How winners sell : 21 proven strategies to outsell your competition and win the big sale / Dave Stein.—2nd ed. Considered highly relevant and content-rich, How to Sell to Winners quickly rose to the position of number one best-seller on Amazon.com.
SELLING
You may be out of the running before you even get in the door, before you can respond to their Request for Information (RFI). To be a winner, you must differentiate yourself from your competition in the way you use commonly available information for your customer's benefit.
HOW THIS BOOK WILL HELP YOU
How to gain and maintain access to, as well as influence the thinking of, key people. How to brand yourself as uniquely valuable to your prospect with personal capital that you can leverage to win business.
PLANNING IS CRUCIAL
RETOOLING
YOURSELF TO WIN
RECRUIT A MENTOR
For a mentoring relationship to be effective, the mentor must be willing to take the time to work with you, be a good communicator, and be knowledgeable about the topic(s) you are seeking guidance on. For a mentor-protégé relationship to work, you must be willing to work hard to improve.
WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?
UNDERSTAND THE TIMELESS TRUTH ABOUT SALES
If you show integrity, your prospects know that you will always do what is in their best interest and are willing to be held accountable. To know this, you need to have a clear picture of the company's financial position today, what it was last quarter and last year, and what the company and analysts expect to be in the future.
CAN YOU HANDLE THE TRUTH?
LEARN TO SEE THINGS OBJECTIVELY
I jumped out of my comfort zone and became an expert in business-to-business sales, as well as a thought leader for my clients. If you set your own limits, understand that expanding your comfort zone per definition requires discomfort.
TAKE INVENTORY, THEN STOCK UP
GET INTO SHAPE FOR SELLING BIGGER
If you're not sure how well you speak or write, ask someone who knows and is willing to be brutally honest. Get out of your comfort zone: ask the top managers of your own company for their perspective on the markets you sell to.
YOU NEED TO SPEAK TO MS. YOUNG
SHE HANDLES
SALESPEOPLE LIKE YOU.”
TRANSFORM YOURSELF FROM A SALESPERSON INTO A BUSINESSPERSON
You want to be in control of your own destiny, so you want to submit your proposal to the board at the right time. If you undersell, you won't have anyone with enough credibility and influence to get you on board.
SELL DEEP AND RICH, WITHIN YOUR NICHE
BECOME AN EXPERT IN THE INDUSTRY INTO WHICH YOU SELL
When you focus on a single industry, you can develop information resources that will help you outpace the competition. History. If you've focused entirely on one industry for a while, you'll understand its history – in fact, you'll have lived it.
INTERESTING
LEVERAGE YOUR PERSONAL CAPITAL INTO A BRAND
The key element – the core – of your brand (we'll talk about branding in a minute) is your personal capital. Putting your personal capital at the core of your brand will very often put you far ahead. If you have built personal capital by providing personal value to your customers that exceeds their expectations, this scenario is not unreasonable.
The dividend from the Personal Capital you've accumulated is that you can start building a brand - a personal brand.
AND THE NUMBER ONE REASON SALESPEOPLE
UNDERSTAND WHY SALESPEOPLE LOSE
I don't know many companies these days that really have a unique enough product or service that they can depend on that offer to win. There are fewer comfortable places for sales reps who don't have the courage to understand what they need to win and take action. Other times, salespeople who are top sellers simply don't know anything about the person in the fight.
They have no plan to win. What was once a simple, short sales cycle two years ago is now often long-winded and complex, and perhaps for far fewer dollars.
LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN, START YOUR ENGINES”
PLEASE RESPOND ON OR BEFORE
UPGRADE THE QUALITY OF YOUR LEADS
If you are in the lower left quadrant, you are early with a low-level contact. You do better if your contacts are at a high level, even if you come in late. This is relatively bad news: it means you are on your way to losing your account.
In fact, it's not unusual for the RFP to come from an existing customer: the first tangible indication that you're about to exit.
TRIANGULATE, CORROBORATE,
EXTRAPOLATE
QUALIFY LIKE YOUR JOB DEPENDS ON IT
On the other hand, if the executive's response is somehow positive, that's what you've got. When you're flying an airplane, your senses can lie when you lose sight of the ground. While you're calling an accounting manager, it's your competition in the CFO's office.
That said, if you're sure you've won, free up some of your time to pursue other opportunities that could go either way - like the ones in the next category.
CORRECT ME IF I’M WRONG, BUT
SCRUTINIZE YOUR PROSPECT
Do you read your prospect's industry journals as if you were a player? If not, then you will never be one. If you can intelligently hypothesize about the impact of a competitor's plans, you will become almost indispensable to your prospect. Speaking of suppliers, do you know who is currently supplying your prospect with what you are selling.
Politics aside, here's some preliminary information you'll need about your customer's key drivers.
IT’S TIME TO ENGAGE
NOT THE PLAN
PLAN TO WIN EVERY SALES CAMPAIGN
It's the same four-part model I used in planning this book: assessing the situation, setting your goal, devising your strategy to achieve that goal, and choosing the tactics you'll use to implement your strategy. What's next?" What's next is what you want to do to implement your strategy - the execution or the tactics. People will pay top dollar for quality, and quality is in the details - the sophisticated engineering of a top-of-the-line Mercedes -Benz, the fit and tailoring of a Savile Row suit, the attention of a top waiter in a fine restaurant.
I saw my first checklist when I was eight; the checklist my mother stuck in the trunk of my steamboat when I first went to summer camp.
DO I HAVE THAT ABOUT RIGHT?”
DELIVER COMPELLING EXECUTIVE PRESENTATIONS
When you use a strategic planning approach for executive presentations, you'll gain a clearer picture of the situation and a better understanding of your audience. Are any of the people attending the meeting connected to your competition in some way? Advisors take turns taking on the role of the most annoying, persistent, and curious journalists who will be present.
At the end of the class, the CEO told me it was one of the best presentations he had ever seen.
WHAT GRADES WILL YOU GET ON
BECOME A SUPERLATIVE RELATIONSHIP BUILDER
As you pursue a beneficial business relationship, consider yourself and your company to have these rights. If your personal goals align with those of your company, then when your company gets what it wants, you'll be in a much better position to get what you want. I like to distinguish between three types of people within the company you're selling to who can help you in your sales efforts.
Another thought: You can't empower non-salespeople in your company to help you win business.
WHAT IT REALLY TAKES TO WIN
IDENTIFYING AND INFLUENCING
DEVELOP YOUR POLITICAL SKILLS
Within a company, it works like this: "If you report to me, I can simply tell you to do something and you will do it." It is say-so influence. You will do it because I say so. In Figure 14.1, you'll see that when you can help a buyer or influencer achieve their personal and business goals (Quadrant 1), you're much more likely to get them committed to helping you win. Let's say you are in your situational assessment phase and have started making associations.
Now that you have a map of the political influence environment, you need to focus on the influencers.
IF IT WEREN’T FOR THE COMPETITION, I’D WIN A
LOT MORE BUSINESS
UNDERSTAND THAT WINNING IS ABOUT BEATING THE OPPOSITION
If you are a student of domestic politics, try following the news of a dispute between two nations. Make sure you are up to date on what key analysts are saying about your competitor and you. Because you will build your customer's trust while depriving your competitor of a tactical victory.
Even better, if it's early in the sales campaign, you'll be putting up a barrier against negative sales, which can make your competitor come across as less than professional.
THEY WILL BUY FROM ME BECAUSE _____
DEVISE UNBEATABLE SALES STRATEGIES
Here are some specific considerations regarding your business and the ability to obtain this opportunity. A prospect will buy from me because I can demonstrate that we offer the lowest total cost of ownership. A prospect will buy from me because we have unmatched integrity, which is a key requirement for this initiative.
The prospect will buy from me because I will leverage board-level relationships to validate our capabilities.
GETTING THE SITUATION UNDER CONTROL
HAVE A PLAN FOR TAKING CONTROL
Answer this question for each deal you predict will close within this quarter: what event or business condition requires your prospect to buy when they say they will. When you unequivocally link the business value of your product or service directly to your prospect's achievement of a critical component of their business plan, time is on your side. You will need to merge the steps of their buying process with your selling process and get your prospect to agree to the timing of the steps in that plan early on.
Your prospect will know the pressure on you and your company to deliver revenue by the end of the quarter, especially if yours is a public company.
AND DAVID SLEW GOLIATH
BECOME AN EXPERT AT COMPETITIVE POSITIONING
Selling against Goliath
Exploiting their opponent's size is the first card most sales reps who sell for big companies—the Goliaths—play against the smaller guys. On the other hand, when you've built relationships in your accounts with influential people willing to help you, you'll need to provide them with the messages—the soundbites and talking points—to position your company advantageously. Challenge. The competition, because they are bigger, are willing to guarantee results in a way that you cannot.
As the CEO, delighted with a contract five times larger than anything his team had secured up to that time, related to me, "the most important thing for me is that this process is repeatable."
Outselling a Competitor Who Slashes Their Price to Win
How do they dilute the value of what you're selling in the prospect's eyes. Highlighting their own strengths in these areas pointed the prospect in the right direction. If they can't bring people to the party now when they sell to us, it's only going to get worse if we become their customer," the prospect told our rep.
Pre-immunize the prospect against what is likely to be a low bid by your competitor.
MANAGE TO LEAD YOUR TEAM
HARNESS THE POWER OF YOUR VIRTUAL SALES TEAM
As a sales professional charged with harnessing the skills and energy of this diverse crew of workers—some of whom aren't even aware they're on your team—you are, in effect, the CEO of your virtual sales team. Think of your virtual corporation as including the prospect team—the evaluation committee, decision makers, steering committees, executives, middle management, technical approvers, purchasing and human resources personnel, finance and legal people, outside consultants, administrative assistants, IT , and, if you are the owner of your domain, the real buyer. As the CEO of your virtual sales team, you have a tremendous challenge ahead of you.
First of all, most of your team members are not under your direct authority or supervision.
