such as productivity, efficiency, financial results, and return on investment
(ROI). Salespeople who can respond to these needs can shut out the
competition while increasing both the amount and profitability of their
sales.
The Business Consultant Role
“Consultative selling”—the ability to understand and link solutions to
a customer’s business priorities—is a critical skill, but it is no longer
by itself a differentiator. Most experienced salespeople know how to
identify information about a customer’s products and market position,
and how to ask questions to uncover business issues important to the
customer. Furthermore, the consultative sales role is still, as the term
suggests, a sales role.
The real opportunity to stand out from the competition lies in becoming
a true consultant to the business, asking a different set of questions
focused on the customer’s core business processes. Once the salesperson
thoroughly understands these processes—how they link to each other
and what kinds of information is exchanged among them—it is possible
to identify unique opportunities to improve key metrics such as inventory
turn, labor costs, or time to market.
Where to Look for Opportunities: The Customer Value
Chain
Unlike information about a company’s financial performance, people,
and products, business process information can only be gathered by
talking to the right people in the right parts of the organization. Michael
Porter’s Value Chain model
1
is a useful tool for organizing a business
process discovery effort. It provides a lens for looking at the business
from the point of view of key functions. The model then serves as a
guide for gaining access to owners of key functions.
Michael Porter depicts an organization’s critical business processes
(at the top of the model above) as a “value chain” wherein each key
production process or system adds a specific type of value to the final
output of the enterprise. Support processes (at the bottom of the model)
include such functions as general management, technology, human
resources, and procurement or purchasing.
1 Porter, Michael. Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sus-
taining Superior Performance. Free Press, 1998.
Inbound Operations Marketing Service Outbound
Logistics & Sales Logistics
General Management, Financial, Administration
Human Resources
Technology
Purchasing
7 marketingtimes
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