If IT companies seek to differentiate themselves from the competition,
they must turn to consultative selling. Consultative selling is
analyzing the needs and challenges of your customers and selling unique
services that enable your customers to reduce costs, increase profits,
and improve overall business performance. The Art of Consultative
Selling in IT provides a practical framework for becoming a successful
consultative seller and shows how to use the blue ocean strategy to
identify opportunities in areas where there is no competition.
The first section discusses the advantages of consultative selling and
explores the concepts of blue oceans. In blue oceans, demand is created
rather than fought over. Competition is irrelevant because the rules of
the game are waiting to be established. The author explains how you can
use consultative selling techniques to create your own blue oceans of
unknown market space, where opportunities for growth are both rapid and
profitable.
In the second section, the author defines the consultative selling
framework (CSF). This framework is based on proven processes, best
practices, and real-time case studies to make consultative selling a
reality. It provides clear guidelines for understanding your customer's
current landscape and challenges, owning its priorities, and helping it
to achieve its short-term and long-term goals. The author explains how
to use CSF to generate innovative ideas and present them to your
customer through profit improvement or efficiency improvement proposals.
The book concludes with examples of several innovative business
improvement ideas that you can present to your customers, including
Agile project management, master data management (MDM), application
portfolio rationalization, and business process management (BPM). The
author discusses the benefits of each methodology and lists the trigger
points to think about when deciding whether the methodology can add
value to a particular customer.
