Book Summary Preview : The New Strategic Selling

The Big Idea
The driving force of the Strategic Selling approach is a non-manipulative selling philosophy. The key to ensuring selling success is to manage every sales objective as a joint venture Sales people must create a framework that fosters a win-win situation; a mutually beneficial transaction where both buyer and seller achieve gains.

The New Strategic Selling book works by helping you sort through confusing data and information associated with every Complex Sale; and to give you a reliable method for analyzing the data, for positioning yourself better with your accounts, and for closing business deals.

Strategic Selling

Successful Selling in a World of Constant Change

Complex Sales

The concept of Complex Sales is a primary feature of this book. The authors defines it as: “one in which a number of people must give their approval or input before the buying decision can be made.” Complex sales are brought about by a bureaucracy that requires many approvals before making a sale.

Change and Strategic Selling

Change happens in all aspects of corporate business. It can happen in the market, technology, customer base, product line, competitive position, marketing strategy and even organizational structure. With the influx of change, it is required of you to develop specific skills that will lead to reliable selling strategies.

Three Premise of Strategic Selling

1. Whatever got you where you are today is no longer sufficient to keep you there.
2. In a Complex Sale, a good tactical plan is only as good as the strategy that led up to it.
3. You can succeed in sales today only if you know what you’re doing and why.

Strategy and Tactics Defined

The objective of a good sales strategy is to get yourself in the right place, with the right people, and at the right time; so that you can make the right tactical presentation. Strategy involves all of the processes that you will use to lay out your moves, prior to the sales call. Tactics, on the other hand, refers to the step-by-step process on how to implement the strategy.

Setting the Account Strategy: Four Steps to Success

1. Analyze your current position with regard to your account and with regard to your specific sales objective.
2. Think through possible Alternate Positions.
3. Determine which Alternate Position would best secure your objective and devise an Action Plan to achieve it.
4. Implement your Action Plan.

Your Starting Point: Position

In account strategy, positioning is the name of the game. Fully understanding your current position means knowing who all your key players are, how they feel about you, how they feel about your proposal, and all the other questions in relation to the options available to them.

Personal Workshop 1: Position

This workshop will help you work through the difficulties of your current sales situation. It has been designed to identify the causes of your current uncertainty, to help you see how those causes affect your current sales objective, and to allow you to make your account position more visible.

Step 1: Identify Relevant Changes. Make a list of all the changes that you feel are influencing the way you currently do your business. Note whether it is a sudden event, a longer process of subtle erosion, or an example of continuous growth.

Step 2: Rate the Changes as Threats or Opportunities. Go down your list of changes and put an O next to those you perceive mainly as opportunities and a T next to those you see mainly as threats.

Step 3: Define Your Current Single Sales Objective. Write down your current sales objective with regards to the account you’ve chosen. Current sales objective must be based on specific, short-term objectives. It must be measurable, must focus on a specific outcome, and must be single rather than multiple.

Step 4: Test your Current Position. Find out how you feel about your specific chances for making this objective work out. Make adjustments to your strategies as you go along.

Step 5: Examine Alternate Positions. Once you know where you are, you next want to know where to go. You need to examine alternatives so that you can discover how you might reposition yourself to make the attainment of your Single Sales Objective more likely...