Chapter 7: Consultative Proposing Strategies - How to Qualify Customer Problems

Overview

The high margins that accrue from Consultative Selling are your reward for knowing more about the customer operations you affect—and being able to improve them—than your competitors do. Margins are merited by mastery of how a customer runs the business lines and functions that are your sales targets. The more you know about them, and the better you are able to implement what you know into proposals for performing them more cost-effectively, the greater your value will be—accordingly, the higher the price you will deserve.

Consultative Selling is industry-specific. Within each industry, it is operation-specific. Business operations in customer companies are your end users, your true markets. According to the way they operate, they create the costs that you can reduce or do away with entirely. They can add new sales revenues or productivity if you can show them how. Your customer's business operations are the sources of the problems you have to solve and the showcases where the value of your solutions gives testimony to your capabilities. Scoping their ways of operating should therefore be your constant preoccupation.

If you are going to sell in a consultative manner, customer business operations will be the subject matter of your consultation. The only alternative is to talk about your own processes and the products or services they produce. In that case, you will be talking to the purchasing tier and selling on a basis of competitive performance and price. Your opportunity for high margins will have vanished.