Consultative Selling/Mac Hanan xii-xiii

xiii Consultative Selling is the delivery system for value.

 

• Instead of sitting across from a purchasing manager...consultative sellers sit side by side with a mid level operating manager who runs a profit centered line of business or a cost-centered business function.
• Instead of selling the added cost of a product...sell the added value of improved contribution to profits.
• Instead of asking for money, they offer money in the form of a return of their customer's investment. 
• Instead of spec sheet...they specify the value they can add on costs and benefits analysis of line-item cost savings and revenue benefits.
• Instead of talking down their competitors...they talk up the enhanced competitive advantage customers can seize over their own competitors.
• Instead of paying lip service to the concept of partnership, they creed the new stream of cash flow that pay their entry fee into true customer partnerships.
• Instead of professing added value, they propose it in quantified, time-framed terms, measuring it milestone by milestone, selling it, being evaluated on it, and being paid for it.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 176-177

177 When you let the flywheel do the talking, you don't need to fervently communicate your goals. People can just extrapolate from the momentum of the flywheel for themselves: "Hey, if we just keep doing this, look at where we can go!" As people decide among themselves to turn the fact of potential into the fact of results, the goal almost sets itself.

Up Your Cash Flow / Goldstein 91-93

95 Take an accurate inventory

• Move identical goods to the same location
• Place inventory in order
• Make all items readily identifiable.
• Clear aisles and passageways
• Segregate scrap and worthless items.

 

If your business is a manufacturing entity, schedule production so that work-in-process is keep to a minimum. This will reduce the time and effort required to count and price those items.

 

A proper cut-off involves identifying the arrival and shipment dates of your inventory.

Good received after the cut-off date should be physically segregated and counted separately.

The Pursuit of WOW/Peters 149-153

153 When a Brazilian manager comes to meetings, the chief measure of success he uses is customer satisfaction. It wasn't even on our list of key measures! But it's how he begins: not assets, not profitability, but customer satisfaction.

Consultative Selling/Mac Hanan ix - xii

 ix ...when margins are the reward for improving a customer's profits rather than for improving your products or services; either you never leave home without new competitive advantages to bring to a customer or you stay in the car.

 

Let's talk about where your business is going, and here's how we can help you meet your goals.

 

 x Theirs is not the gift of gab but the greatest gift of all, being able to help customers grow their business so the consultative seller's business can be grown by high-margin sales in return.

 

xi ...Consultative Selling keep their eyes on the eagle: their customers.

 

The power of Consultative Selling to compel customer awareness, positive attitude, and acceptance has been proven over and over again by companies as diverse in size, industry, and nationality....

 

 xii Compugen's customers are differentiated from their competitors by the caliber of their profits and the competitive advantages of their processes.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 173-176

174 Tremendous power exists in the fact of continued improvement and the delivery of results.

 

 176 Clearly, the gtg companies did get incredible commitment and alignment--they artfully managed change--but they never really spent much time thinking about it. It was utterly transparent to them. We learned that under the right conditions, the problems of commitment, alignment, motivation, and change just melt away. They largely take care of themselves.

 

Jim Herring, the Level 5 leader who initiated the transformation of Kroger, told us that he avoided any attempt at hoopla and motivation.

Up Your Cash Flow / Goldstein 91-93

Up 93 There are no easy solutions to inventory control, but here's some suggestions:

 

• Use perpetual inventory records for the large dollar amounts of inventory.  Maintain records on 20% of the items that account for the 80% of the dollars and not the 80% of the items that account for 20% of the dollars.
• Take physical inventories regularly and compare the physical inventory with your perpetual records to test the perpetual records for accuracy.
• If taking a physical inventory is a large task, take counts on a cycle. This may mean counting a fourth of the inventory every three months or a sixth every two months.
• The small and low value items should not be included in your routine inventory counts. Counts them once or twice a year; use your judgement.
• If the physical inventories and the perpetual inventory are in agreement, the perpetual inventories can be used for financial accounting.
• All differences between the physical inventory and the perpetual inventory should be reconciled.
• As soon as an item in inventory appears to be slow moving, reduce the price and get rid of it. This will keep your inventory fresh at all times.
• Is you manufacture a product, a cost accounting system that determines the cost of your product should be developed. This will aid in the determination of the price your product will be sold for.
• Sell your product by calculating the sales price in the following manner:

Material Cost ___________

Labor Cost_________

Factory overhead__________

Selling Costs___________

Administrative costs___________
Profit______________

Total sales price__________

• Don't be foolish when working with your inventory in determining costs and/or systems. If you are in doubt about what you are doing seek, professional advice.
• Adopt and maintain written policies and procedures to implement all inventory procedures.
• Automate, automate, automate.
• Review inventory reports and procedures regularly.
• Stop fantasizing.

The Pursuit of WOW/Peters 147-149

 149 Ira's Roxbury story is a perfect example of how to turn people on: You give them control and pride of ownership and say, "You're special, you matter. Go to it and have fun." Usually it's: "Go to it and have fun until you run up against rule or a boundary or a procedure manual."

 

Employees have to have real power to help the customer. Having that responsibility can be scary, but even that fear gets the blood pumping.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 216-217

217 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote...If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges and is not installed in an office within on year afterwards...it seems to his friends and to  himself that he is right in being disheartened and in complaining the rest of his life. There is a better path Emerson cried: A sturdy lad..keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls...He has not on chance, but a hundred chances.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 169-173

173 The gtg companies were subject to the same short-term pressures form Wall Street as the comparison companies. Yet, unlike the comparison companies, they had the patience and discipline to follow the buildup-breakthrough flywheel model despite these pressures. And in the end they attained extraordinary results by Wall Street's own measure of success.

 

The key, we learned, is to harness the flywheel to manage these short-term pressures.

The Pursuit of WOW/Peters 143-147

144 Managers have to understand that inspiration is a valuable commodity.

 

145 We can't keep suffocating the risk-takers.

 

147 Guy Kawasaki, one of the original Apple Macintosh gang, had this motto: "Never buy a computer from a company where the president can't do the demo." Simply throwing money at innovation without involvement at the top is useless.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 215-216

216 ...your choice between generalizing and specializing should be powerfully influenced by frank self assessment. A specialist should be willing to bet on the long-term value of his specialty, do whatever it takes to be among the very best, and take the risks and seek the rewards of a more entrepreneurial career.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 168-169

169 The gtg companies had no name for their transformations. There was no launch event, no tag line, no programmatic feel whatsoever. Some executives said that they weren't even aware that a major transformation was under way until they were well into it. It was often more obvious to them after the fact than at the time.

Up Your Cash Flow / Goldstein 88-91

90  I like to refer to inventory as the "fantasy asset." More games are played and guesses are made on the value shown as inventory on financial statement than any other item in the statement. This occurs so often that many times management loses sight of the importance of proper control and evaluation of inventory--the single most important asset in determining company profitability.

 

If you use an incorrect inventory for your financial statement your profit or loss statement will be incorrect by the same amount on a dollar-for-dollar ration.

The Pursuit of WOW/Peters 133-143

143 Digital Equipment was started with something like $50,000. Today, venture-capital firms laugh at the idea of considering anything that's needs less than half a million dollars.

What's interesting is the goings on one level down from the formal capital market. When INC. did its 500 fastest-growing companies list a couple of years ago, it asked how many bucks people had used to start their companies, and 75 percent had spent less than $100,000. Some insanely high number, like 35 percent, had spent less than $10,000.

 

What makes Boston and Silicon Valley interesting is that you see companies that do value new ideas. Making innovation a rock-bottom tenet of company culture is the key.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 206-215

214 Loyalty to the profession is greater than loyalty to the company.

 

...you are what you do for your customers--is as a clear a description of the new career contract is there is.

 

215 Someone who bets his career on a specialty is like a investor who puts all his money on one stock.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 160-168

168 Here's what's important. We've allowed the way transitions look from the outside to drive our perception of what they must feel like to those going through them on the inside. From the outside, they look like dramatic, almost revolutionary breakthroughs. But from the inside, they feel completely different, more like an organic development process.

 

 Kimberly Clark executive "He evolved it over time"