Consultative Selling/Mac Hanan 43-44

44 Consultants sell money, not products. They transact returns from investments, not sales. Their price is an investment, not a cost. Their performance is measured by the amount and rate of the customer's return, not by product performance benefits. They work inside their customer businesses as partners, not from the outside as vendors. They relate directly to customer line-of-business managers and business function managers, not purchasing agents. They work at these middle management levels on a long-term, continuing basis, not from bid to bid. Their focus is not on competitive suppliers but on competitive profit making for their customer partners and for themselves.

Customer-Manager Hierarchy

Box 1. Top Management--develop objectives, invite proposals, apply criteria based on ROI and cash flows, Allocate funds and set controls.

Box 2. Middle Management--generate investment proposals based on ROI and cash flows, Recommend specs, implement.

Box 3. Purchasing Management--Invite proposals, apply criteria based on price performance specs, Recommend vendors.

Box One is the home of the "C" Level"

Box Two managers

You must help your customer partners get more funds, and get them more quickly and more surely so that they can increase revenues or margins and decrease more costs.

Box One is Box Two's funder.