industry Average Norm in order to be the norm leader. Our Norm must also be better than the Customer’s Current Norm performance in order to have a proposal opportunity, either to improve customers to the level of industry average or to bring them closer to "our norm."

Norms give a consultative seller the vocabulary to speak in business-ese like this:

• Our Norm for average cost of recordkeeping of purchase orders, inventory reconciliation, and other related transactions in your product category is X dollars. Your cost is three times higher than our norm.
• Our Norm for average sales per square foot in your product category is X dollars. Your sales are five times lower than our norm.
• Our Norm for out-of-stock in your product category is X times per quarter. Your out-of-stock is six times greater than our norm.

Using norms, a consultative seller can get a handle on a customer’s perception of the values that can be added by conducting challenging dialogs like these:

• "It takes you 3.0 hours to complete a design cycle. Our norm is 1.7. What is the value to you in costs saved and faster revenues for every 30 minutes we can bring you closer to our norm?"
• "It takes you 72 minutes to make a die changeover. Our norm is 46. What is the value to you in costs saved and faster revenues for every 10 minutes we can bring you closer to our norm?"
• "It takes you 3.6 years to introduce a new model. Our norm is 2.9. What is the value to you in costs saved and faster revenues for every 30 days we can bring you closer to our norm?"

Your norms are your value metrics. They say that there is a better way than the one the customer is currently practicing. The profit difference between the customer’s way and your norm represents your added value. If you can enable a customer’s new product, for example, to enter its market one month earlier than its plan, the dollar value of that month’s earnings and the advance of one month in achieving payback of the product’s funding represent your added value.

The first thing that you should propose to a customer is your norm for the customer’s business or business function. "If your operation can more closely approach my norm," you can say, "some or all of the added value representing the difference between them can be yours."

What you do not ask is as important as what you do ask. You do not ask, "Do you want my product, service, or system?" Nor do you ask, "Do you want my solution?" or "Do you want to buy from me?" You need only ask whether the customers want their operation to approximate your norms more closely. When you ask that question, you are proposing to sell in a consultative manner. When the customers ask how they can make their operation come closer to your norm, they have begun to "buy" from you.

As soon as you know your normal benefit on an application-per-function or application-per-operation or per-process basis—they are all ways of saying the same thing—you can use it in two ways:

• To target leads fast in customer operations where the current revenue performance is below the level of your norms or where the current cost performance is above them.
• To get to proposal fast by presenting a preliminary benefit that can bring the customers’ current performance closer to your norms.

You want to be able to say something like this to command a customer manager’s attention:

We are experienced in improving the contribution to profits made by your operation. Our norms show that managers who implement our solution can increase their revenue contribution or decrease their cost contribution by approximately $x within y period of time. How do these norms compare with your current performance? If performing closer to our norms can make you more competitive, what if we can work together the way we are proposing to achieve a $000 minimum improvement within the next 00 months?

Creating Norm Warehouses

The norms you work with come into play as soon as you choose a category of performance you want to improve in a customer operation where you believe you can bring the contribution to profits closer to your normal performance. At that point, you compare the customer’s current performance against your norms. If your norms are superior, you have a lead to prepare a Profit Improvement Proposal.

A matrix for warehousing your norms on an industry-specific basis is shown in Norm matrix. For each line of business or business function that you sell to, enter the major operations within it that you affect across the horizontal axis and your major applications that can improve their performance down the vertical axis. Where each application intersects each operation, the matrix shows your normal range of added value. Your norms that rank as a customer industry’s best practices identify the categories in which you can be the "category killer"—the owner of the standard value of its outcome. Killer norms are your brands, your "product line" of high-margin earners in return for their high added value.

Norms that are not best practices identify your commodity applications. They earn you less and cost you more to sell because you must compete against someone else’s category killers.

When a customer operating manager calls out, "Who owns the norms for my performance in this category?" your voice must be the only one to answer if the question addresses one of your category-killer applications. If someone else answers, you may be redundant. If everyone else answers—which means that no one owns the norm—you are a vendor even if you call yourself a consultant.

A Norm-KPI Matrix modeled on the App-Op Matrix shown in Norm matrix can be used to provoke lead targeting by highlighting applications whose norms can improve key indicators of a customer’s performance. This can make proposable PIP opportunities transparent and enable more fast closes.

In the form of digital dashboards, both matrices can be installed on a corporate intranet for real-time access on a 24/7 basis. They can be made customer-specific, so that only each customer’s account manager can view them, or they can be open to an entire consultative sales force on a collaborative lottery basis: anyone who is first to suggest a winning value proposition receives a bonus that is percentaged on total PIP profits.

Digital dashboards can also be created to enable online assessment of consultative sellers’ performance by their sales managers. An automated data collection process can help keep tabs on how each individual seller is performing according to key indicators as well as on team, industry, and regional performance. Key consultative seller performance indicators can include the ratio of PIPs closed to PIPs proposed, average cycle time to close, average investment-to-profit ratio per close, and average value of each migration PIP.

Making Norms Industry-Specific

Norms are meaningless unless they are industry-specific. Industry designations do not get specific until they are defined by a three-digit Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code, such as the seven classes of Primary Metal Industries:

SIC Code Industry Subcategory

• 331 Blast Furnaces and Basic Steel Products
• 332 Iron and Steel Foundries
• 333 Primary Nonferrous Metals
• 334 Secondary Nonferrous Metals
• 335 Nonferrous Rolling and Drawing
• 336 Nonferrous Foundries

Within each three-digit code are four-digit subclasses. The code 3321 contains gray and ductile iron foundries, while 3322 contains malleable iron foundries. As a general rule, three-digit norms suffice. But if you do a lot of business in a four-digit subclass, it will pay you to correlate your norms to its improved outcomes. Otherwise, a niche specialist can beat you.

Your norms must average the aggregate values you contribute to a specific operation in a line of business or business function in the industry as the result of each application.

Applications must be equally specific. The exact specifications, configurations, or installation requirements of an application may vary even within the same industry. Your norms should account for them by being prefaced with predictive modifiers, such as:

• Above/below average engineering changes
• Above/below average specification deviations
• Above/below average labor content
• Above/below average use of multiple materials
• Above/below average production of multiple parts
• Above/below average generation of multiple product variations that cause multiple customized setups
• Above/below average length of production runs

If you sell to manufacturing customers, you should create a correlate to the SIC classification system with an SPC Index for Standard Process Classifications and an SCC Index for Standard Cycle Classifications. You can model them like this:

Standard Workflow Classifications

• 001 Information Systems Workflow
• 002 R&D Workflow
• 003 Engineering/Product Development Workflow
• 004 Manufacturing Workflow
• 005 Inventory Workflow
• 006 Sales and Service Workflow

Standard Cycle Classifications

• 101 Product Design and Development Cycle
• 102 Production Cycle
• 103 Inventory Cycle
• 104 Order Entry/Shipment Cycle
• 105 Billing and Collection Cycle
• 106 Sales Cycle

A norm’s worth is derived from its specific application-to-operation nature. This is the only way that your norms can act as shorthand representations of your ability to solve customer business problems: your norms for costs saved by reducing labor content or reducing scrap in a manufacturing operation, or your norms for revenues gained by speeding up product design and development cycle times in R&D.

Selling based on customer industry norms is commodity selling. Industry norms are commodities. They are available to you and to your competitors alike. They give you no meaningful differentiation. Nor do they give your customers the competitive advantage to take leadership even if you succeed in improving their current norms to the industry level. Industry norms are competitive floors, not ceilings. To perform at or near the industry norm is merely a customer’s entry pass into competition, not a badge of superiority. Competitive parity is signaled by the industry norm. Competitive advantage takes place above it.

Bringing Customers Closer to Your Norms

As a norm leader, you can offer customers a demonstrable advantage over their competitors by bringing them closer to your norms, which should be significantly superior to the industry average. This ability—to help your customers compete more cost-effectively—is your own competitive advantage as a consultant. It transcends your product price and performance, your deals and discounts, features and benefits, or any other aspect of your business and its sales propositions. It is the added value that your customers buy when they buy from you.

Without norms, you cannot quantify prospective customers. You may be able to learn where they hurt; where their "pain points" are. But you cannot know how much you can ease the pain, if at all, or how long it may take. Nor can you know the value that easing the pain can add to the customers’ operation where the hurt—or opportunity—is located.

If your customers are providers of supply chain management software and you supply solutions to businesses in the SIC code 7372, your experience tells you that they derive revenues primarily from software licenses and services such as consultation, maintenance, and training. You also know that their two major cost centers are R&D and sales, both of which account for about two-thirds of their total costs.

You are most likely to target your leads where the customers’ major sources of revenue bunch up and where the major costs cluster. But without norms, you can end up asking of everything you learn, "So what?"

What if you learn that the customer’s revenues from license fees have decreased 38 percent from a year ago? So what? If you do not have norms for the value you can add to license fee sales, how can you make a compelling proposal to increase them? By how much can you normally raise them? How soon? How sure can you be?

What if product development costs have been increasing by an average 23 percent year over year? So what? Can you help speed up the customers’ innovation cycle time? Can you help expand the number of commercializable products that come out of their R&D? You cannot answer these questions unless you know how much value your solutions normally add and how soon they normally add it. Within the context of your norms, you can calculate your value propositions with maximum certainty that they can pay off.

If the customers’ profits are coming more from turning over licenses at discounted fees instead of high unit margins, can you help? How sure are you? If their selling cycle takes an average of twelve months, can you reduce it? By how much? How soon? At what value to the customers? Based on the value, at what price to you?

The superior level of your norm value—superior to both the industry average and your customer’s current performance in an operation’s dollar contribution to profits—should brand you as the partner of choice. By contrast, your competitors who sell from industry norms will be selling commodities. Even though they can propose customer improvement, they cannot propose leadership.

Maintaining a superior norm margin is crucial to your branding. Every time you perform below it, you lower it; every time you lower it, you come back to the pack of competitive commodity suppliers. This is your main incentive to work at your best. It also warns you to work only with customers who want as badly as you do the growth that your norms promise, who have the managers and support staffs who can partner additively with you, and who will be impressive references for your track record as norm leader.

A model set of norms, in this case "norms on a card," is shown in Norms on a card. The information on this three-by-five-inch card represents the normal savings that an automated process controls supplier can make in the major cost contributors to a pulp mill’s operations.