Consultative Selling/Mac Hanan 5-8

8 The traditional buyers are cost-controllers. If you choose to confront them as your decision makers, they will faithfully negotiate away your margins in order to lower "the cost of goods bought"

 

On the other hand, you can choose to partner with managers who act as your economic sellers inside their businesses, promoting your proposals to improve their contributions to profits.

 

If you make the three right choices, you are in position to compare your value against a customer's current value, attach your price in the form of an investment to your value, and partner with a business manager who sells your value. You are selling like a consultant.

 

Vendor sales representatives become consultative sellers by making three conversions in their mindsets:

1) They must convert price into investment.

2) They must convert a product or service into the dollar value that comes from being applied to a customers operation (value added by application VABA.

3) They must convert their focus on making individuals stand-alone sales into making a portfolio of continuing sales, each one of which is a logical migration form its preceding sale. A customer's profit improvement cannot be sporadic, periodic event. Instead , it must be an ongoing process whose continuous inflow of new streams of cash is predictable. Reliability of profit improvements is every consultative partnership's middle name.