The number one, which is the smallest whole number, can have enormous power. One more product sold every day, one more percentage point added to current revenues or profits every week, or one more day gained every month in the collection of accounts receivable can yield astonishing amounts of improved profits for a customer. Applying [...]
To vend, you need to know your own costs. To sell in a consultative manner, you need to know customer costs. To vend, you need to know your own sales opportunities. To sell as a consultant, you need to know customer sales opportunities. Realizing that you must come up with a cost-reducing or revenue-adding option, [...]
All business operations have a flow—they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Manufacturing begins with raw materials and ends with finished goods in inventory. Data processing begins with raw information and ends with reports. There are costs at both ends; in between, there is nothing but costs. Consultative sales representatives should be able [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
After you have completed all of the research required for developing a clear understanding of the overall environment in which your marketing plan will be operating, it is time to begin putting the final plan together. At this point, you should have completed a market review that clearly outlines the size and nature of the [...]
Many marketing plans result in strategic programs designed to either obtain new distribution or achieve improved performance in existing retail outlets. Many of the marketing plans in this book have called for increased shelf space for product lines, focused on improved in-store visibility, or been intended to add value to retailer relationships. When these plans [...]
In this article, ethnographic research was used to develop a summary of consumer usage and attitudes in the baby shoe category. The objective was to understand the detailed habits and practices of mothers of infants as they related to the purchasing and usage of baby shoes. The procedure involved in-home discussions with respondents about their [...]
This article provides a marketing plan for expanding the sales and distribution of a Chinese manufacturer of central air conditioners in Taiwan. One of the interesting aspects of this marketing plan is its use of the Internet to develop a qualitative understanding of consumer usage and attitudes. Internet research can be very useful when research [...]
The purpose of this document is to provide a comprehensive marketing plan for a major new venture in marketing a broad line of hardware products through supermarket organizations throughout the United States. This document is divided into the following seven sections: BACKGROUND. This section reviews the background of this project and outlines the steps that [...]
Asking the right questions during focus groups is obviously the key to learning how your potential customers feel about your business venture. Finding out how someone really feels can be quite tricky. It is important that you know what to listen for when respondents are discussing their reactions. Here are three methods that can be [...]
Focus groups are normally conducted in a professional facility designed for this purpose, and the selection of the focus group facility is very important. There are hundreds of alternatives listed in the Market Research Association Blue Book, and they can also be found in other sources, such as trade magazines and under Market Research in [...]
The respondents to be included in focus groups must be carefully selected. You must be sure that they really represent your potential target customers and that they are capable of giving you valuable insight. You also want to avoid people who might tip off potential competitors and ‘‘professional respondents’’ who have been to so many [...]
A focus group is a special type of interactive interviewing process in which individuals (technically called respondents) are brought together to discuss a specific topic. The respondents are selected on the basis of carefully thought-out criteria, so that they are exactly the types of individuals who can best relate to the subject. During the group [...]
Finding the match between your company’s resources and the needs and desires of your target customer group is a major mission that must be undertaken by every developer of a marketing plan who is serious about creating a successful venture. It is not always easy to identify this match. Casually asking customers at random may [...]
Now that we are in the twenty-first century, the completion of a market review for your marketing plan may have been made easier by the Internet. We discussed in an earlier chapter how to use the Internet to gather secondary information. This can sometimes be more effective than other methods of gathering this information because [...]