The Art of Consultative Selling in IT : Taking Blue Ocean Strategy a Step Ahead

The Academy of Urbanism was founded in 2006 with a mission to recognise, encourage and celebrate great places across the UK, Europe and beyond, and the people and organisations that create and sustain them.  This book is a compendium of seventy five places that have been shortlisted as part of the Academy''s annual awards scheme which covers great Places, Streets, Neighbourhoods, Towns and Cities.Included are 75 places shortlisted between 2009 and 2013.  Each has been visited by a team of Academicians who have spent time in the place, talked to officials and local people and sought to understand what it is that makes them special and how they have achieved what they have achieved.  The Academy also commissions a poem, a drawing and a figure ground plan to understand and interpret the place.  David Rudlin, Rob Thompson and Sarah Jarvis have drawn on this treasure trove of material to tell the story of these 75 places.  In doing so they have created the most comprehensive compendium of great urban places to have been published for many years.

If IT companies seek to differentiate themselves from the competition, they must turn to consultative selling. Consultative selling is analyzing the needs and challenges of your customers and selling unique services that enable your customers to reduce costs, increase profits, and improve overall business performance. The Art of Consultative Selling in IT provides a practical framework for becoming a successful consultative seller and shows how to use the blue ocean strategy to identify opportunities in areas where there is no competition.The first section discusses the advantages of consultative selling and explores the concepts of blue oceans. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. Competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be established. The author explains how you can use consultative selling techniques to create your own blue oceans of unknown market space, where opportunities for growth are both rapid and profitable.In the second section, the author defines the consultative selling framework (CSF). This framework is based on proven processes, best practices, and real-time case studies to make consultative selling a reality. It provides clear guidelines for understanding your customer‘s current landscape and challenges, owning its priorities, and helping it to achieve its short-term and long-term goals. The author explains how to use CSF to generate innovative ideas and present them to your customer through profit improvement or efficiency improvement proposals.The book concludes with examples of several innovative business improvement ideas that you can present to your customers, including Agile project management, master data management (MDM), application portfolio rationalization, and business process management (BPM). The author discusses the benefits of each methodology and lists the trigger points to think about when deciding whether the methodology can add value to a pa