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 before their customer’s top tier will not do so for long, or soon again. For consultative sellers to make a stand, and make it again and again, they must be prepared to speak the language of management, address customer concerns instead of their own, and put to work their knowledge of the customer’s business so that a demonstrable improvement—not just a shipment of goods—takes place.
Key account sales representatives who want to penetrate the top customer tier must position themselves to discuss, document, and deliver their answers to the question, "How much profit will you add?"
In order to be accepted as profit improvers, sales representatives must pledge allegiance to the Consultant’s Credo, reproduced in Consultant’s Credo. Only by understanding the consultant mindset—which is the mirror image of the customer manager mindset—will you be able to partner at the Box Two level shown in Customer-manager hierarchy. The customer business line managers and business function managers are concentrated at this level, reporting directly to Box One, where the funds are.
Consultants sell money, not products. They transact returns from investments, not sales. Their price is an investment, not a cost. Their performance is measured by the amount and rate of the customer’s return, not by product performance benefits. They work inside their customer businesses as partners, not from the outside as vendors. They relate directly to customer line-of-business managers and business function managers, not purchasing agents. They work at these middle management levels on a long-term, continuing basis, not from bid to bid. Their focus is not on competitive suppliers but on competitive profit making for their customer partners and for themselves.
Box One is the home of the "C Level" managers, the chief officers of operations, finance, information, and other core corporate functions, including the chief executive officer (CEO).
By partnering at Box Two, you can capture customer managers to act as your "economic sellers"—there is no such thing as "economic buyers," since Box Two managers do not buy—who will help you do your job so that you can help them do their jobs more successfully.
If you are a Box Two manager, what constitutes success? It means always improving your contribution to profits. For a business line manager, it means expanding revenues or increasing margins. For a business function manager, it means reducing costs. And where does the money come from to do these things? It comes from Box One. What is your role in this process? You must help your customer partners get more funds, and get them more quickly and more surely so that they can increase more revenues or margins and decrease more costs.
As Customer-manager hierarchy shows, Box One is the keeper of the keys to the corporate treasury. Box One is Box Two’s funder, open to suggestion twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, from their Box Two managers on how corporate funds can be invested more cost-effectively—in other words, how to get "the biggest bang for the buck." Box Two managers are always in a proposal mode with their Box One funders, claiming a stake in the funding process for their own businesses or functions. Box One favors them on the basis of the strategic fit of their proposals with corporate growth policy and their adherence to financial objectives for each dollar invested with them. What rate of return will be achieved? When will the investment be paid back? How abundantly will the cash flow? What is the degree of risk?
With every release of funds to a Box Two manager, a control procedure goes along with it to make sure that the invested funds are, first of all, paid back on time, and then maximized for the greatest return. The Box Two managers who get the most funds the most often are the best internal sellers. If you can help them get even more, or more often, they will "go partners" with you to do it again and again.
Allying Box Two
Consultative sellers succeed or fail on their ability to ally themselves with their Box Two counterparts. They cannot sell without them because Box Two sells for them in ways that they cannot. Their alliances are founded on creating an ongoing stream of Profit Improvement Proposals for the customer managers to sell internally, thereby obtaining the funds to support the consultative seller’s strategies. In order to act consultatively, the seller must conform to the requirements outlined in Consultant’s Credo.
Box One thinks, feels, and acts in ways that are standard operating performance for all Box One managers, emulated by all Box Two managers who interface with them, and virtually unknown to everybody else. Box One’s position self-description is that of a money manager.
As a money manager, Box One is preoccupied with financial stewardship, the management of other people’s money. This involves making prudent, duly diligent investments, the control and fractionalizing of risk into small, survivable bites, and a conservative management style that emphasizes certainty over the chance for a windfall, incremental gains over breakthroughs, and consistency over flashes in the pan.
Your alliances at the Box Two level depend on the same standards of performance as your Box Two counterparts’ internal alliance with their own Box One: the contributions that you make to competitive profit making. When you work in partnership with Box Two function managers, the added contribution you make to them becomes incremental to the contribution they have committed to make to Box One. That is why they will partner with you. The incremental value of your contribution becomes their test of how much you are worth as a partner.
The definition of business partner is therefore the customer manager’s definition: someone who can add incremental value to the manager’s contribution to profits. If you are going to qualify as a consultant partner, you must make yourself incrementally valuable to a business manager. This means you must deliver one or more of three types of added value:
- You must enable your partners to add more profits than they would be able to contribute without you.
- You must enable your partners to add profits sooner than they would be able to contribute without you.
- You must enable your partners to add profits with greater certainty than they would be able to contribute without you.
These "deliverables" set the standards of performance for consultative sellers. You will be judged for your partnerability by the manager’s answers to three questions: How much value do you propose to add? How soon do you propose to add it? How sure can I be that you will add as much value as you propose as soon as you propose to add it?
These are very different questions from the traditional ones raised at the Box Three purchasing interface. When vendors make their sales calls there, they are asked how much performance they can propose and how little price they can charge for it. But Box Two managers do not buy products; they invest in value. They do not buy at all; they sell proposals to obtain funds for their own operations. The Box One managers they sell to are your customers’ ultimate buyers. They buy investment opportunities that can put their money to work at the highest rates for the surest return within the shortest periods of time.
They judge their Box Two operating managers by how good they are as money managers. "If I give you one dollar," they ask in effect, "How much more will you give me back? How long before I get it? How sure can I be?" Managers who partner with you as their consultative seller are betting that you can help them enhance their performance by enabling them to return more money than they could alone, or return it faster, and return it more surely.
When you reduce one of the Box Two managers’ critical cost factors, you can help them improve the contribution they return from their operation. When you increase one of their critical revenue factors, you do the same. These are the mutual objectives of your cooperative partnerships because they are the achievements that improve your mutual profits.
Customer managers who meet the standards of performance for cooperative partnerability are called the Alpha Managers, the consultative sellers’ comanagers on the customer side. The Alpha Managers are the owners of the contribution from a customer operation. The Alpha’s name is signed in blood on the operation’s business plan. He runs, supports, or supplies a line of business and is not to be confused with vendor selling’s usual list of barnyard suspects like the political fox, the coaching goose, or the gatekeeper gander.
There is only one Alpha Manager per consultative seller per customer operation. This makes it crucial to partner the Alpha Manager; once lost to a competitor, the consultative seller is effectively denied penetration.
Empowering Box Two with Added Value
Box Two managers have a simple set of needs:
- They want money.
- They want money now—yesterday would have been even better.
- They want money so that they can make more money with it.
In order to position yourself for Consultative Selling, you must be able to prove to customer managers that you can help them get their hands on money, that you can help them to get it soon, and that you can supply them with a steady stream of investment opportunities that will enable them to make more money. These are the empowering features and benefits that will make you compellingly partnerable.
As your products and services become more closely replicated by competition, their features and benefits can no longer be differentiated enough to command a premium price. This places the burden of differentiation on you. Can you help customer managers make or save more money than your competitors can? Can you help them make or save it faster? Can you make them more certain by working with you? Yes answers are your sole competitive advantage because they provide the sole competitive advantage of your customer managers.
Vendors sell by asking purchasing managers at the Box Three level to let the sellers do their job: "Buy from me." Consultants sell by helping their Box Two partners do their own jobs better: "Win with me. If you put your money to work with me," the consultant’s position says, "you will have more money back sooner and surer." At the same time, you will have a greater market share of a current market, or you will have gained entry into a new market, or you will have a reduced cost burden in an important operation or greater productivity. You will be competitively advantaged as either a market share leader or as the industry standard of value as the low-cost producer.
The Box Two connection is vital. It is the essential linkup that makes Consultative Selling work. Without it, vendors remain vendors at the Box Three level, as these comments—typical of trying to sell consultatively to an untrained and unpartnered purchasing function—show:
"The customers have not responded. We try and try but at the end of our product demos, the same questions are still raised: what is the price and how much of a discount does it represent?"
"We must be qualifying opportunities far too late in our customers’ decision process. We have no time to PIP, just enough to propose a quote."
The true value of the competitive advantages you bring to customers is not in new profits themselves but in their investment value when they put them to work. How much more can they make on what they have just made with you? Funds always seek work. Idleness incurs opportunity cost. For this reason, you must have your next investment proposal in your hip pocket—actually, in your Account Penetration Plan—ready to present as soon as your current project has reached payback. This maintains your position squarely in the flow of funds while simultaneously repositioning your customers for the next round of being competitively advantaged by their partnership with you.
As your customer partners position you, you are an optional investment opportunity. This is how you must come across to them. It tells you how you must define the nature of your business with them:
- If you are in the telecommunications business, you must not simply be "in telecom." You must not sell switches, networks, or rates.
- You must not be simply one more "problem solver." You must not just sell "solutions."
- You must not simply be a "consultant."
You must be a profit improver, a partner whose expertise and experience in the customers’ businesses can help the customers increase the amount, speed, and certainty of the profits they contribute to their top-tier managers in Box One. You must understand the world that your partner lives in. If they are "in manufacturing" and considering robotics, they live in a world of cost contributors, Robotics cost checklist. Which of them can you help the customers control? Your contributions are your tickets of entry into their world. How much you can contribute, how soon, and how reliably will determine whether you will be invited to live in your customers’ world as their partner or will just be passing through.
Acquisition Costs
- The robot and its tooling
- Facilities, equipment revisions, and rearrangements
- Application engineering
- Process and product changes
- Training and transfers
- Installation
- Direct labor costs
Life Cycle Costs (Costs of Ownership)
Cost of capital
Taxes and insurance
- Maintenance labor, supplies, and spare parts
- Energy
- Training
- Scrap and rework
- Safety and potential cost of disability
Positioning as the Mixmaster
Each customer business function is a mix of costs and opportunities. Can you optimize the customer’s mix—that is, can you enable it to more nearly deliver its optimal contribution to profits? If you can learn how to master the mix of customer costs in an industry’s manufacturing process, for example, you can ensure your role as the industry’s standard-bearer.
All customers allocate certain resources to each of their businesses and their functions. This is their asset base—actually, their cost base. Some of these resources are supplied internally. They consist of their own people and the capital they use. The rest of their resources come from outside—the products, services, and systems that are acquired from a variety of suppliers. Taken together, these internal and external resources form the customers’ current operating "mix." In order to partner, you will have to help create a mix that can contribute higher profits.
All customer businesses operate with a mix. Some mixes are simply conglomerations of products. Others add services such as training or maintenance. Still others are composed of systems that, in turn, are composed of subsystems or, when amalgamated, contribute to networks. You must determine where you fit in every mix, what value you can add to it, and what the worth of that value can be to you and a customer.
The mix becomes your market. It is where you fit, where you operate, where you belong. It becomes the arena of your expertise. You must know how to make it produce profits in the most cost-effective manner, and you must know this better than anyone else. You must master the mix so well that you can position yourself with customers as their industry’s "mixmaster."
Customer mixes usually lag behind the optimal mix. They frequently represent a sizable investment. They are also hidebound to a customer’s learning curve. People have learned how to operate the current mix and have become familiar with its capabilities and its quirks. Training programs have been built around it. Cost and production schedules are established for it. Psychologically, it has become "the way we do things around here," a part of the gruel of corporate culture. It must be approached remedially but respectfully. You must not want to run your customers’ businesses. You must want to partner with them so that they can run them better.
There are three main strategies for optimizing a customer’s operating mix:
- You can supplant one or more elements in the current mix. If the mix is labor-intensive, for example, you may be able to reduce labor content by substituting an automated process or eliminating an operation altogether. Or you may be able to combine multiple processes such as forecasting and inventory control, thereby eliminating overlapping and duplicated costs.
- You can substitute your product or process for a competitive product or process that is part of the customer’s current mix. The basis for your recommendation must be that improved financial benefits will accrue to the customer if the mix is altered—not simply that more advantageous performance benefits will be realized.
- You can manage the mix internally as its systems integrator or facilities manager, working under a profit-improvement contract with a customer. Alternatively, you can manage the mix as its outsourcer.
The specific strategies for partnering by means of optimizing a customer’s mix depends on the industry you serve. If you sell personal care products to supermarket and drug chains, you can penetrate by optimizing the mix of the number of facings that stores allocate to your products compared to competitors’, the locations of your facings, and the type of displays. The proof of your optimization has to be quantified in financial benefits, such as profit improvement per square foot, overall improvement from personal care department contribution per store, or improved profit contribution from related item sales. Or you may propose to optimize a customer’s mix by taking on the role of manager of the personal care product category.
If you sell financial services such as stocks and bonds, insurance, real estate investments, or money market funds to affluent individuals, you can optimize the mix of their portfolios in terms of growth potential, risk, and current payout. The proof of your optimization has to be quantified in dollar benefits, such as higher earnings, lowered taxes, or increased net worth.
Customers are preoccupied with growth. In business, you grow or die. Without growth, costs overtake you, new technologies outmode you, and competitors outmarket or outflank you. Customer managers take partners precisely to hedge against these risks.
All consultants discover that it is easier to reduce a customer’s costs than to expand sales, and it is a good deal easier to quantify the resulting improvement to profits from cost reductions. But consultants quickly learn that no customer business exists to control costs. Customers are in business to make money, and the only way to make money is through sales. A consultant who is positioned as a cost reducer can be important to a customer. But a consultant who is positioned as a sales developer is vital.
New profits from increasing customers’ volume at the same margin or increasing margins at the same volume are the stuff of which growth is made. As a result, customers can control more of a market and become the profit leader if not the leader in market share. There is nothing wrong with being low-cost producers. But if consultants are expert in cost reduction, they should learn how to translate their impact into its effect on revenues so that they can be positioned as growth contributors.
All cost reductions can be translated into their sales equivalent. A reduction in the cost contributed by unnecessary inventory expense can be interpreted as the equivalent of a corresponding increase in sales revenues. This is equally true for a decrease in the cost contributed by scrap from off-specification production, from rejects or rework, from failures to make same-day delivery, from late billing, and from late collection of accounts receivable. If these costs are reduced, their earnings equivalent is the dollars saved or avoided: How much profit on how many dollars’ worth of how many units sold over how much time stated as "the equivalent in profits from the sale of 500,000 cartons each week—or 1,000 carloads every seventy-two hours—or ten additional aircraft operating each day at an 80 percent load factor."
Competing against a Customer’s Competition
Vendors compete against each other. Their customers pay their Box Three managers to manage this competition, playing one vendor off against another to get the best—that is, the lowest—price. Competition, whether among vendors or others, is based on comparison. When vendors compete for Box Three, they compare themselves against their competition product by product, feature and benefit by feature and benefit. When all the distinctions without a difference cancel out, vendors compare their performance to their price. In this way, they force debate on the relative merits—or, in other words, they force competition on themselves. The winners make the sale but, in the process, trade away their margins.
It is not uncommon for the margin loss to exceed 50 percent. In one typical case, a sales representative "sold" a $3 million order for computers to a retailer at a 54.75 percent discount that, the customer was told, would "elevate your awareness of the benefit of doing business with us by increasing your overall profitability." The discount was composed of a 46 percent price break plus free cooperative advertising funds, prepaid freight, the services of a team of marketing and sales representatives, together with a product trainer, and a rebate program. As the representative said who made the sale, "The customer practically sold himself."
The transcendent objective of Consultative Selling is to maintain premium margins. To do this, consultants must create a new concept of competition; that is, they must sponsor a different set of comparisons, none of which is with "other vendors." In addressing Box Two, consultants can position two types of comparison for their customers to evaluate:
- For profit center managers who run customer business lines, consultants can create a comparison between a manager’s current sales and share of market and the consultant’s norms. When the consultants’ norms are superior, they can propose to add value to the customer by helping to increase volume or margins.
- For cost center managers who run customer business functions, consultants can create a comparison between a manager’s current operating performance and the consultant’s norms. When the consultants’ norms are superior, they can propose to add value to the customer by helping to reduce or avoid costs.
In both cases, the consultative sellers are challenging the customer to compare their current competitive advantage with a proposed superior advantage. Is a competitor taking greater advantage of a market opportunity than you are? If so, I can help you come closer to equality or leadership. Are unnecessarily costly operations taking needless advantage of your profits and preventing you from being a lower cost producer? If so, I can help you come closer to equality or leadership.
When customers focus on comparing what it is costing them now, in both direct costs and opportunity costs, to be competitive with what it could cost them if they were partnered with the consultant, their concentration is on their own competitive position and not the consultant’s. Other vendors are driven from their field of vision. They are out of sight and out of mind because the questions the customers ask themselves have nothing to do with "the best price." They are, instead, preoccupied with questioning the deal at hand. Is it credible—can I believe the numbers? Is it sufficient—will it make enough of a difference? Can it be done—can the proposed people and systems and strategies do the job? Is it realistic—can I reasonably expect to get the predicted rate of return on my investment within the promised time frame?
What if they ask, "Are there other suppliers who could do the same thing or do it more cheaply or better or faster?" They already know the answer: "Perhaps." They also know that because time is money, they will risk opportunity cost if they want to find out. They will be far more concerned with evaluating today’s opportunity today—the bird in the hand—and not speculating about tomorrow. All they can ever be sure about is today. Today’s opportunity taken tomorrow is already operating at a competitive disadvantage.
Zeroing in on Consultative Targets
In order to be able to improve the profit contribution of a customer’s business or business function, you must know three things:
- The current values in the customer business or function that you can affect—the dollar values of a customer’s current costs, current productivity levels, and current sales
- The prospective dollar values that you can add
- The net worth of your added dollar values when subtracted from the investment required to realize them
Knowing Customer Current Values
All customer operations are cost centers. Only one, the sales function, can also be a profit center if profits from sales exceed the cost of sales. Customers have a choice of three strategies for managing their operations. One is to avoid or reduce costs while maintaining productivity. Another is to increase productivity while maintaining, reducing, or even increasing costs. The third is to eliminate an operation altogether, either spinning it out as an independent profit center to remove it from the corporate books or outsourcing it.
In order to consult with a customer line-of-business manager (LOB), you must be expert in the customer’s markets. This means that you must have three kinds of smarts. You must be process smart, knowledgeable in the flow of the customer’s products through their distribution processes and where their critical values are added. You must be applications smart, knowledgeable in how to apply your products and services to the customer’s sales and distribution process so that revenues or margins can be increased. And you must be validation smart, knowledgeable in how to quantify your contribution.
"Knowing your customer’s business" means having all three types of smarts. In the areas of your expertise, you must know how a customer’s distribution process flows. You must be able to chart it from start to finish. You must know the 20 percent of its critical success factors that contribute up to 80 percent of its income and earnings. You must know the value of these revenues and profits. You must know your norms for the products and markets that account for the majority of profits and by how much the customer’s earnings deviate from them. You must know how to bring the customer’s profits closer to a norm if they are below it or keep them above it if the customer is doing better than the norm. You must know by how much you can do this and how soon. When you know all these things, then you can say that you know the customer’s business as far as the products and markets you affect are concerned. Anything less is vendor selling.
In order to consult with a customer function manager, who supports or supplies a line of business, you must be expert in his or her operation. This means that you must have three kinds of smarts. You must be process smart, knowledgeable in the flow of the customer’s process and where the critical costs cluster. You must be applications smart, knowledgeable in how to apply your products and services to the customer’s process so that costs can be reduced or productivity can be increased. And you must be validation smart, knowledgeable in how to quantify your contribution.
"Knowing your customer’s business" means having all three types of smarts. In the areas of your expertise, you must know how a customer’s process flows. You must be able to chart it from start to finish. You must know the 20 percent of its critical success factors that contribute up to 80 percent of its costs. You must know the value of these costs. You must know your norms for these operations and by how much the customer’s costs deviate from them. You must know how to bring the customer’s costs closer to a norm if they exceed it or keep them below it if the customer is doing better than the norm. You must know by how much you can do this and how soon. When you know all this, you can say you know the customer’s business as far as the operations you affect are concerned. Anything less is vendor selling.
Vendors like to say that they are value adders. Yet all they can usually quantify is the value of the cost they add when a customer buys from them. Rarely, if ever, do they know the value of the customer costs they reduce or the productivity they increase or the new revenues and profits they contribute to. Yet these are every supplier’s most crucial values. Unless you know them, you are selling blind. You will only be as valuable as your most recent discount.
Even worse, you are selling costs, not improved profits, when you vend. If you do not know the value you add to a customer, you must sell what you know: your product’s cost and its justification. As soon as you sell cost, you will come under the control of the customer’s purchasing function, whose primary purpose is cost control. You will be imprisoned in vending.
Arranging a Transfer of Values
In Consultative Selling terms, a sale is a transfer of values: A customer’s resources—time, talent, and money—are transferred for the contribution to customer profits made by a supplier’s products and services. In the same terms, a sales call must be an exchange of values as well. The customers must come away with new knowledge: They must be aware of the supplier’s norms for profit contribution and how the current contributions of their operations compare with them. The suppliers must come away with new knowledge as well, consisting of data on customer businesses or business functions whose profit contributions can be brought closer to the suppliers’ norms—in other words, they must come away with leads. Unless the suppliers come home with data on which to base a Profit Improvement Proposal, or with an approved proposal itself, they have not made a sales call. They have been socializing on company time.
All value is customer value. Adding value does not take place at the factory. It takes place in a customer’s business. If you are going to add to a customer’s value, you must first know what it is without your addition. This is the customer’s "before." The new value will be the customer’s "after." The difference between before and after is the value added by your business. In truth, it is your business. It is what you do and the reason why you are in business to do it.
For the purposes of Consultative Selling, the value you add must become the product you sell. You must become a value-added seller. This means that you must know your "product," the value that you represent.
In common with all products, value has its own specifications. These give it its performance capability, that is, what it is able to do inside a customer’s business. Your performance capability is customer-dependent and will vary for each customer application. Each of your "products" will be unique to its customer. No two values will be the same, except by chance. As a result, you will no longer be able to print a price list. As values differ customer by customer, moving up and down within the range that establishes your norms, the price you require in the form of a customer’s investment to achieve each value will also differ.
Value has three specifications:
- It has "muchness": You will be able to add a lot of value or only a little.
- It has "soonness": You will be able to add value quickly or not for a while.
- It has "sureness": You will be able to add value with a high degree of certainty or you will hedge.
A mix of "muchness," "soonness," and "sureness" forms the value benefits that you will be able to offer to each customer. You must be able to quantify each one. Otherwise, if all you can say is something like, "We are pretty sure that we can provide a lot of value to your operation very soon," you will be saying nothing. Once you have quantified your value, then you will be able to know your most important sales tool: what your added value is worth to your customers.
Knowing the Worth of Your Added Values
If you are able to offer your customers the added value of one dollar as the result of doing business with you, what are you really offering them? The dollar has three values. One is its money value. A dollar is a dollar. Another value is its time value. A dollar today is worth more than the same dollar will be worth tomorrow. Finally, the dollar has investment value. It can be invested at a rate of return that will multiply its original value several times.
Your value is worth what customers can do with it—a function of how much they get from you, when they get it, and what they do with it. This is the ultimate worth of your dollar. Like value, dollars appreciate only inside the customers’ business. In order to create new worth for customers, you must therefore get into the customers’ business—into their critical lines of business and critical business functions—and help them manage them. You cannot create worth without the customers. Nor can they achieve the added worth you offer without you. To magnify the worth of a business, you and your customers need each other. This congruence of need makes you partnerable.
As a consultant, the most important knowledge you can have about your business is your value to your customers; that is, how much you typically contribute to their profits and how long it typically requires to make your contribution.
When you know what your value is worth to customers, you and your customers can tell what kind of consultant material you represent. If your value is the same as what the customers can obtain working alone without you, you are not consultant material. If your value is worth more than what the customers can obtain working alone or with any other supplier, you may be prime consultant material.
If you want to be the customers’ consultant, you must offer them the prime value. Nobody must be able to offer better value specifications—as much value or as soon or as sure. If you can achieve this position, your value becomes the industry standard. Not only do you deliver the greatest value, but it is worth the most to your customers.
When that happens, you have a new basis for your price. No longer does your price need to reflect cost or competitive market value. You are able to relate your price to the worth of your value on a return-on-investment basis. The customers’ added worth becomes their return. Your price becomes their investment. A premium return to the customers is all the justification you need to require a premium investment.
If you sell without knowing your value, everything else you know is rendered valueless for margin building. What price would you charge—or, in Consultative Selling terms, what investment would you require—for sixty two-way wireless radios installed on the manufacturing floor of an engine maker’s plant? If you guess $150,000 because you do not know that the customer’s first-year cost savings from reduced downtime is $1.5 million, what kind of a deal would you have made if you had given your product away while its value-to-price ratio was 10 to 1? You would have booked the sale, but you would have made yourself a philanthropist.