Consultative Selling/Mac Hanan 32-33

33 Your norms announced what is special about you: You know how to improve the profits of certain types of business operations.

If customers already exceed your norms, you can help them maintain competitive superiority. If your norms are better than customer's current performance, you can help bring the customer up to your standard values.

Your norms--not your products--must become your consultative stock and trade.

Your norm is an if-then model: If the customer adopts your solution, then the customer norm more nearly approaches your own.

At any give time, you can assess your competitive advantage as a consultative seller--in other words, the value of the net profits you normally contributes to your customers--by checking our your norms according to three criteria:

1. Are they better then enough customers' current performance? If so, you will have continued proposal opportunity.

2. Are they better than your customers' industry average performance? If so, you may have a competitive advantage over other consultative sellers to bring customers up past industry average.

3. Are they better than or as good as each customer industry's best practices? If so, your norms are the industry standard of performance for all customers who want to achieve best practices.

A consultative seller's database must be compartmentalized into tree modules that he or she can scan left to right to target proposal leads: Our Norm, Industry Norm, Customer's Current Norm.