Seeing the Road Forward to Success

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Sales strategy consists of identifying how you will achieve relative superiority—that is, the point at which you have a decisive advantage over your competition.3 In other words, strategy answers the question, “What are you counting on to win?” And winning means improving your customers’ businesses and growing your company’s revenue and profits by defeating a competitor trying to do the same thing. Insight from our seller surveys and deal reviews outlines three specific nontraditional sources of relative superiority that advanced sellers both “see” and “manage,” while others do not, enabling them to lead the change in this market. More specifically, the best sellers:

1. Start with a focus on customer politics by identifying influence and going beyond the tangible authority of organization charts to know who to call on.
2. Provide unexpected customer value that goes beyond the stated and expected value associated with a sales opportunity to significantly advance a customer’s business, while differentiating themselves from the competition.
3. Formulate a sales strategy that leverages the largely invisible elements of influence, unexpected customer value, and sales cycle timing, along with Competitive Differentiation and vulnerability, to build on the more traditional sources of competitive advantage and decisively win business.

This book presents how to see and manage these three invisible intangibles—politics, Unexpected Value, and strategy—and have them work together in an interconnected way to achieve relative superiority and maximize value to your customers and your company (see Figure 1.4). Simply put:

Figure 1.4: Nontraditional Sources of Relative Superiority—The Three Intangibles

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We present the way to win by seeing sales as a management science.

Our journey continues in Chapter 2, where we outline what great selling looks like when politics, unexpected customer value, and strategy are mastered. We consider this chapter an advanced “MBA of selling” that is practical, relevant, and empirically based. From there we dive deeply into politics, then value, and, finally, you will learn how to package it all together to formulate sales strategy.

As you will see in the next chapter, these three areas will significantly accelerate your development and sales performance in the shortest amount of time possible. Our aim is to assist you in reaching a new level of professional success that is acknowledged by your company, where you are viewed as a valued source of competitive advantage—an asset to be recognized and compensated accordingly.

1 Gerhard Gschwandtner, Selling Power editorial, May/June 2011.

2 Sales Training 2011: Uncovering How the Best-in-Class Sustain, Reinforce, and Leverage Best Selling Practices, Peter Ostrow, Research Director, Aberdeen Group, September 2011. For the full report, visit www.aberdeen.com.

3 Relative superiority is defined by William H. McRaven in his book Spec Ops (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1995).

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