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72 • The 100 Greatest Ideas for Building the Business of Your Dreams

easier to write down and say than it is to do, since there are hazards to this sort of
consultative selling:

• The customer may want to keep aspects of the project, e.g. return on invest-
ment, to himself.

• The customer may not see the requirement for carrying out each of the steps.
• It is time consuming.
• It requires the account manager to become versed in his or her customer's

business and hold discussions on business topics which initially may not be
part of a salesperson's comfort zone.
• The approach carries some risk, in that a customer going methodically through
a process of this nature may come across reasons for not doing the project as
well as reasons for doing it.

With all these hazards it is still the essence of professional account management to
try to persuade a customer to identify the steps in capital investment evaluation and
then go through them together. So, amend this step-by-step guide to fit the prod-
ucts and services that you sell. You might also benefit from taking a project whose
implementation is complete and trying, as a post-hoc rationalisation, to recognise
what happened at each step. You can then take the result to the customer con-
cerned, discuss it with them and try to sell them on the idea of involvingyou in the
next project they are planning.

As you do this, use your experience and your company's to prove that you can
add value to your customer's professional plans.

Idea 47 - Look back in wonder

The final step in the customer's sensible progress through the capital investment
process is to evaluate the results and adapt the project to improve them.