Chapter 12: Make Money with the "C" Word

Think Like a Consultant to Sell Beyond the Sale

A few columns ago, we talked about the power of questions to keep a sales conversation focused on customer problems and needs. We even came to a tacit agreement (didn’t we?) that an effective sale can’t happen without asking questions – that questions allow us to gather information, diagnose a prospect’s biggest business problems and craft a cure for them.

All of that sounds innocent enough, but if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that approach to sales is a step down the path of consultancy – not just consultative selling, but truly consulting with your customers, far beyond what’s necessary to sell some servers or software.

Peter Drucker once wrote that the greatest strength of a consultant is to be ignorant and ask questions, and that’s just what I’ve been advocating all this time. I’ve been leading you down the path of becoming that dreaded “c” word to your customers and prospective customers. But why?

If you’ve been in the IT game long enough, you’ll probably guess that this is about margins. After all, consulting is really just another word for professional services, right? And everybody knows professional services have those killer margins.

That’s all true, but it’s not the point. You see, nearly anyone can sell the products and services you’re selling. And nearly anyone can compete with you on price.

But does anyone else out there have your brains? If so, you might want to give George Romero a call. But if not, you’ve just stumbled upon the most powerful product you can sell – your unique ideas, perspectives and experience. In short, your brains.

If you can take ideas like the ones presented in this series of articles or from any source of your choice, make them your own and then fit them into solving your customers’ toughest problems, you’re well on your way to that Holy Grail of sales – customer entanglement. And there’s no more powerful way to add value for all your partners.

When you act as a consultant – that is, offering your unique perspective, experience, skills and knowledge to your customers to help them do things better, faster and cheaper – you’ll not only have repeat buyers, but you’ll have customers who don’t WANT to do business without you. They’ll want you at their sides for every decision – from long-term strategy to short-term tactics.

And when their business decisions – informed by your wise advice and enlightened self-interest – lead to IT purchases, who do you think they’ll want to buy from? It won’t be a conversation about price. It won’t be a conversation about speeds and feeds. It might not even be a conversation at all. It’ll be an automatic sale, a natural outcome of a mutually trusting, beneficial and entangled relationship.

And you’ll have the “c” word to thank.

Give some thought to how you can take consulting to the next level with your customers and prospective customers. Are you taking every opportunity to add value with the power of your brains? Are you doing everything you can to help your partners, both upstream and downstream? Are you creating entangled business relationships that last beyond a transaction? If the answer to any of those questions is no, take some time to figure out what’s holding you back and how you can remove those obstacles.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 11: Consultative Sales Is Not Enough

Capture and Keep Customers with the Most Powerful Product in Your Inventory

“Money without brains is always dangerous.”

So said Napoleon Hill, best-selling author of the modern personal development classic, Think and Grow Rich. And it’s as true today as it was in his day.

It’s also true that money without brains is always limited – especially when it comes to selling technology. Sure, you can sell a lot of products and a lot of professional services. And you can probably make a lot of money in the process. But at some point, the flow of new customers through your pipeline will slow, and you’ll reach a saturation point with your existing customers. And the money will be spent.

But if you use your brains, the picture can be very different. I’m not talking about the power of positive thinking or The Secret or airy notions of believing, conceiving and achieving (though those are powerful too). I’m talking about actually using your brains to grow your business.

If you’ve read the other articles in this series, you’ve probably noticed that I’m really into concrete ideas, techniques and tools that will make you stand out from the hordes of iron movers who crowd the seven infernal circles of IT distribution. But these aren’t just tricks and window dressing. These are the tools of a consultant–-and they just might keep your money from getting dangerous or limited, or dangerously limited.

Wait. Did I just use the “c” word – that filthy, vapid synonym for all things unsavory, unvaluable and unhelpful? Didn’t Ed Finkelstein, legendary Macy’s CEO, say, “A consultant is someone who takes your watch away to tell you what time it is?”

Yes. To all of that. I did, and he did. And next time we meet, I’ll defend my use of that term, and tell you how reclaiming and redefining it can be the secret to a long, happy – and maybe even money-filled–-life.

Until then, as Casey Kasem always says, keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 10: Be Your Customer's Hero by NOT Solving Problems

Putting yourself in the mindset of truly solving customer problems – rather than selling so-called solutions – can be overwhelming at first. Just look at that fishbone diagram you made a couple weeks ago. If you did your level best to brainstorm every possible cause of the business problem you wanted to tackle, you probably ended up with a shockingly long laundry list of potential causes.

As I mentioned last time, what you absolutely DON’T want to do is start pointing to product features that address each and every item on the list. In fact, sometimes the best thing you can do for your customer is NOT solve every problem.

Instead, you need to stick that fish in the Bass-O-Matic ’76, puree it up and gulp down that tasty concoction.

OK, maybe that’s a bad metaphor. And nauseating, to boot.

The point is, you need to prioritize all those potential causes and find the key few that have maximum impact on the problem. Only then can you start offering solutions.

In the Six Sigma world, there are a number of Bass-O-Matics used to help blend up your bass into something you can start working on – from the so-called House of Quality (part of Quality Function Deployment, or QFD) to the Failure Modes Effects Analysis (FMEA) and the Pugh matrix.

But you don’t need complicated tools or acronyms to solve problems for your customers. You need simple tools that give you quick answers that add value.

Let’s take the problem of shoes coming untied. Now, I might have a few key requirements about my shoelaces. I might want them to stay tied, to match my shoes and to be tied in a very neat bow, for example. And I’d probably rank the importance of my needs in that order. Staying tied is most important, followed by matching my shoes, which is then followed by the very neat bow.

In order for my prioritization to work, I need to assign each of these a numeric value that corresponds to its importance, so I’ll give staying tied a 9, matching my shoes a 5 and the neat bow a 1.

Next, I need to pull out my fishbone and look at all the possible causes for my shoes not staying tied, from the length of the laces to the length of my fingernails. We’ll just pick three for simplicity: length of laces, material the laces are made from and the length of my nails.

Now comes the Bass-O-Matic moment. I need to plug all of these into a matrix and determine the impact that each potential cause has on my key requirements. The length of my laces, for example, probably has a high impact (call it a 9) on them staying tied, a low impact (or a 1) on matching my shoes and a medium impact (5) on the tidy bow.

I repeat this process with all the meat on my fishbone until I have a completed matrix that looks something like the one in this file.

Now, you probably wouldn’t agonize as much over keeping your shoes tied as I do. But this oversimplified example should give you an idea of how a prioritization matrix might help you zero in on problems worth solving (in this case, shoe lace length). More importantly, the matrix tells you what problems aren’t worth solving.

When you can tell your customers that some of their problems just aren’t worth solving, and start solving their most important problems, the whole conversation starts to change. Barriers come down. Trust builds up. Rather than being there to shove as many products into the data center as possible, you’re now there to help. You become a trusted advisor – even a hero.

Next time we meet, we’ll talk about using tools like the matrix above, the fishbone diagram, powerful questions and more to create powerful, entangled customer relationships that add value and profitability for everyone.

Until then, try taking the matrix for a spin. Pull all the meat off your fishbone diagram and see if you can use the matrix to help you churn out a tastier bass.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 9: Super Bass-O-Matic '76 Zeros in on Problems

Zeroing in on Business Problems with the Super Bass-O-Matic ’76

I’m a sucker for the classic Saturday Night Live sketches from the original cast. With clever creative assistance from Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol, the so-called "Not Ready for Prime Time Players" – John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris and Gilda Radner – created a sketch comedy template that hasn’t been matched in any other season of the show, in my not-so-humble opinion.

One of my favorites from that era is Dan Aykroyd’s surprisingly brief commercial spoof for the Super Bass-O-Matic ’76. I could describe it in lurid detail, but instead, let’s just take a look at it. Go ahead. It’ll only take a minute and a half. Tell your boss I said it was OK.

Click for Bass-O-Matic link.

Now, if you have any sense at all, you’re probably wondering what the heck that has to do with solving business problems, adding value for customers and partners, and selling more. And I don’t blame you. Bear with me.

If you remember our last conversation, we talked about using a fishbone diagram to brainstorm the causes of your customers’ (or your own) business problems. And if you did your homework, you probably realized pretty quickly that it can be a bit overwhelming. Even when you’ve already grouped the causes into categories – like Materials, Methods, Machinery/Equipment and People – the meat on your fishbone diagram points in dozens of different directions. It doesn’t tell you where to start solving.

At this point, there are two things you could do. First, you could try to chew up all that fish meat – to address every possible cause. In the ever-evolving world of information technology, you could probably find a product or service that would touch every single one. In fact, it’s tempting, isn’t it? Don’t we just love to solve every single problem our customers bring us?

Unfortunately, that approach just won’t work. For one thing, it’s going to be prohibitively expensive for your customer to buy all those, um, solutions, and logistically tricky for you to deliver them.

More importantly, not all causes are created equal. For example, if you look back at the problem of my shoes always coming untied, the fact that my laces are too short (materials) might have a greater impact than the fact that my fingernails are too long (machinery/equipment). I could go get a manicure for 30 bucks and not get the awesome results I’d get for two dollars’ worth of new shoelaces.

In other words, you have to prioritize. If you walk into a sales meeting with the idea that you’re going to solve every possible cause of your customer’s biggest problem, they’re probably going to laugh you right out of the boardroom. If, on the other hand, you can help your customer (or prospective customer) identify and solve the root causes of real business problems, you’ll be the hero. You’ll become a trusted advisor and valued partner. Your problem-solving process has to include finding the greatest leverage points – the places where the right solution, skillfully applied, will get the best results.

That’s why we all need the Super Bass-O-Matic ’76.

But that will have to wait until next time. I don’t mean to tease you, but I’ve already talked your eyes off plenty for this time around. Next time we meet, I promise to reveal the Bass-O-Matic.

In the meantime, pull out that fishbone diagram you made after reading the last installment and give some thought to what you might do with all that fish meat. If your first instinct is to start mapping every potential cause to a feature of something you sell, you’re in trouble. If, on the other hand, you’re wondering how you might identify the points of greatest leverage, then you’ll want to tune right back in next time. You’re about to be a hero.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 8: Go Fish to Solve Your Problems

The best way to solve a problem? Go fishing!

When you go to a doctor, you probably want her to take care of the cause of your problem, not just the symptoms.

For example, if I tell my doctor that I burst into tears every time I see Justin Bieber, and she then hands me pills that stop me from crying forever, I probably won’t be happy with that. After all, like they used to say in “Free to Be You and Me,” it’s all right to cry. Instead, I’ll want her to help me figure out the cause of the tears.

Solving business problems – whether for yourself or for your customers – is a lot like that. Of course, weeping and Bieber are unlikely to have anything to do with it. However, as we discussed last time, your first job before you go selling your precious “solutions” – which are like those stop-crying pills, if you don’t do your homework first – is to diagnose the root cause of the problem. And to do that, you have to know what questions to ask.

If that sounds like hard work, I’ve got some advice I think you’re going to like. Go fishing.

That’s right. When it comes to structuring your questions and guiding your problem solving process, there’s a really simple tool that helps you fish for root causes. Quality control geeks call it the Ishikawa diagram, because a brilliant statistician named Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa invented it back in the ’60s. However, I’m always afraid I’ll mispronounce his name, so I just call it the fishbone.

In the quality control world, fishbone diagrams are used to identify and display all possible causes for a given problem, but you don’t have to be a quality control expert to use them. You simply have to understand two simple ideas: cause and effect.

Click here to see an example of a fishbone diagram.

The head contains the effect, which is the problem I’m trying to solve. The bones are major categories of types of causes that would make sense for this context.

The categories I’ve put on my fish’s bones – Machinery/Equipment, People, Materials, Methods – are some of the traditional categories used in fishbone diagrams. Machinery/Equipment includes any of the tools that might impact the problem. The category of People captures issues related to training, skills, knowledge or other human causes. Materials refers to the actual stuff involved in the process. The bone labeled Methods is a place to list all the ways we go about doing things that might lead to the problem. But you can use whatever will help you diagnose the problem in its context.

Let’s look at the head of my fish. Why are Eryc’s shoes always coming untied? I realize you’re more likely to have heads that say, “Why is the data center overheating?” or “Why is bandwidth constrained?” I also realize that my problem doesn’t seem complex enough to warrant its own diagram, but bear with me.

Now, let’s see how going fishing will help me solve my problem. Instead of this vague, general question at the head of my fish, I now have four additional questions I can ask. What machinery or equipment is causing Eryc’s shoes to come untied? What is it about the people involved in tying Eryc’s shoes that causes them to come untied? Are there issues with the materials used for tying Eryc’s shoes? What issues might exist in the methods and processes employed to tie Eryc’s shoes?

See how that narrowed the conversation? Now I can start my diagnosis process – putting meat on the fish’s bones by brainstorming all the possible causes of my problem in a structured way that keeps it from getting overwhelming and keeps me focused on causes, not symptoms.

One word of caution: the fishbone diagram is a brainstorming tool. That means it should contain every possible cause, no matter how far-fetched or improbable it might seem. When we meet next time, we’ll talk about how to pull all that fish meat off the bones and find the tastiest parts – the most likely root causes that we can go after.

In the meantime, pick a problem in your own business. Grab a piece of paper, scribble that problem in a fish head and start putting meat on the bones. You’ll be surprised just how easy it is.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant