• About Us
    • Our Story
    • Customers
      • Sales Training Case Study
    • Products and Services
      • Sales Training Programs
        • Train the Trainer Courses
      • Sales Management Training
      • Sales Force Training
      • Sales Certification
      • Sales Training Workshops
      • Customer Relationship Professional (CRP)
        • Why You Need to Train Customer Relationship Professionals
        • Why Customer Satisfaction Isn’t Enough
    • Sales News
  • SALES SKILLS
    • 5 Critical Sales Skills
      • Sales Skill #1 – Buyer Seller Relationship
      • Sales Skill #2 – Sales Call Planning
      • Sales Skill #3 – Questioning Skills
      • Sales Skill #4 – Presentation Skills
      • Sales Skill #5 – Gaining Commitment
      • Sales Skills Training
    • Sales Skills Assessment
    • Sales Skills Articles
      • Don’t Make Classic Selling Errors
      • Learn Critical Selling Skills
      • Understand How Buyers Buy
    • Sales Skills White Papers
    • Sales Skills Books
      • Action Selling Sales Book
      • Selling Your Price
      • Questions
      • Masters of Loyalty
      • Sales Strategy
    • Sales Skills Videos
    • Sales Skills eLearning
  • Sales Training
    • Action Selling
    • Sales Training Workshops
    • Leadership Training
    • Best Sales Training
    • Sales Training Articles
      • Business Skills for Salespeople
      • How to Train Salespeople
      • Use The Best Sales Process
    • Sales Training White Papers
    • Sales Training Books
      • Action Selling – Sales Book
      • Selling Your Price – Sales Book
      • Questions – Sales Book
      • Masters of Loyalty – Sales Book
      • Sales Strategy – Sales Book
    • Sales Training Videos
    • Sales Training eLearning
  • Customer Service Training
    • Customer Relationship Professional (CRP)
    • CRP White Papers
    • CRP Videos
    • Masters of Loyalty Book
  • Search
  • Contact
1.800.232.3485
The Sales Board The Sales Board
  • About Us
    • Our Story
    • Customers
      • Sales Training Case Study
    • Products and Services
      • Sales Training Programs
        • Train the Trainer Courses
      • Sales Management Training
      • Sales Force Training
      • Sales Certification
      • Sales Training Workshops
      • Customer Relationship Professional (CRP)
        • Why You Need to Train Customer Relationship Professionals
        • Why Customer Satisfaction Isn’t Enough
    • Sales News
  • SALES SKILLS
    • 5 Critical Sales Skills
      • Sales Skill #1 – Buyer Seller Relationship
      • Sales Skill #2 – Sales Call Planning
      • Sales Skill #3 – Questioning Skills
      • Sales Skill #4 – Presentation Skills
      • Sales Skill #5 – Gaining Commitment
      • Sales Skills Training
    • Sales Skills Assessment
    • Sales Skills Articles
      • Don’t Make Classic Selling Errors
      • Learn Critical Selling Skills
      • Understand How Buyers Buy
    • Sales Skills White Papers
    • Sales Skills Books
      • Action Selling Sales Book
      • Selling Your Price
      • Questions
      • Masters of Loyalty
      • Sales Strategy
    • Sales Skills Videos
    • Sales Skills eLearning
  • Sales Training
    • Action Selling
    • Sales Training Workshops
    • Leadership Training
    • Best Sales Training
    • Sales Training Articles
      • Business Skills for Salespeople
      • How to Train Salespeople
      • Use The Best Sales Process
    • Sales Training White Papers
    • Sales Training Books
      • Action Selling – Sales Book
      • Selling Your Price – Sales Book
      • Questions – Sales Book
      • Masters of Loyalty – Sales Book
      • Sales Strategy – Sales Book
    • Sales Training Videos
    • Sales Training eLearning
  • Customer Service Training
    • Customer Relationship Professional (CRP)
    • CRP White Papers
    • CRP Videos
    • Masters of Loyalty Book
  • Search
  • Contact

Sales Strategy From the Inside Out: Preface – Strategy is not a knack

Sales Books, Sales Skills Articles

Sales Strategy From the Inside Out: How Complex Selling Really Works

Preface – Strategy is not a knack

In my 37 years as a salesperson, sales executive and sales trainer, I have known thousands of wonderful salespeople. But in all that time I have met only a handful whom I would consider naturally excellent at sales strategy. I can literally count them on one hand.

When I say “excellent at strategy,” I mean salespeople who could think through a complex deal and maintain a clear vision of how and why the deal would happen. Thanks to what I can only call an innate ability, these five individuals could figure out the power relationships in client organizations—which people had the influence, authority, and respect necessary to move the deal forward—and determine the necessary steps to bring those people onboard.

Above all, they were perceptive about the motives of buyers and influencers at various levels and knew what they had to do to help the buyers get what they wanted.

No, they weren’t clairvoyant. Their abilities had to do with asking great questions and thereby earning the right to ask more great questions. They wound up knowing who was who, and what was what, and how various buyers stood to benefit from the deal because the buyers told them. The buyers told them because great questions build trust, and trust creates allies.

Those five people were naturals. Every other salesperson I’ve ever known had to be thoroughly trained to reach a comparable level of effectiveness.

A number of books have been written on sales strategy. Some of them are very good. A few years ago I met Steve Heiman, author of the great book, “Strategic Selling.” I hold his work in very high regard. He documents, in great detail, the different types of buyers that exist in organizations and how to approach them.

What’s lacking even in Heiman’s first-rate book, however, is a vivid sense of how salespeople who really “get” strategy actually operate, and why buyers respond to them.

This book is my attempt to fill that gap. I wanted to get inside the heads of some sellers who excel at strategy, and let them describe why and how they do what they do. Likewise, I wanted to get inside the heads of some buyers at different levels in an organization and let those buyers describe what it is about these particular salespeople that makes them stand out from the crowd. Why do the buyers find themselves wanting to do business with these folks and not somebody else?

A complex sale can involve any number of players in the buying and selling companies, but I think that three voices from each side of the fence are enough to illustrate how and why a great sales strategy works. You’re going to hear from three people at GoTeam Unlimited, a team of sellers, and from their counterparts in the corporate hierarchy at a client organization called Amstand Companies.

To imagine these characters as fully as possible, I made each of them a composite of some real people I have known. I want to make it clear, however, that no character is based on a single person, and no character is intended to represent any actual person, living or dead.

It is for the reader to judge how realistic I was able to make my characters seem. But I’d like to point out that one of them, at least, is deliberately imperfect. Carrie Overton, the GoTeam salesperson who makes the initial contact at Amstand, is not the most adorable or charismatic or customer-loving person you will ever meet.

This is because she doesn’t have to be. One lesson I hope you will take away from this book: Great strategy, and the learnable skills necessary to execute it, do not depend on any special, innate charisma of the salesperson. They depend instead on employing a systematic approach to the sales process that enables people who aren’t “naturals”—practically all of us, in other words—to do what the handful of naturals are able to do.

The system that GoTeam uses is Action Selling. The three sellers will describe some of its workings explicitly. But the whole point of using these characters is to let them show you, rather than just tell you, how and why the system works in a complex selling situation.

I am a teacher and trainer at heart, however, so please allow me to spell out a few other lessons that I’m trying to illustrate.

  • The GoTeam sellers are great at strategy not individually but in combination. They consult with one another about the Amstand account. They talk. It’s part of what Action Selling calls “leveraging your resources.” If I could find only five naturally great sales strategists in 37 years, maybe we need to put our heads together more often. (Selling happens to be more fun that way, too.)
  • Other writers, including Steve Heiman, have suggested that salespeople find a “coach” in the client organization to help them navigate through a complex sale. Basically, the coach is someone to whom you can ask questions such as, “How does the decision process work in your company?” Or, “Who should I speak to about this topic?” I think the idea is great as far as it goes, but why make just one person a coach? Why not learn how to ask great questions and earn the right to ask more questions of every single decisionmaker
    you call upon? Make them all coaches. Once you do, they will gladly give you the information you need to win.
  • A related lesson: Lower-level “influencers” are not obstacles to avoid in your quest to get to the person who makes the ultimate buying decision. They are potential allies—every one of them. They should want to take you to the ultimate buyer. Too many salespeople think they’re being “strategic” when they find a way
    over, around, or through a department head, say, to get to a senior executive. When the exec listens to their pitch for five or 10 minutes and then gives them the heave-ho, they think: “Well, at least my strategy worked. I got to the top decision-maker.” This is so tragic that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I explained in the Introduction that Action Selling is structured upon certain documented knowledge about every buyer’s decision-making process (the 5 Buying Decisions). The first of those decisions (“Do I buy the salesperson?”) is absolutely critical. As you read what our characters have to say, please notice how everything else flows from that first decision.

Once a decision-maker at any level “buys” the salesperson, he or she begins looking for reasons to buy the product, instead of reasons not to buy. The salesperson gains an ally who provides vital “coaching” information about how to travel the path toward a sale. In a complex sales environment, how do you know what your next step or milestone should be? How do you get the information necessary to achieve that milestone? It all comes from people who have “bought you.”

This isn’t to say that salespeople don’t need to do any homework on their own. It’s important to research a client company, and you’ll find that lesson embedded in the book too. But if the client company is a maze, it’s the buyers’ maze. When they, themselves, are leading you through it, a complex sale isn’t complex at all.

All 5 Buying Decisions are important. They all matter. But how crucial do I consider the first one: whether to buy the salesperson? You will discover that all of the characters in this book are speaking before GoTeam has presented its product—its proposed solution for Amstand’s needs. The issue of price has not yet come up. The first buyer you meet, a middle manager named Nancy Winslow, is going to marvel that “GoTeam still hasn’t tried to sell us a solitary thing.”

I would argue that Nancy is dead wrong. I think that GoTeam already has sold her the most important thing. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether you think GoTeam is going to make a lot of money.

Duane Sparks

Share

You also might be interested in

How to Build True Customer Loyalty

Mar 6, 2017

Truly loyal customers are those who value their relationship with you so highly that they have stopped shopping for the kinds of goods or services you provide. They are with you for the long haul. Your competitors’ enticements fall on deaf ears.

The New Action Selling: Act 2: People Skills

Sep 14, 2016

A client will almost never come right out and tell a salesperson, ‘I’m not going to buy from you because I don’t like you or I don’t trust you,’ But it happens all the time with major sales. If you’re asking the customer to spend thousands of dollars, or maybe to risk their reputation by bringing in your products or services, you simply cannot be someone I don’t like or trust. Before you can sell the customer your product, they have to be sold on you.

Why I Hate Closing

May 3, 2018

How do you feel about the term "closer"? I remember being called a closer when I was a rising star during my early years as a salesperson. But, I have never liked being referred to by that handle, and I never cared for what it implies.

FREE SALES COACHING

Signup for GREAT IDEAS directly from our Sales Training Consultants!
  • By clicking submit, you acknowledge that you may be contacted by an Action Selling Representative.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

THE NEW ACTION SELLING

The New Action SellingA Quick Read That Will Boost Your Sales -- Guaranteed! The Action Selling series of sales books will help you achieve quota, sell bigger deals, shorten selling cycles and retain your customers.

Shop Action Selling
Action Selling

Since 1990, The Sales Board’s Action Selling Sales Training and Sales Certification Programs have consistently increased revenue, protected margins and improved the sales culture for thousands of businesses worldwide. Action Selling Sales Training Programs Work. Your salespeople will become top producing sales professionals. Your sales managers and sales trainers will become effective sales coaches. And whether your business consists of a few reps or a large, global sales force, the Action Selling process will differentiate your company and products/services.
The Sales Board

14505 21st Avenue North, Suite 206
Minneapolis, MN 55447
1.800.232.3485 | 763.473.2540

Copyright © 2019 The Sales Board, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service

Prev Next
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Accept Read More
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Necessary Always Enabled