INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS
New England Chapter

News and Views

In this issue:

Upcoming Events

News from
the Board

Roundtables:
Next Event Featuring You?

IMCNE Member Profile
Curtis Bingham

Member Article
How Effectively are You "Negotiating the Sale"?
by Harvy Simkovits

Book Reviews
Get to Work:
A Manifesto
for Women
of the World

Upcoming Events

Thursday, November 15, 2007
Hilton Garden Inn
Waltham, MA

Sponsored by Regus

Rethinking Work:
How You Can Profit from Authenticity

Our next dinner meeting will feature a panel of three successful professionals who will share personal stories about how they harnessed their authenticity—personal strengths and truths—to advance in their job or grow their business.

The panel will be facilitated by Cliff Hakim, author of the newly released book, Rethinking Work.

Preceding the dinner, we will have a sponsor seminar:

Work Without Boundaries

This discussion will help you improve your skills, tools and techniques for working virtually. The discussion will be led by Dave Jacobson, IMCNE’s new sponsorship chair. Dave recently joined Regus, the world’s largest provider of workplace solutions, offering the widest range of products and services that allow individuals and companies to work however, wherever, and whenever they need to.

Investment
Members: $55 Nonmembers: $65

For more information or to register, click here.

Thursday, January 24, 2008
Dinner Meeting - 5:30-8:30 pm
Hilton Garden Inn, Waltham, MA
Lessons on facilitation featuring a panel of experienced facilitators.

Friday, March 21, 2008
Full Day Thought Leadership Conference
Hilton Garden Inn, Waltham, MA

News from the Board

New Sponsorship Chair

As you see in the November 15 th dinner announcement, IMCNE has a new VP of Sponsorships, Dave Jacobson. Sponsorships are a key way that IMCNE can build our organization. They give us financial support but also connect us with companies that we need to know. Last month’s sponsor, Harvard Business School Press, and November’s sponsor, Regus, are great examples of sponsors that want to know our members. And, frankly, our members are better off for getting to know these market leaders.

Have an idea for sponsorship? Let Dave know at 617-663-4800 or .

We have listened to you and are making changes to the newsletter to reflect your ideas.

We want to publish our members works. If you have a blog, an e-mail newsletter or a short article (500 words or less), please send it to . If you put us on your distribution list, you never have to think about it again but your content will go into our pipeline. If you have a blog, feel free to send your URL and give us permission to mine it for posts that we want to share with other members.

This is a member-only benefit and a great way to increase your visibility in the New England consulting community (our newsletter goes out to close to a thousand people).  Please include a headshot and a 30 word bio with your byline with any submission. If we mine your blogs, we will create the bio and grab your headshot.

We reserve the right to edit and proof each piece, so if that is a concern, please choose the article you wish to send, ensure it is no more than 500 words, and proof and edit it carefully before sending it. We maintain the right to edit and proof, but it is unlikely that we will need to do much to an article that you have submitted to these specs.

Have you read a good business book lately? Do you have a question that you would love to ask a group of consultants? Are you one of our New England members that is tired of all our meetings being held in Boston? Do you have a challenge that you are facing and would like to get feedback? Do you have a case study that would fuel a good discussion? THEN USE THIS RESOURCE! 

It takes about three minutes to fill out a Roundtable Proposal. You give us a title and description; we’ll publicize it and handle registrations. This program helps our members Get Smart, Get Known, Get Business. What are you waiting for? Download the form today from our Programs page (http://www.imcne.org/programs.htm)

We have a good group of members that are going to pursue their CMC this spring. It’s not too late to join and take your career to the next level. For more information contact Glenn Bachman, CMC glenn@ravenbusiness.com 401-635-0050 or Mary Adams, CMC or 781-729-9650

IMCNE Member Profile

Curtis N. Bingham, President of the Predictive Consulting Group, Inc, is a speaker, author, and consultant with more than a decade of experience in x-raying customers and prospects to get inside their heads and learn what they need, want and are willing to pay for. Using this critical customer insight he helps:

• Guide executive decision making using Customer Value Drivers.
• Precision-target companies’ most desirable prospects and Acquire them at greater profits.
• Selectively retain the most important customers and maximize their value.

Curtis has published more than 20 articles on Chief Customer Officers and related topics such as increasing customer value, gathering customer insight and customer-centric growth. In addition, he is the author of the forthcoming book, The Hottest New Title in the Executive Suite: The Chief Customer Officer. Curtis has been an interim CCO and for the last four years has published the annual CCO Report detailing executive-level customer champions at companies such as Cisco, HP, Sun, Monster.com and Disney, describing the roles, responsibilities, and best practices of CCOs around the world.

He is a contributing editor for Sales & Marketing Excellence and a regular contributor to the Handbook of Business Strategy. He has taught Demand Chain Management at Bentley College and has served on the Executive Board of the New England Chapter of the Institute of Management Consultants (IMCNE). He holds an MBA from Lehigh University and a Master's degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University . Curtis is also heavily involved with the Boy Scouts of America. Evenings and weekends are usually spent enjoying his second love (after his wife and family, of course) in the outdoors and helping develop character, citizenship and life skills in each Scout.

 Ten Things You Didn’t Know about Curtis:

1. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, it would be...  Mint-chocolate chip ice cream—my college buddies would laugh at me because I don’t drink and would celebrate by downing a pint of ice cream instead of joining them at the pubs!

2. If I weren't a business person, I would be a...
Full-time Dad!  I live for my kids, and this summer taught them how to landscape, much to their chagrin!

3. Something I would like to do, but haven't had the chance...
Sky-diving, but as long as I’m interested in my wife’s eternal company, it’ll never happen!

4. The last concert I went to...  
Umm, my family teases me relentlessly about being so uncultured.  Just as long as they don’t claim that I’m uncouth, I’m ok.

5. My favorite toy as a kid...  
Had to have been a shotgun and a motorcycle, neither of which I’m allowed to play with anymore.

6. When I'm not working, you'll find me... 
Hiking with my family in Zion ’s National Park, camping in the snow in Maine with my sons, or camping in NH with my daughter. Or pulling weeds.

7. My favorite TV show is... 
I don’t have one, as I don’t even have a TV.  With three kids, clients, and a closet with 120 business books I’ve purchased but not quite gotten around to reading yet, who has time for TV?

8. If I could be any animal, I would be a... 
A lion, so I could exact revenge on a particular client that hasn’t paid me yet!

9. The last movie I saw was... 
The Bourne Supremacy with my 14-yo son—cool bonding experience to live the action life we both know will never happen to us!

10. If I could have dinner with a famous person, dead or alive, he or she would be...
My wife.  She’s famous enough for me!

Learn more about Curtis and his business by visiting his firm’s website http://www.predictiveconsulting.com/index.html

The member profile was written by Lewis Green, the Founder and Managing Principal of L&G Business Solutions LLC. (www.l-gsolutions.com). Lewis is the editor of News & Views. Profile candidates are selected from our volunteers, new members and a random selection of attendees at IMCNE events.

Member Article

How Effectively Are You "Negotiating the Sale"?

By Harvy Simkovitz

Is a fence only a fence? What if it can make you wealthy?

After a period of soul searching and marketplace research, one fence manufacturer realized that its best marketplace value proposition was to help its customers (independent business dealers) to become wealthy. So it developed a campaign and program that would assist its dealers to "become successful millionaires" via selling and installing that manufacturer's fences. That company also effectively trained its sales force to introduce that program to those dealer owners.

At its next industry trade show, a long-time customer came into the manufacturer's booth and asked for the company's price list. The retrained sales person said that they no longer give out price lists but that the dealer could sign up for a one-hour presentation on how to become a millionaire by selling this manufacturer's fence program and system. The dealer then said that they had no time for that, and just wanted the company's price list. The sales man tried again to interest the dealer in the manufacturer's program, yet to no avail. The dealer again requested a price list so that they could move on. The sales person then respectfully turned the dealer around and said that fence price lists could be obtained from the adjacent competitors, but that his company no longer worked that way.

Becoming miffed, the dealer grumbled goodbye and walked away towards the edge of the company's booth, heading for the competition. Then, suddenly sensing that he was not going to be stopped from leaving, he abruptly froze at the booth's edge. Now, truly knowing that the sales person was serious about the manufacturer's position, the dealer slowly turned around and said, "Okay, okay. Where do I sign up for your presentation?" It was a successful "moment of truth" for this manufacturer and its sales force.

Businesses are constantly fighting the forces of commoditization that naturally exist in the marketplace. Even if your company designs custom- engineered solutions for your customer's specific needs, as time passes, your customer will be exposed to competing vendors that try to take that business away from you. The customer invariably will come back to you saying he can get similar services elsewhere for a cheaper price, or they will just ask you to lower your price because of competitive pressures. This often leads to a no-win game for your business where you are forced either to cut your price or to provide more services for the same price, thus risking your profitability.

Methods by which you can deal effectively with this "commoditization game" are:

• Continue to re-engineer your products and services so that you are continually evolving them to your target marketplace's changing needs. To do this, you need to be good at 1) digging deep into your customer's psyche (like the fence manufacturer did) and come up with important hot-button issues for them that your business can serve, and 2) designing your products and services that effectively address your target customers' deepest needs.

• Respectfully be able to say "whoa" to customers (again, like this sales man did) that do not understand your value proposition, and focus your efforts only on those that do get it and value your uniqueness. Also, it takes a bit of chutzpah and a strong belief in your program to carry out this approach.

• Have a deep and powerful relationship with each customer that serves what is truly important to them, both for the buyer in front of you and for their whole organization. Train your sales force to be able to build rapport, ask the right strategic questions and to position your offerings to what is most important to each customer and their various constituencies.

• Focus on value first (again, as this fence company did) before revealing price. Coming out with price too early, before the customer understands your full value package, can cause them to run away or move on prematurely.

• Build unique capabilities (like UPS does in being able to totally run its customer's warehousing and distribution operations) that bond the customer to you and make it hard for them to switch to the competition.

If you do need to go along with the commoditization game, here are tricks for you to minimize its impact on your business:

• Provide lower-cost options so that your customer has choices on the level of involvement they want in your products and services.

• Continually seek efficiencies in your business, and then pass some of those savings onto your customers as your costs to do business decrease.

• Never lower price without concurrently taking away value. Focus in on the most important pieces for your customer (and know how and when to ask the right questions to determine what those pieces are) and then remove those parts of your package that are less important to them.

By more effectively "negotiating the sale" with your customers, you can work to generate better results for your customer and increased profitability for your business.

Harvy Simkovits, CMC, President, Business Wisdom, http://www.business-wisdom.com/ works with business leaders who aspire to be their best in making a profound and lasting difference in their organizations, communities and their world. Business Wisdom assist company owners and key executives to generate greater prosperity for all stakeholders of the business, productivity in all company operations, and personal fulfillment for owners and employees alike.

Book Reviews

Get To Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World

By Linda R. Hirshman

Ms. Hirshman has kicked up her share of controversy over time. She is provocative and somewhat argumentative. However, I think that she is to be congratulated for her courage. Her basic argument is that in being respectful of all “choices” that women make (to stay home and/or to work), our society has left them hanging by keeping the burden of running a home and family on their shoulders.

Women have inarguably been given more equality and opportunity outside the home in recent generations. But, Hirshman reminds us, women have not been given, nor have they demanded on a broad scale, more equality inside the home. Even if women “choose” to work, they still tend to take the primary responsibility for child rearing and home-making. Hirshman has a lot of good advice for women and men about how to deal with this dynamic.

But she warns that if we don’t figure it out and half of educated women continue to drop out of the workforce because they can’t balance it all, “It is only a matter of time before people start asking why society should spend the scarce educational resources educating women.” Linda Hirshman reminds us that we all need to take personal responsibility to ensure that not only our work places, but also our families are places of equal opportunity and responsibility.

For more information, visit Ms. Hirshman’s website: http://gettoworkmanifesto.com/

This review was submitted by Mary Adams, CMC.

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