Consultative Selling: The Hanan Formula for High-Margin Sales at High Levels, Eighth Edition

What if you could raise your margins from 0.80 percent to 350 percent of sales, your average dollar value per sale from $350,000 to $1.25 million, and your average annual revenue per sales representative from $150 million to $450 million—all without innovating your technology or renovating your product or service? This is Mack Hanan’s challenge, which he calls his Norm Challenge because it is based on the outcome norms of businesses that convert to his proprietary strategies of Consultative Selling.

The sustainable results of the hundreds of Fortune 500 corporations that endorse Consultative Selling have made traditional benefit-and-features selling obsolete. Hanan’s approach transforms the sales process from a tradeoff of product-performance-for-price to one of improved customer profit and margins. In other words, added margin becomes the tangible benefit that the consultative seller provides to the customer.

For forty years, Mack Hanan’s Consultative Selling has empowered hundreds of thousands of sales professionals to reap maximum success. Updated and revised, the eighth edition precisely matches its format and content to the disruptive demands of the 21st century business environment.

This classic resource shows you how to develop long-term, continuing relationships with customer operating managers, instead of just vending to purchasers. Filled with strategic sales techniques, a step-by-step implementation guide, and case studies of companies—including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, American Airlines, Motorola, Xerox, NCR, GM, and Boeing—the book reveals how you can supercharge your bottom line by selling improved customer profits rather than products or services and become a driving force in making your clients more competitive.

You’ll learn how to:

• Close major sales fast by avoiding traditional price negotiation
• Identify key information sources for lead targeting
• Maintain high customer satisfaction by generating greater returns on their investments
• Beat out the lower-price bidders who traditionally make the sales to not-for-profits and government agencies
• Control the costs of sales by condensing the selling cycle

The eighth edition features brand new sections on building and using consultative databases for value propositions and proof of performance; using consultative selling strategies on the Web; studying your customers’ cash flows to win proposals; creating a two-tiered sales model to separate consultative sales from commodity sales; and coping with—and reversing—the occasional “no.”

Filled with powerful consulting tactics that will make your customers’ competition—and your own rivals—competitively disadvantaged, Consultative Selling is a crucial resource for those who want to become an essential component of how their customers do business.

About the Author

Mack Hanan is an international consultant, trainer, and lecturer on accelerated business growth. He invents unique strategies that focus on the three key pressure points of growth: top management, profit-center management, and sales management. In each of these critical success operations, he counsels, trains, and lectures. His expert system in Consultative Selling is a comprehensive online training and implementation program that can be previewed at mackhananconsultativeselling.com. In addition to previous editions of this book, he is the author of Competing on Value (with Peter Karp), Growth Partnering, and Sales Shock!