In case you thought that sales people sprinkled "Pixie Dust" on you to cause you to buy something that you didn't want to, here is the truth. Sales people are here to help you because you came to that sales person for help. Washers and Dryers, Cell Phones, Pest Control, Beauty supplies. REad this article and feel better about your prior "engagements" with a professional sales person.

For decades, sales pundits have been advising companies to practice a "consultative" style of selling. It was bad advice then and it's bad advice now.

The idea behind consultative selling is simple. Rather than acting like a salesperson (i.e. making sales pitches), you strive to become the customer's "trusted adviser," just like a management consultant who's hired to help solve problems.

While this sounds smart in theory, in practice it's dumb because no customer really wants an "adviser" or a "consultant." Customers want somebody who will take responsibility for a crucial part of their business, not some smart**s who kibbitzes from the sidelines.

Consider: everything a company buys from another company, it could decide to do itself.  Apple, for instance, could decide to make its own screens, or mine its own minerals to make the metal cases of iPhones and iPads. It doesn't though. Instead, other companies sell those items to Apple.

The same is true with smaller firms. Suppose you're selling a service that helps small software firms support their products. Those customers could decide to build their own service centers, but instead they decided to let you own that essential part of their business.

Customers want YOU--as the representative of your firm--to be personally responsible for making certain that a crucial job gets done. In other words, rather than a consultant or an adviser, the customer wants you to be a manager.

That's an important distinction. The ultimate source of your credibility is never your ability to provide sage advice, but your ability to deliver, to solve problems, to take on the hassles that the customer would rather not think about nor bother with.

In order to sell to a business, then, you must convince the customer that you're the type of person whom they would normally hire to manage the function that your firm provides, had they decided to keep that function in-house. This means you must:

• Have a thorough knowledge of that function
• Understand how that function fits into the customer's business
• Be capable of ensuring that the function achieves the customer's goals
• Be able to manage the team that will provide that function (i.e. your firm)
• Look, walk, talk and act like the managers inside the customer's firm
• Be willing to put the customer's interest first--just like an internal manager would

In other words, if all you have to offer when you sell is "consultative," you might as well not bother.

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Geoffrey James writes the Sales Source column on Inc.com, the world's most visited sales-oriented blog. His newly published book is Business to Business Selling: Power Words and Strategies From the World's Top Sales Experts. @Sales_Source

As a guy that owns a business I am really lucky to have a staff like I have and customers that say these great things about them. Like I always say, "the Customer Decides....."

"I need to tell you again personally that I found your staff to friendly knowledgable and down to earth I have in fact shared the word with all my friends. I work for the nashville fire dept and I know alot of folks. Id say we ll sell a couple anyway.

Anyway you can be assured that those folks took care of exactly what they said they would. I happened to get a bike that sorta slipped through the mechanic luckily I caught what I perceieved to be a problem when I got it home. In fact I was so convinced by your video that I didnt even ride the bike before I bought it. Thats how well done your video was done. Anyway I knew anything that was found would be handled and it was just as promised I will not buy another bike in nashville tennesse You will always have first shot.

I have delt we several dealers and the only comparison across the country Is harley in pensocola fla they were helpful when we had a stator problem last summer.

So be proud of those folks You have a great team."

gary heflin

6154565259

"Please feel free to call me or have anyone who may have doubts about your dealership I will set them straight.

I would also be happy to talk with the harley corporation in reference to your dealership thats how impressed I am with your folks"

How Harley-Davidson explains the U.S. economy

Posted by Neil Irwin on January 29, 2013 at 11:03 am

Harley-Davidson is more than just an iconic American brand. It is also a surprisingly good reflection of the forces shaping the U.S. economy as a whole. The motorcycle company reported its fourth quarter earnings Tuesday, and the details show a firm that is as typically American as the roaring sound of a hog on the highway.
Here are the five ways the company’s financial results explain the forces shaping the U.S. economy.

The U.S. economy in a nutshell. (Jahi Chikwendiu-The Washington Post)

Coming back—but not all the way. Harley-Davidson shipped 247,625 motorcycles in 2012, up 6.2 percent from 2011 (that’s an extra 14,508 motorcycles shipped out the door). The company forecasts a similar gain in 2013. That is up handily from the recent past; the company shipped only 223,023 motorcycles in 2009, as the steep global downturn meant consumers were in no shape to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a motorcycle. But while the gains since then have been decent, it’s worth remembering that Harley—and the U.S. economy as a whole, isn’t anywhere near back to its potential. In 2006, the company shipped a whopping 349,196 motorcycles. In other words, it would take much stronger growth for Harley-Davidson’s production to return to the track it was on before the recession. The same is true of the U.S. economy as a whole; economic output in 2012 was something close to $1 trillion below the level that the Congressional Budget Office estimates is the U.S. economy’s potential. The missing motorcycles are part of that “output gap.”

Changing consumer demographics. The drivers of U.S. consumer spending are more and more diverse, which can be a challenge for companies that are strongest among more middle-aged whites. Harley is dealing with that by pushing particularly hard on what it calls “outreach” segments of the market, as opposed to just its “core customers” of people who have traditionally bought the company’s motorcycles. As Keith Wandell, Harley-Davidson’s chief executive, explained in an October conference call with analysts, growth in sales to young adults, women, African Americans, and Hispanics was going gangbusters. “In fact, through nine months, sales to outreach customers grew at nearly twice the rate as sales to core riders, thus ensuring new riders coming into the Harley-Davidson family,” said Wandell. If the Republican party had been as successful at expanding its appeal beyond middle-aged white men as Harley-Davidson, Mitt Romney would be president right now.
Households using debt more responsibly. Harley-Davidson has a finance arm that offers loans for purchase of its bikes, and those loans were part of the vast expansion of household debt leading up to 2007 and the wave of defaults since then. But Harley’s data fits a broader story in the U.S. economy—households are becoming more responsible with debt. In 2007, before the recession, Harley’s “annual loss experience” on motorcycle loans—how much of each dollar lent out had to be written down because the buyer couldn’t pay—was 1.91 percent. It spiked to 2.86 percent during the recession. But now it has fallen not just down to its pre-crisis levels but far below, to 0.79 percent, the lowest in a decade. Executives in a conference call described it as a key positive surprise for the year. Only 3.94 percent of outstanding loans were more than 30 days delinquent on payments this year, compared with 6.15 percent before the crisis. Translation: People borrowing money to buy motorcycles are being more cautious than they were in the pre-crisis days. It’s hard to know for sure how much of this is due to higher lending standards and how much due to Americans’ wariness of taking on too much debt, but either way, it is a healthy sign, that household debt is not the problem weighing on Americans it was in the not-too-distant past.

Source: Harley-Davidson

Exports are the key to growth. There is a widespread notion that the world doesn’t want to buy American products. It isn’t backed up by the data—and Harley-Davidson is a prime example. The United States remains the company’s biggest market, but growth is coming from abroad, particularly emerging markets. Shipments of motorcycles in the United States were up 6.6 percent, to Japan up 2.3 percent, and to recession-stricken Europe down 5.9 percent. But apparently the emerging middle class of Asia and Latin America can’t get enough Harleys. Sales in Asia outside of Japan rose 25.6 percent and Latin American sales rose a whopping 39 percent. Those are off of small bases, but it shows how a company like Harley-Davidson can keep expanding even amid slow growth in the United States and other developed economies.
Doing more with fewer workers. Rising productivity is the key to rising wealth over the long-term, but over short time periods, it is part of the story of high unemployment. And Harley-Davidson has had great success building more motorcycles with fewer people. The company started 2012 with 6,000 employees in its motorcycle division, who shipped 247,625 of them. That works out to more than 41 motorcycles produced per worker. Compare that to a decade ago. The company started 2002 with 8,100 workers, who produced 263,653 units. That’s 33 motorcycles per worker. In other words, the company is making pretty much the same volume of output as it did a decade ago, but with more than 2,000 fewer employees. That is great for shareholders: Someone who bought Harley-Davidson stock (ticker symbol: HOG) at the end of 2002 and reinvested dividends since then has earned more than 33 percent on their money over the past decade, despite a catastrophic financial crisis during that period. It is less great for workers; Harley’s ability to produce the same output with so many fewer workers is America’s middle-class jobs crisis in a nutshell.