That’s right. If you’re going to do what’s generally called “consultative selling,” the last thing you want is to be seen as a “consultant.” It’s strange but true. Here’s why.
Over the years, the term “consultant” has accumulated a suitcase-full of connotations and associations that are inimical to making the sale. When most real-life business folk hear the term “consultant” they think:
- Unemployed Executive
- Drone from Corporate Headquarters
- MBA-armed know-it-all
- Work-avoiding Kibitzer
- Overpaid Blowhard
The problem with the term “consultant” (or it’s cousin “trusted adviser”) is that “consultants” and “advisers” have no responsibility for delivery. The customer neither wants nor needs a “consultant” looking over her shoulder telling her how to her job. Positioning yourself as and acting like a “consultant” is thus a good way to slow the sales process — or even lose the sale.
What the customer REALLY wants and needs is somebody to manage that segment of their business, so that the customer doesn’t have to think about it any longer. The customer wants you to take responsibility for a key function of the customer’s business. In other words, the customer wants you to be a manager, because that’s what managers do.
Example: Suppose your firm supplies glue to car manufacturers. Guess what? They’re perfectly capable of setting up their own glue pots, buying raw materials from chemical companies and making their own glue. The reason that they’re buying glue instead is because they’ve concluded that it’s easier to have somebody else worry about all that aspect of making an automobile. So they’re not buying glue…not really. What they’re really doing is outsourcing the “glue manufacturing” part of their business to your firm. And they want YOU to manage it.
THEREFORE, If you’re going to sell B2B at a high level in the post-Internet age, you must convince the customer not that you’re a consultant, but that you’re the type of person whom they would normally hire to manage that function, had they decided to keep that function in-house. That means that you must:
- Have a thorough knowledge of that function.
- Understand how that function fits into the customer’s business.
- Be capable of ensuring that the function achieves the customer’s goals.
- Be able to manage the team that will provide that function (i.e. your firm).
- Look, walk, talk and act like the managers inside the customer’s firm.
- Be willing to put the customer’s interest ahead of your team’s interest.
Tomorrow, I’ll give you a classic real-life example — an example that allowed a multi-billion dollar company survive a catastrophic market disruption. ALL this company’s competitors went down the toilet, but it’s still one of the most successful companies in the world — all because they understood, early on, that customers want sales reps to be managers, not consultants.
