Introduction
Sales is one of the few professions where nearly everyone is searching for the edge that will make him or her better. It doesn’t matter if you’re the top salesperson at your company or are simply working hard to reach the next level of productivity. The desire to constantly improve is the same.
In that sense, salespeople are like professional athletes whose careers and incomes depend on achieving and maintaining a level of uncommon excellence. Athletes incorporate the latest knowledge about diet, fitness, strength, and mental focus into their training regimens in order to achieve even small increments in the improvement in their performance. After all, in most sports, a 1 percent improvement can be the difference between winning and losing—between being the champion or an also-ran.
So it is in sales. You only have to be 1 percent better than your competitors to win your customer’s business. However, there’s a catch. You have to generate that 1 percent margin of victory. Why? We live and work in a global economy where the pace of technological innovation has lowered the barriers to entry to most market segments, resulting in an explosion in the number of products and services competing for the attention of the customer. As more of these products and services enter a market, the differences between them, both real and perceived, narrow. The result is that in the eyes of the customer, all competitive products and services look increasingly alike. This means that the responsibility for creating the meaningful differentiation between you and your competitors, that 1 percent difference, the margin between winning an order or losing it, falls squarely upon your shoulders.
In my previous book, Zero-Time Selling, I wrote that in this modern global economy, how you sell is more important than what you sell (and I provided ten strategies for companies to use to differentiate themselves based on how they sell). I believe this statement is truer today than when I first wrote it. Now the challenge becomes how to effectively compete in this changing business environment. How can you break through the noise to attract and retain the attention of busy and distracted customers? How can you maximize the value of your selling to help your customers achieve their objectives? In short, how can you amp up your selling to stand out in a crowd of undifferentiated competitors? I wrote this book to provide the answers to these questions and more.
As I speak to audiences of salespeople around the country, the question I’m most frequently asked is, “What’s the best sales process or sales methodology that I can use?” My response is that the best sales process is the one that works for you. Companies necessarily have their own particular sales procedures that they want salespeople to follow. But the fact remains that when salespeople interact with a customer, they’ll fall back on a personalized selling process that they believe works for them. This will never change. Salespeople will always adapt corporate sales procedures or given selling methodologies to an individual selling process that fits into their comfort zone. And there’s nothing wrong with that—if it works.
The problem is that for too many salespeople, their comfort zone doesn’t align with the buying and decision-making requirements of the customer. Industry studies show that year after year, fewer than 50 percent of salespeople achieve their quotas. Some of this shortfall could be written off as “grading on a curve.” But I believe that the trouble is more fundamental than that. My experience has shown me that most salespeople lack an unambiguous understanding of what they need to do each and every time they interact with a customer. Selling is an interactive process. It’s not something that you do to your prospects and customers. It’s a process that you undertake in collaboration with them to help achieve a specific objective.
Amp Up Your Sales revolves around three main themes: (1) simplifying your selling, (2) maximizing the value of your selling, and (3) amplifying your sales responsiveness.
At the beginning of my sales career, one of my first sales managers assured me, “Selling is simple. It’s not easy. But it is simple.”
Well, sales should be simple. But usually it isn’t.
In Part I of this book, I introduce you to the core concepts of selling (and buying) that all salespeople must understand in order to simplify their selling. I break core sales concepts—like selling, buying, time, and decision making—down to their smallest levels. In physics, this is called reducing complex problems to first principles. I’ll use what I call the first principles of sales to illustrate what selling and buying really mean in today’s modern sales environment.
You may be tempted to skim over this section. Don’t. You probably think you understand what selling is. But, as you’ll learn in Chapter 1, it’s not what you think. If you’re going to invest your time in taking steps to become a superior salesperson, then it’s essential that you first develop a clear understanding of what it means to sell. After all, how can you improve your sales skills if you don’t know what the goal should be? How can you improve your aim if you can’t clearly see the target?
Similarly, you may think you know what buying is. You may believe that you understand how customers decide to give you their time. Or that you know how every customer falls into one of two types of decision makers and how this categorization affects every sales opportunity. Or that you know which factors influence the customer’s first perception of you and how this can win or lose the sale for you. Or that you know how to win the sale before winning the order. But chances are that this will be new for you.
How will this knowledge simplify your selling? If you really understand what selling and buying are, especially from the perspective of your customers, then this helps you focus on just those sales actions that move the needle, that deliver maximum value to customers, and that help them make favorable purchasing decisions quickly and with the smallest investment of their time and money possible.
In Part II, we’ll focus on responsiveness, the single most important sales skill that you must master and integrate into your selling. You don’t have to master many skills in order to be proficient at your job. You don’t need to be the smoothest cold caller, the most polished presenter, or the most knowledgeable about your products to win some orders. But if you’re not completely responsive to your customers, you’ll never reach the sales goals that you’ve set for yourself.
In Part III, the focus is on how you can maximize the value you deliver to the customer through your selling. I’ll open your eyes to a new way of visualizing value as a core attribute of your selling. As a result, you will be prepared to deliver the maximum value each and every time you interact with your customers (irrespective of the method that you’re employing—phone, e-mail, social, text, video, or in-person calls). This leads to accelerated trust-building and compressed customer decision-making cycles. You’ll learn how to eliminate the valueless sales calls and wasted selling time that plague so many salespeople and inhibit their productivity.
In Parts IV-VIII of the book, I’ll use these building blocks to provide simple, easily implemented sales strategies that create tangible sales differentiation and that will help make your selling memorable to the customer. It doesn’t matter what type of product or service you sell, and it doesn’t matter how costly or inexpensive the product is. The goal on the part of your prospects is the same: They’re looking for your support to help them make an informed purchase decision. Deliver value to help the customer quickly move through the buying process, and you’ll create the building blocks of a relationship that will make it easier for the customer to choose you.
As you will learn, what makes selling simple is that a relatively small number of sales processes, when mastered and applied in a consistent and disciplined manner, will enable you to accelerate trust, deliver maximum value, tangibly differentiate you from your competitors, and empower your customers to make fast and favorable decisions.
Most important, all the sales processes and strategies discussed in this book are under your direct control. You can’t control your customers and the actions they take. You can control only what you do. But if you take the right steps at the right time, you’ll move your customers to make the timely buying decisions that will amp up your sales.
Everyone can achieve uncommon excellence in sales. Especially you.