How to Sell Manager-To-Manager

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  dfwGreg10/25/07 Report as spam
  1

  Excellent article

  I've enjoyed this article as a good checkup for what works. In the industries I've been active in, I dropped the "consultant" title quite a while ago. As a former technology trainer, I learned early on that everyone usually wants the solutions handed to them.
  
  Spending time to understand the issues, look into best practices and then come up with a solution that YOU MANAGE is almost always received well. That is - if you are working high enough in the organization. Lower level management tends to be threatened sometimes, while high level execs and owners want to know how to get started.
  
  Ownership and responsibility have always worked for me.

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  Geoffrey James, Sales Machine10/25/07 Report as spam
  2

  High level vs. Low Level Calling

  You're exactly right. M2M is for situations where you call high. Note that in order to call high, you need to establish credibility as a manager or potential manager.

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  ptiseo10/29/07 Report as spam
  3

  Vagueness in item 3

  "All the effort put into ???customer satisfaction??? is really just an attempt to measure whether this happens. By the way, if you have to check for ???customer satisfaction??? you???re not managing that function."
  
  Could you expand on that statement? I'm not sure what you mean by it. It's vague enough that I may be misinterpreting what you are trying to say. I guess what you are saying is "don't check via customer satisfaction if your function happens on-time and on-budget"?

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  Geoffrey James, Sales Machine10/29/07 Report as spam
  4

  Clarification

  What I'm saying is that if you need to hire somebody outside to measure whether the customer is satisfied, you're not on top of the account. If you're managing a function, you should know whether that function is working correctly. After-the-sale customer satisfaction implies that you've walked away after selling product (or solution) and need to find out, as an afterthought, whether it's what the customer wanted.