9780814416853

Summary

The biggest mistake sales people are making in their careers right now is equating a faster pitch with a faster close. Believe it or not, they will actually experience greater success if they slow down. "Slow Down, Sell Faster!" shows readers how to stop jumping the gun and work with their customers to identify and quantify their real needs. Featuring a simple yet powerful eight-step process and practical, repeatable techniques, this work is packed with examples from the author's extensive experience.

Author Biography

KEVIN DAVIS is president of TopLine Leadership, a sales and sales management training company. His revolutionary eight-step process is used at Citigroup, ADP, Bayer, Sprint-Nextel, IKON Office Solutions, Global Imaging Systems (a XEROX company), and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies.

Foreword	p. xiii
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Introduction	p. xvii
Understanding Buying is Where Selling Should Start	p. 1
Why Slower Is Faster: How Selling Too Fast Results in Lost Sales and a Longer Buying Process	p. 3
How Selling Too Fast Causes Lost Sales	p. 4
Shifting from Selling- to Buying-Focused	p. 8
The Eight Steps in the Customer's Buying Process	p. 8
Six Mysteries of Selling Solved	p. 11
The Eight Sales Roles That Match the Buying Process	p. 14
Slow Down and Get in Sync!	p. 19
Mastering the Politics of Selling to Multiple Decision Makers	p. 20
The Players on a Complex Buying Team	p. 21
Configurations of a Complex Buying Team	p. 29
A Case Study in Complex Buying Team Dynamics	p. 29
How to Avoid the Biggest Mistakes	p. 32
Looking Ahead	p. 35
Winning the Complex Sale	p. 36
The Questions You Can't Afford Not to Ask	p. 37
Fundamental Skills to Master	p. 38
When in the Buying Process to Reach Each Decision Maker	p. 42
Sharpening Your Political Skills	p. 46
Winning Over a Complex Buying Team Takes Skill	p. 48
The Eight Roles of Buying-Focused Selling	p. 49
Prologue to Part II: How to Get Started with the Eight Sales Roles	p. 51
Focus on Obtaining Go-Forward Commitments	p. 53
Getting Started	p. 55
The Student: Use Knowledge to Gain an Edge	p. 58
Study Your Customer	p. 60
Customer Step 1: Change	p. 61
How a Student Gains a Deeper Understanding of Your Customer's Business	p. 62
Know Three Things About Each Customer That Other Salespeople Won't Know	p. 62
Understanding the Company's Decision-Making Hierarchy	p. 66
Put Your Knowledge to Work	p. 69
Getting More First Appointments	p. 70
The Goal: A Twenty-Minute Appointment	p. 71
A Telephone Approach That Gets Results	p. 72
Preparing for the First Appointment	p. 82
The Doctor: Diagnose Small Problems, Define Big Needs	p. 83
Uncovering Needs to Establish the Value of Your Solution	p. 84
Customer Step 2: Discontent	p. 86
Types of "Patients" You Will Meet	p. 88
How the Doctor Intensifies the Prospect's Need for Change	p. 91
The Five Steps of Diagnosis	p. 92
Handling the "Ballpark Price" Questions	p. 101
Identify then Intensify Discontent	p. 102
Accelerating Momentum with a Memo of Understanding (MOU)	p. 103
Why MOUs Are Critical	p. 104
Sample MOU	p. 106
The Architect: Design Customer-Focused Solutions	p. 107
Orienting on the Buying Process	p. 109
Customer Step 3: Research	p. 109
The Customer's Process for Developing a Solution	p. 111
Understanding Customer Buying Criteria	p. 112
The Dynamics of Customer Buying Criteria	p. 114
How an Architect Designs Unique Solutions	p. 115
Identify Your Differentiators (Do a Market Assessment)	p. 116
The Architect's Toolkit: How to Understand and Influence Buying Criteria	p. 118
Creating a Better Match Between Criteria and Capabilities	p. 124
Create a Unique Solution to Match Customer Needs	p. 127
The Coach: Make a Plan to Defeat the Competition	p. 128
Evaluating Your Starting Position	p. 130
Customer Step 4: Comparison	p. 134
How a Coach Develops a Winning Game Plan	p. 137
Scouting the Competition	p. 137
Five Winning Strategies	p. 142
Become a Stronger Competitor	p. 151
Winning Proposals and Presentations	p. 153
Developing a Convincing Proposal	p. 154
Presentations: Preparation Will Meet Opportunity	p. 159
Be Sure to Maintain Communication	p. 162
The Therapist: Understand and Resolve a Buyer's Fears	p. 164
Customer Step 5: Fear	p. 166
Why Fear Happens	p. 168
How a Therapist Resolves Buying Fears	p. 171
Important Skills of a Therapist	p. 173
Fear May Not be the Only Hurdle	p. 176
Resolving Your Own Fears	p. 178
Help Customers Move Past Fear	p. 179
The Negotiator: Reaching a Mutual Commitment	p. 180
Customer Step 6: Commitment	p. 182
How a Negotiator Creates Win-Win	p. 182
Evaluate Your Negotiating Power	p. 183
Preparing to Negotiate	p. 185
Handling the Most Common Customer Negotiating Tactics	p. 190
When the Negotiation Really Begins	p. 190
Negotiate to a Win-Win Agreement	p. 197
Transitioning from Pre- to Post-Sale	p. 198
Do You Keep or Hand Off Implementation?	p. 199
Drafting an Implementation Plan	p. 200
Minimizing Customer Risk	p. 200
The Teacher: Teach Customers to Achieve Maximum Value	p. 202
Customer Step 7: Expectations of Value	p. 203
Lessons from the Learning Curve	p. 204
How an Effective Teacher Instructs Customers: The Four Steps of Customer Education	p. 206
Teaching Benefits You, the Teacher	p. 211
Exceed Your Customers' Expectations	p. 212
The Farmer: Cultivate Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty	p. 213
The Key to Customer Satisfaction	p. 214
Customer Step 8: Satisfaction	p. 215
How a Farmer Cultivates Customer Loyalty	p. 216
Four Keys to Sales Farming	p. 217
The Three Levels of Customer Relationships	p. 220
When and How to Develop a Strategic Partnership	p. 224
Getting More Referrals and Testimonials	p. 226
Your Final Role: Chief Satisfaction Officer	p. 228
Epilogue to Part II	p. 230
Coaching the Eight Sales Roles	p. 233
Coaching for Success: Advice for Sales Managers (and the People Who Work for Them)	p. 235
What Is Coaching?	p. 236
How to Improve Your Sales Coaching	p. 238
Getting the Most Value Out of Each Milestone	p. 242
Coaching the Sales Roles	p. 245
Your Mission: Create a Great Sales Team	p. 248
Endnotes	p. 251
Index	p. 253
About the Author	p. 261
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Excerpts

<html><head></head><body>Introduction Years ago I was selling an office equipment solution to the CEO of a 100-person company. I was selling to him the way I had been taught: I established comfortable conversation while building trust, asked questions to diagnose his needs, then presented my solution as an answer to his needs. Everything appeared to be going along as planned. Suddenly he leaned forward and asked, “Aren’t you going to close me now?” Why is it that customers know more about selling techniques than most salespeople know about buying behavior? That’s not right. An understanding of buying is where selling should start. We need to redefine “selling” to mean helping people buy. What might “helping people buy” actually mean? The HR Chally Group, founded in 1973 through a grant from the United States Justice Department to create validated assessments that accurately predict on-the-job effectiveness—including sales performance, has a lot to say. For their most recent report Chally interviewed over 2,500 customers who provided opinions about more than 4,000 salespeople. The results appear in The Chally World Class Sales Excellence Research Report. Among their findings was that “customers usually award the prize to the salesperson who has been there through every step of their buying process, meeting customer need after customer need by presenting the right information at the right time. To win a sale, then, a salesperson’s sales process must match perfectly with the customer’s buying process. The two should be mirror images.”1 We can take a lesson as well from Dr. Steven Covey’s classic book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. (I’d bet many of you have a copy on your bookshelf right now.) Dr. Covey says, “We have such a tendency to rush in, to fix things up with good advice. But we often fail to take the time to diagnose, to really, deeply understand the problem first.”2 This rushing in and “fixing things up with good advice” occurs a lot in our profession because we have been conditioned to see things through a salesperson’s eyes, and our sales behaviors are based on these perceptions. But your buyers have a different frame of reference. They have their own point of view. So let me ask you, when selling, do you think as much about the customer’s buying process as you do about your sales process? Are you with your customers “through every step of their buying process”? If not, it’s not your fault. Despite the evidence before us that a new sales paradigm is needed, few sales books or training courses teach salespeople how to deeply understand the purchasing decision from their customers’ perspective, how to adapt their selling behavior to customers’ buying behavior. If you don’t think about the buying process on every call, you can get out of sync with your customer, and that can lead to lost sales. That’s why I wrote this book, to demonstrate the why and the how of getting in sync with your customer’s buying process. When you do that, you realize that you need to slow down each conversation you have with a customer so you can ask more questions, and help the customer do a better job of buying. When you slow down your selling, you can help customers move more quickly through each step of their buying process. Hence the paradoxical title of this book: Slow Down, Sell Faster! </body></html>

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Slow down, Sell Faster! : Understand Your Customer's Buying Process and Maximize Your Sales

0814416853

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials

Excerpts

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