Consultative Selling/Mac Hanan 33-34

34 Norms give a consultative seller the vocabulary to speak in business-ese like this:

• Our Norm for average cost of record keeping of purchase orders, inventory reconciliation, and other related transactions in your product category is x dollars. Your cost is three times higher than our norm.
• It take you 3.0 hours to complete a design cycle. Our norm is 1.7. What is the value to you in cost saved and faster revenues for every 30 minutes we can bring you closer to our norm?

The City of Influence / Stewart 43-45

44 Disneyland would perform at the level you expected and were willing to pay for that luxury.

45 Bricks represent the relationships inside of your city of influence, and they are the only building material guaranteed to keep your business safe from the attacks of the wolf.

When two competitors both have fair prices and excellent performance then the relationship becomes the deciding factor. And the more expensive the service, the more relevant the relationship.

16 of 21 Suggestions for Success /H. Jackson Brown...

21 Suggestions for Success /H. Jackson Brown,Jr.

1. Marry the right person.

2. Work at something you enjoy and that’s worthy of your time and talent.

3. Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.

4. Become the most positive and enthusiastic person you know.

5. Be forgiving of yourself and others.

6. Be generous.

7. Have a grateful heart.

8. Persistence, persistence, persistence.

9. Discipline yourself to save money on even the most modest salary.

10. Treat everyone you meet like you want to be treated.

11. Commit yourself to constant improvement.

12. Commit yourself to quality.

13. Understand that happiness is not based on possessions, power, or prestige, but on relationships with people you love and respect.

14. Be loyal.

15. Be honest.

16. Be a self-starter.

The Pursuit of WOW/Peters 260-262

261 Distance learning is the wave of the future.

262 Make a list of your 100 top customers. Put it in your desk drawer. Every week call four of them, just to check in, listen, see if there's anything they want to talk about. Anything. When you get to the bottom of the list, start all over again from the top.

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.