Slow Down, Sell Faster!: Understand Your Customer's Buying Process and Maximize Your Sales / Edition 2 available in Paperback, eBook
Slow Down, Sell Faster!: Understand Your Customer's Buying Process and Maximize Your Sales / Edition 2
- ISBN-10:
- 0814416853
- ISBN-13:
- 9780814416853
- Pub. Date:
- 01/05/2011
- Publisher:
- AMACOM
Slow Down, Sell Faster!: Understand Your Customer's Buying Process and Maximize Your Sales / Edition 2
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Overview
Faster sales pitches won't lead to faster sales. The key to speeding up the sales process is to actually slow down and get in sync with your customer's buying process.
The biggest mistake salespeople make in their careers is equating a faster pitch with a faster close. Sales guru Kevin Davis shows you how to slow down and focus on the customer buying process, so they can identify and quantify customers' real needs--and adapt their sales pitches accordingly.
In Slow Down, Sell Faster!, you'll learn how to:
- Match your sales behaviors to your customers' needs throughout the buying process
- Get more appointments by using a problem-focused approach
- Combat your most lethal competitor: customer complacency
- Use probing questions to diagnose small problems that point to bigger needs
- Master the complicated politics of complex sales
- Overcome common selling dilemmas
Davis introduces a simple yet powerful method for buyer-focused selling that is practical, repeatable, and easily customizable. This buyer-focused approach extends to proposals and presentations, loyalty, retention, and, of course, cultivating more business.
Packed with examples from the author's extensive experience and detailed research on customer buying patterns, Slow Down, Sell Faster! offers an alternative to traditional selling that leads to increased sales--and happier customers.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780814416853 |
---|---|
Publisher: | AMACOM |
Publication date: | 01/05/2011 |
Edition description: | Second Edition |
Pages: | 272 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
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!
Table of Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I UNDERSTANDING BUYING IS WHERE SELLING
SHOULD START
Chapter 1 Why Slower Is Faster: How Selling Too Fast Results in
Lost Sales and a Longer Buying Process
How Selling Too Fast Causes Lost Sales
Shifting from Selling- to Buying-Focused
The Eight Steps in the Customer’s Buying Process
Six Mysteries of Selling Solved
The Eight Sales Roles That Match the Buying Process
Slow Down and Get in Sync!
Chapter 2 Mastering the Politics of Selling to Multiple
Decision Makers
The Players on a Complex Buying Team
Configurations of a Complex Buying Team
A Case Study in Complex Buyinnamics
How to Avoid the Biggest Mistakes
Looking Ahead
Chapter 3 Winning the Complex Sale
The Questions You Can’t Afford Not to Ask
Fundamental Skills to Master
When in the Buying Process to Reach Each Decision Maker
Sharpening Your Political Skills
Winning Over 0a Complex Buying Team Takes Skill
PART II THE EIGHT ROLES OF BUYING-FOCUSED SELLING
Prologue to Part II
How to Get Started with the Eight Sales Roles
Focus on Obtaining Go-Forward Commitments
Getting Started
Chapter 4 The Student: Use Knowledge to Gain an Edge
Study Your Customer
Customer Step 1: Change
How a Student Gains a Deeper Understanding of Your
Customer’s Business
Know Three Things about Each Customer That Other
Salespeople Won’t Know
Understanding the Company’s Decision-Making Hierarchy 66
Put Your Knowledge to Work
Milestone #1: Getting More First Appointments
The Goal: A Twenty-Minute Appointment
A Telephone Approach That Gets Results
Preparing for the First Appointment
Chapter 5 The Doctor: Diagnose Small Problems, Define Big Needs
Uncovering Needs to Establish the Value of Your Solution
Customer Step 2: Discontent
Types of “Patients” You Will Meet
How the Doctor Intensifies the Prospect’s Need for Change
The Five Steps of Diagnosis
Handling the “Ballpark Price” Questions
Identify then Intensify Discontent
Milestone #2: Accelerating Momentum with a
Memo of Understanding (MOU)
Why MOUs Areitical
Sample MOU
Chapter 6 The Architect: Design Customer-Focused Solutions
Orienting on the Buying Process
Customer Step 3: Research
The Customer’s Process for Developing a Solution
Understanding Customer Buying Criteria
The Dynamics of Customer Buying Criteria
How an Architect Designs Unique Solutions
Identify Your Differentiators (Do a Market Assessment)
The Architect’s Toolkit: How to Understand and Influence
Buying Criteria
Creating a Better Match Between Criteria and Capabilities
Create a Unique Solution to Match Customer Needs
Chapter 7 The Coach: Make a Plan to Defeat the Competition
Evaluating Your Starting Position
Customer Step 4: Comparison
How a Coach Develops a Winning Game Plan
Scouting the Competition
Five Winning Strategies
Become a Stronger Competitor
Milestone #3: Winning Proposals and Presentations
Developing a Convincing Proposal
Presentations: Preparation Will Meet Opportunity
Be Sure to Maintain Communication
Chapter 8 The Therapist: Understand and Resolve a Buyer’s Fears
Customer Step 5: Fear
Why Fear Happens
How a Therapist Resolves Buying Fears
Important Skills of a Therapist
Fear May Not be the Only Hurdle
Resolving Your Own Fears
Help Customers Move Past Fear
Chapter 9 The Negotiator: Reaching a Mutual Commitment
Customer Step 6: Commitment
How a Negotiator Creates Win-Win
Preparing to Negotiate
Handling the Most Common Customer Negotiating Tactics
When the Negotiation Really Begins
Negotiate to a Win-Win Agreement
Milestone #4: Transitioning from Pre- to Post-Sale
Do You Keep or Hand Off Implementation?
Drafting an Implementation Plan
Minimizing Customer Risk
Chapter 10 The Teacher: Teach Customers to Achieve
Maximum Value
Customer Step 7: Expectations of Value
Lessons from the Learning Curve
How an Effective Teacher Instructs Customers:
The Four Steps of Customer Education
Teaching Benefits You, the Teacher
Exceed Your Customers’ Expectations
Chapter 11 The Farmer: Cultivate Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
The Key to Customer Satisfaction
Customer Step 8: Satisfaction
How a Farmer Cultivates Customer Loyalty
Four Keys to Sales Farming
The Three Levels of Customer Relationships
When and How to Develop a Strategic Partnership
Getting More Referrals and Testimonials
Your Final Role: Chief Satisfaction Officer
Epilogue to Part II
PART III COACHING THE EIGHT SALES ROLES
Chapter 12 Coaching for Success: Advice foro Work for Them)
What Is Coaching?
How to Improve Your Sales Coaching
Getting the Most Value Out of Each Milestone
Coaching the Sales Roles
Your Mission: Create a Great Sales Team
Endnotes
Index
About the Author