Hope Is Not a Strategy

Product commodification, disintermediation, e-commerce, customer relationship management, and business partnering are the major selling transformations that are rapidly changing traditional business-to-business buyer-seller relationships. The result is a complex sales structure that encompasses buyer preferences for integrated solutions, and these preferences require teams of multiple sellers, both inside and outside the vendor company, to help clients evaluate the competing benefits and differences of complex products/services. Moreover, multidepartmental buying committees are constantly changing requirements and politics, creating increasingly intricate, ever-shifting competitive evaluations. Thus, multimillion dollar deals can spin out of control in an instant, immune to the traditional methods that once made salespeople and sales managers successful.

Hope Is Not a Strategy combines the best practices in the areas of consultative, competitive, political, and team selling to offer a proven, simple strategic process-R.A.D.A.R.®-for penetrating accounts, winning sales, and dominating share of account, no matter how many people are involved in the buying decision, and no matter how quickly the competitive environment shifts. And, it shows how to take strategies, client relationships, and individual skills to the next level of sales competency. Individual sellers will gain insights about how to transform coercive customer relationships into collaborative problem solving, and finally into helping clients co-manage their businesses. Sales managers will learn how to restructure sales teams and account strategies for winning tomorrow’s deal as well as today’s. CEOs will gain an understanding of the importance of changing sales models and messages to conform to new industry markets, competitors, and technology. And, consulting partners will gain insight into the kind of proactive ethical competition that gains high-value accounts.