When I saw the latest trailers on the BBC for The Apprentice, with these macho, posturing quotes, I found my skin growing clammy. I know it’s popular and makes good television, with its sharp-dressed contestants and all their dramas and rivalry, but I’ve grown to loathe everything it stands for.

It’s all so tired, so 1950s and as far removed from most businesses I work with as the moon landings. The Apprentice portrays business as a series of win-lose deals, where you have to be an aggressive, win-at-all-costs transactional salesperson. Oh dear. Has no-one told Lord Sugar that in 2011 business is based on networks, relationships and consultative selling? Anyone who acts in the way most of these contestants are encouraged to act in the real world would be found out, tweeted about and marginalised very quickly.

I’m not naive; I know The Apprentice makes great TV. But what worries me is that the young people around me who aren’t yet in business honestly think that this is how you have to behave to succeed. I could cry … but according to TV’s Alan Sugar that would make me weak and a failure. Pity he doesn’t make connections with businesses built by decent people driving dynamic success for their customers and themselves in a positive way.

Is it just me? Is it just the UK or is the US Apprentice the same?

What do you think?

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Everyone who answered this question mentioned relationship building and communication as being key for sales people but I don’t think that’s enough without the ability to really listen, really hear what you’re being told and to be creative with what you’ve heard.   This is always the starting point to building your value proposition as this is the customer experience part of the process,

As we become even more polarised from transactional selling (where the buyer knows what they want) to consultative selling (where they don’t know what they want), the merits of a good consultative sales person become clearer and clearer.

A good consultative sales person will translate what they’ve heard into some in-the-moment innovation crafting and keep offering this back and forward with the client until they have a starting point of a solution. I deliberately chose the words innovation crafting rather than solution crafting for consultative selling as it must be co-created with the buyer rather than a fixed solution the sales person has in their mind. This needs innate creative ability as well as good listening and relationship skills.

Really listening and building a good relationship over time also means dropping your ego.  You may not make the sale today, tomorrow or next month and you may not sell what you wanted to sell, so let that go.  In consultative selling the relationship with the buyer over an extended period is key and it can’t be faked, they will see straight through that.
My 8 tips to building a sales person’s value proposition are:

1. Listen, really listen
2. Hear what you’re being told
3. Replay what you think you’ve heard back to your buyer
4. Use your creativity for innovation crafting
5. Drop your ego
6. Build good, real relationships
7. Ask for commitment to you early in the process, but not too early – it’s like dating!
8. Stay for the long game

As we continue to move more and more towards automating transactional (often commodity) sales then I think this aspect of consultative selling for more complex products/services will become even more important. It’ll be one of the few differentiators left.

Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Cindy

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Then there was me, I was on my way home from work, I knew exactly what I wanted and would have been happier not to wait but to self-select my flowers and pay automatically as I was in a hurry, but this wasn’t on offer, so I had the choice of waiting to be served, or leaving without my flowers. I stayed and learnt an awful lot about wedding flowers in the process!

I was a transactional buyer, I knew what I wanted and how much I wanted to pay. The bride-to-be was a consultative buyer, she didn’t know what she wanted but she knew what she wanted to achieve, and she was flexible with her pricing.

The sales assistant however had to do consultative selling to the young girl as well as transactional selling to me. I was impressed, if not a little frustrated, at the flexibility of this sales person. Consultative salespeople are problem solvers and conceptual thinkers who look at the big picture. He was doing this perfectly in helping the bride-to-be choose her flowers. He knew his products and knew what would work in different situations and what wouldn’t.

It struck me that all retail stores these days need to offer a self-service option for the transactional buyer like me. In the way that some supermarkets have self-check outs and newspaper vendors have an honesty box in which to drop your money. Of course the ultimate transactional sale is an online sale like Amazon for example, where some browsing is possible but you often know what you want, self-select and self-checkout.

So is there anything in between these days or is every sale either consultative or transactional? I couldn’t think of an example, maybe you can?

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The moral of the tale? Don’t be scared to reduce and focus your offering portfolio for greater profit. Now is a great time to apply rigorous focus and do this. The first step in the process of reviewing and developing your offerings is to categorise what you’ve already got.

We tend to think that it is easy for manufacturing and product companies to categorize their products, but more difficult for service companies to do so. There is a tendency for those of us in the services sector – particularly in consulting – to think that, because our Offerings are less tangible, perhaps more complicated, that somehow they are superior to the manufacturing and product equivalents. There’s a certain intellectual snobbery about it. But it’s nonsense.

If you are a service provider, or provide a product-service amalgam, for a moment think of your Offerings as products. That way, you’ll likely find it a lot easier to define the components – the Bill of Materials, so to speak – that go to make up the whole. So think of building offerings like building products.

Only when this mapping has been completed – and it may be quite a lengthy exercise – will you be able to position your Components, Offers, Solutions, and Co-created Value onto a Value Pyramid, as explained next.

It is our experience that the whole of this exercise is best carried out using workshops: create hypotheses and workshop through with your offering managers or solutions leads.

Map to The Value Pyramid™
Having identified your Offering portfolio you need to map the offerings to The Value Pyramid™. The basic components are Component, Offer, Solution and Co-created Value, and that the nature of the sales processes around each of these categories changes profoundly, as indicated here:

Value Pyramid

Value Pyramid 2

By way of example, we set out below an Offering Portfolio Map for a hypothetical market intelligence consultancy. We have envisaged an organisation that offers a range of research and analysis services to its clients. The map might work out as follows:

Value Pyramid 3

Once this mapping is complete, it is far easier to see the way forward because you are able to identify:

• What offers can be grouped together to form new Solutions or higher value offerings?
• What offerings in one part of the business can be combined with other offerings from other areas (sectors or technical lines) to create new offerings?
• What pricing needs to be used with which offerings and what level of required profitability?
• How should each type or group of offerings be sold? That is, which lend themselves to low-cost of sale, automated or transactional selling, and which to high-touch, problem solving, high value-add consultative selling?
• To whom should each offering be sold? Offerings suited to transactional selling will be targeted to expert buyers (e.g. procurement experts) whereas Solutions and high-value offerings will normally involve consultative selling with more senior management (e.g. CEO and other senior executives) who, although they may know generally what they want to achieve, will need value-creation support to help them shape the solution.
• How long will it take to sell the respective offerings? Offerings lower down The Value Pyramid™ generally have a shorter sales cycle than those nearer the top.

Profitability
We also recommended a radical review of the profitability of your products and services, which we will explore in another article.

Having identified your best Offerings, you should then examine whether (and how) your sales and marketing approach needs to be refined.

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