Michael Shays Articles

Tell PSR Stories - Click To Read Article
Perhaps the oldest and greatest communications tool of mankind is storytelling. Stories have per¬petuated the fabric of civilizations, families, and religions. Stories inform, teach, entertain, per¬suade, and bind together peoples. They also sell.

Achieving a Customer-focused Culture - Click To Read Article
Since customer satisfaction is key to increased sales, premium margins, and company growth, it makes sense to instill a customer-focused culture throughout the company. However, talking about customer satisfaction and taking the necessary steps to achieve it are two different things. Though many companies talk the talk, few are able to walk the talk. Here are seven hurdles to maintaining a customer-focused culture and how you can clear them.

Share the Pain and Share the Gain - Click To Read Article
How to be the one to help clients with the right solution before they set upon the wrong approach and started looking for help among your competition. Clients are giving professionals subtle and even strong signals of pain. But professionals with tunnel vision do not catch these signals and lose the opportunity to be of real help.

Go Fishing with a Frying Pan - Click To Read Article
One of the greatest reasons sales are lost is because of our weak expectations. Closing is a matter of attitude. Your basic assumption must be that you and your firm have the solution the customer or client needs. If you negatively and unjustifiably prejudge the quality of a prospect or the outcome of a sales call, you will betray these feelings to the prospect without saying a word.

Compensate for Lack of Experience with Preparation - Click To Read Article
How a consultant prepared for a visit with a prospect in an industry he knew little about and impressed the prospect by reading a junior high school book his wife found in the local community library.

How to Get Value from a Management Consultant - Click To Read Article
Unlike many outside services, management consulting is distinguished by qualities that appear less tangible -- and are therefore more difficult to assess up-front. Usually the fee must be set before the consultant's assignment begins. So how can a value-conscious manager make sure the company gets the consulting service, support and results that it's paying for?

Obedience to the Unenforceable - Click To Read Article
There is the rule of law and the rule of free choice. In between is the rule of self. If we are not careful to manage the rule of self in the interest of customers, employees, and others, we may find that someone somewhere will legislate the rule for us.

One Way to Build A Bond With A New Prospect - Click To Read Article
Get us the client,” our senior management said. An $8 billion Regional Bell company had just calved off the AT&T glacier and my firm wanted its unfair share of the consulting business that was sure to come. I knew about the industry but had no substantive relationships in this new company. There were dark moments when I wondered if I had anything unique to offer. I had to identify something the company needed that it had not yet defined.

How a Department Store Lost its Customer Base - Click To Read Article
You have to care about your ¬customers, or you will never ¬understand them. If you don’t understand them, you won’t know how to serve them, and if you don’t know how to serve them, they won’t come back. The key is knowing your neighbor.

How Datsun Became Nissan - Click To Read Article
If you want to be successful in the market, you must be a buying agent for the consumer. It is no longer viable to be a selling agent for the manufacturer. How Nissan almost lost its US foothold.

Data Collection? Save Yourself the Trouble. - Click To Read Article
Why pay your consultant or internal project team to spend up front time collecting data that will only burn up hours (and fees) and inhibit the solution that you so sorely need? The time to collect data is during the assessment of the solution, not during the assessment of the problem.

Been There, Done That. Don’t Do it Again - Click To Read Article
Leveraging experience to solve subsequent challenges can reduce mistakes, but leveraging solutions can lead to serious mistakes. Each challenge is unique and requires an understanding of how one is different from the other.

Use the Magic Words in Consultative Selling - Click To Read Article
At some point in a sales meeting with a client, a professional is expected to offer some course of action. If the professional is focused only on what he or she came to offer the client, there is a great risk of rejection. Using these four questions—we call them the magic words—the professional has a greater probability of closing a sale.

Sell Benefits, Not Advantages - Click To Read Article
Sellers are often too enamored with the advantages they have over their competition, but the customer is less impressed. They want to know “What are you going to do for me?” and even more important, “What will that do for my bottom line?” Here is a test to see if you are selling advantages, products or benefits.

Six levels of competitive readiness: How to get ready for the ambush... - Click To Read Article
To succeed today you need more than the right product or service. As soon as the market catches on, someone else will find a way to provide a similar product or service. To stay a step ahead of this competition you must already have a plan to move your product or service up a hierarchy of competitive levels. Once you have provided the need at one level, you have to be prepared to provide the need at the next level. This is product readiness for the competitive ambush ahead. This is how to stay ahead of the competition with what Theodore Levitt once described as the generic product, the expected product, the augmented product, and the potential product.

Resolving A Conflict Between Two Sales Staffs - Click To Read Article
How do you get two competing groups to work together as a team? Here is a case study of salespeople on the road and a telemarketing group within the same company that just discovered they were both talking to the same customers. How did anger and recrimination turn into cooperation and partnership?

A Strategic Plan from the Bottom Up - Click To Read Article
How do you craft a strategic plan that becomes an integral part of business as usual? You build the plan from the bottom of the organization to meet the focus from the top.


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