Consultative Selling

Traditional selling is, by design, a manipulative process. Salespeople have a product with specific features for which they need to find a buyer. Customers have to be convinced of the reasons they need that product. It’s the product that’s the focus of the sale, not the customers’ needs, objectives, desires and hopes.

The consultative selling process is, by contrast, non-manipulative. It doesn’t focus on the product. Instead, its goal is to clearly define a client’s needs and objectives and secure that client’s agreement that these needs should be addressed. Techniques that keep clients involved in the process, actively translate their feelings into actions and maintain their ongoing interest in continuing to work toward their goals are all critical to consultative selling.

Client’s lack the skill and perspective necessary to analyze their own business. A consultant with a larger world view and a firm grasp of industry best practice is in a unique position to identify business objectives, define performance metrics and measurement, analyze business process and suggest solutions. This is where opportunities lie.

… How I came to Consultative Selling

At Indus International, Inc. members of my team assembled a billable service we called a Readiness Assessment. Here ‘readiness’ referred to an organizations ability as well as motivation to accept change while ‘assessment’ referred to an analysis of the organizations business processes. At its foundation the assessment was a methodology designed to quickly survey business factors across a company. The output was a list of ranked business processes targets representing best candidates for automation.

I began to use the techniques developed for this methodology during my interactions with existing and prospective clients. Below I have described some of success stories. These are representative not comprehensive.

Company A, Nuclear Power Generation Division - $998,000 software sale

I meet whom I will call Company A after giving a presentation on the features and benefits of the Document Management Application Programming Interface (API), a component of the Indus Passport EAM product suite. Company A representatives in attendance approached me after the presentation and asked questions relevant to problems they were having with the core Passport EAM product suite. An in depth discussion over the next several weeks ensued. While their questions were technical in nature I realized their real issue was a missing coherent strategy for records management. As a result they were asking the core product to perform functions it was simply not meant to perform.

Shortly after I gave a presentation on the Document Lifecycle in Asset Intensive Organizations at the Nuclear Information Records Management Association (NIRMA) conference. Representatives from Company A were in attendance and this proved to be the catalyst that allowed me to drive into their organization. I had gained credibility through industry leadership and an honest commitment to their best long term interest.

Over the course of two months I held several discovery sessions with key Company A executives and their team members surrounding records management, regulatory compliance and business objectives. I assisted Company A build a business case elucidating the ROI (hard and soft) of an enterprise records management application. The result was a license sale of $998,000. No RFP was created. No software demonstration was given. The sale was built entirely on the business case, the ability of the solution to meet business objectives beyond the business case and the fit with the culture of the organization.

Company B, Nuclear Power Generation Division –$800,000 services engagement

I was introduced to Company B by an Account Executive interested in sell through. Similar to Company A, Company B also utilized the Indus Passport EAM suite. Initially I began my relationship with them while proposing incremental improvements to their existing use of the system and writing subsequent Statements of Work (SOW). On several of these engagements I functioned as Project Manager or Principle Consultant and quickly gained respect for my product knowledge, my intimate working relationship with Product Development and well as my honest commitment to their best long term interest.

During these engagements we continually visited the benefits of utilizing the business process automation features of the product, something they had not seriously looked at before. At Company B’s request I met with key executives on several occasions in a discovery process targeting business process areas of particular concern. I secured Company B’s agreement that identified candidates should be addressed and I negotiated a SOW totaling more than $800,000 in a fixed price engagement.

Company C, Municipal Water Works – $2,700,000 services engagement

My relationship with Company C started as a response to a RFP. I participated on the proposal response team answering product functionality questions, developed the services quote and created the implementation plan to meet competitive requirements. We proposed a fixed price phased approach. Phase 1 delivered on RFP requirements while later phases addressed what we suspected to be critical business factors based on our experience in the industry and our informal interactions with Company C.

We won the RFP based on our Phase 1 strength and our vision beyond the RFP. However, this was only the beginning of the requirements discovery as we next entered into detailed contract negotiation. It was through these negations that we were able to spend time with our prospect, learn their business objectives, tie project deliverables to those objectives and establish performance metrics. Phase 1 finalized at $3,500,000.

Throughout the Phase 1 engagement I served as a member of the Steering Committee and handled issue escalation such as product defects, contractual interpretations and resource logistics. I also served as a product expert as well as conducted advanced training classes. I was in a unique position to partner with Company C and through which earned their trust and respect. Together we defined a long term enterprise business process automation strategy and contracted engagement lasting through Phase 2 and Phase 3 totaling $2,700,000 in additional services fees.