Exceptional Selling E-Book

Jeff Thull

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 323

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Praise for Exceptional Selling "Thull's leading-edge thinking makes this book extraordinary.This straightforward guide to communicating across all cultureswith credibility and respect will give you a significantcompetitive advantage in a complex and crowded globalmarketplace." --Guenter Lauber, Vice President, Siemens Energy &Automation, Inc., EA Systems "Exceptional Selling may be one of the most important bookswritten on sales and marketing communications for high stakessales. It shows you how to stand apart from your competition,communicate with great clarity, and position your solution as themost compelling choice for the long term." --Rob Mancuso, Senior Vice President, Investors FinancialServices Corp. "Thull has taken consultative and collaborative sales to newheights. The knowledge in this book is priceless. The trust andrespect created by the diagnostic process is a must-have forsuccess here in Asia and around the globe. It enables us todifferentiate ourselves early and achieve long-lastingsuccess." --Tay Chong Siew, Major Customer Director, North Asia, BOCGases "Having achieved exceptional success by working with Thull andimplementing the strategy and process in his first two books, I'mastounded that his leading-edge thinking is captured in yet moredetail in another brilliant book. The conversation examples of hispowerful diagnostic approach will bring even greater success to ourorganization. Truly exceptional!" --Alberto Chacin, Director of On Demand Services LAD, OracleUSA "Exceptional Selling is a dramatic departure from the vastmajority of sales books. It scares me to see all the ways in whichwe can self-sabotage our sales opportunities-but that's onlychapter one. Throughout the book, Thull describes compellingexamples of how to succeed in a cluttered marketplace." --Steven Rodriguez, Senior Vice President, CeridianCorporation "Thull has again extended the concepts and thinking he developedin The Prime Solution and Mastering the Complex Sale. This is anessential read for anyone working to understand his customers in acomplex world." --Wayne Hutchinson, Vice President of SalesMarketing andConsulting, Shell Global Solutions International B.V.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Foreword

Understanding Your Customer’s World

Getting to the Customer’s Real Problem Together

Designing Solutions That Sell Themselves

Preface

Acknowledgments

I - “What We Got Here Is a Failure to Communicate”

Chapter 1 - The More You Sweat, the Less You Sell

The Emotional Mind-Set—The Root of Miscommunication

Presentation and Persuasion—Commoditize and Alienate

Customer Expectations—Snake Oil and the Hard Sell

Solving the Style Challenge

Chapter 2 - Nobody Buys a Value Proposition

Commoditization of the Value Proposition

“Blah Blah, Fluffy”

The Burden of Proof

Translation Skills Required

Leverage Your Value Triad

Across-the-Spectrum Positioning

Imposing Order on the Value Translation

Chapter 3 - You’ve Got to Get Your Mind Right

Diagnosis—The Mind-Set of Success

Summary

II - Taking It to the Street

Chapter 4 - Earning the Keys to the Elevator

How Qualified Is Qualified?

Contact Without Proper Preparation Is an Exercise in Futility

The Research Conversation—Forget About Solutions and Decision Makers

The Engagement Conversation—The Quest for Access and Sponsorship

When Customers Come Knocking—A Word about Prospects That Come to You

Progressing Toward Change—Discover’s Role in Change Psychology

Chapter 5 - Diagnosis Trumps Presentation Every Time

The Decision to Buy Lives in the Negative Present

Diagnosis Requires an Expert

The Nature of Diagnosis—Cyclical Conversations That Cover All the Bases

Chapter 6 - Cutting Through the Smoke and Mirrors

Staying on the Inside Track by Co-Creating Solution Parameters

Focus on Parameters, Not Features and Benefits

The Design Conversation—Guiding Customers on a Journey into the Positive Future

Selection Criteria and the Discussion Document—A Solid Foundation for a ...

Chapter 7 - It Doesn’t Pay to Surprise a Corporation

Closing Is Not the End of the Sales Process

The Deliver Conversations—Fingerprints, Graceful Recoveries, Mutual Feedback, ...

III - Breaking Away with Exceptional Credibility

Chapter 8 - “Show Me the Money”

Barriers to Financial Conversations

Financial Conversations—Cost, Return, Investment

Chapter 9 - Connecting at the Level of Power and Decision

Barriers to Executive Conversations

The Executive Conversation—Rules for Engaging Rulers

A Final Word on the Sequence of Executive Conversations

Epilogue

Index

Advance Praise forExceptional Selling

“I am a Jeff Thull fan. In Exceptional Selling he zeros in on the key ingredient of sales of any sort: intimate mental and emotional connection with the customer—which leads to deep understanding, a successful sale and its successful implementation. I call this ‘connection bit’ the ‘missing 98 percent’ of the selling process, over looked by most sales trainers and salespersons alike. Jeff’s book has something profound to teach each of us, regardless of profession, from the pizza parlor to the pulpit, starting with me!”

—Tom Peters, Author of Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age

“As a CEO, I highly recommend this book as a guide on executive and financial level conversations. Jeff shows you how to gain access and establish relevancy and credibility with people that hold the power and make the decisions. It’s without a doubt the best way to step out of the crowd and connect with executives.”

—Chris Capdevilla, CEO, LogicalApps

“If you want to be an exceptional communicator, you must read Jeff Thull’s books. Exceptional Selling is a complete no nonsense approach to sales—how to get in, how to connect and how to win! It conveys a vital message: Open, honest, and straight-forward communication is the shortest path to long-term success.”

—Frank Toffoloni, U.S. Director of Sales, Diagnostica Stago Inc.

“Jeff has been sharpening the skills of my sales organizations over the past 20 years. His latest book, Exceptional Selling keeps him out front with sensible techniques that work. Top sales producers will quickly recognize how to improve their results; rookies will find the finest road map to success in the selling profession.”

—Peter Muldowney, Chairman, Specialty Materials Division, Morgan Crucible Co. PLC—Retired

“Exceptional Selling is a comprehensive and powerful framework for building strong relationships based on integrity and trust. Just as he has done for our financial advisors, Jeff Thull shows you how to communicate with confidence and create exceptional value for both you and your customers.”

—Richard G. Averitt III, Chairman and CEO, Raymond James Financial Services

“Get your Post-its® ready! From the very first chapter, I found myself tagging pages so I could present and put into practice the dozens of actionable takeaways. I highly recommend this book for any consultative sales team looking to make their product stand apart from the competition.”

—Gary Robbins, Partner/Vice President, Frost & Sullivan

“Exceptional Selling is the masterful continuation of Mastering the Complex Sale and The Prime Solution. At a time when we’re all searching for new ways to leverage our strengths, Jeff’s ‘taking it to the street’ wisdom redefines communication strategies and sets a new benchmark for competitive differentiation. This book will dramatically shift your thinking and show you precisely how to achieve lucrative sales results.”

—Nat Geissel, President, DMS Health Technologies

“Jeff Thull has assembled a real street level guide that uncovers how true value is recognized, assembled, and realized. If you are a sales manager and your team is not having the kind of conversations outlined in this book, your sales opportunities will most likely be lost to someone who is.”

—Brooks Hoff, Western Regional Sales Manager, Fluke Corporation

“Jeff brings clarity to the sales process through his discovery and diagnostic methods that promise higher closing rates and help you convey, in cooperation with your clients, relevance and credibility to solving their problems. We’re all looking for that differentiation factor and Jeff shows you the way to gain new levels of respect and credibility from your clients that you may not have experienced in the past.”

—Guy R. Manuel, President, Transcontinental Printing, Marketing Products & Services

“Jeff Thull has done it again with Exceptional Selling—he truly provides a fresh and innovative perspective to the art of sales. By using logical and practical conversation examples throughout the book, Thull identifies and conquers common sales traps and defines successful keys to breaking down communication barriers. Geared toward the individual sales professional, Exceptional Selling is a powerful, applicable tool in the complex world of sales, and is a must-have in the library of any sales executive.”

—Kerry Gilger, President and CEO, FYI Corporation

“Exceptional Selling is a tremendous learning tool for sales professionals. Jeff’s done a great job of expanding on the diagnostic selling concepts from his previous books by emphasizing the amplified role required of a salesperson to quarterback a complex sale—both externally and internally.”

—Chris Ostrander, General Manager, Eaton Corporation

“It’s finally here—a word-for-word, step-by-step guide from Jeff Thull for those of us in the sales trenches each and every day. I have worked with Jeff and Prime Resource Group for over 10 years and have literally begged Jeff to put all of his best strategies in a single resource. Exceptional Selling is that resource. Jeff’s past two books were wonderful, especially from a macro senior-management perspective, but this book contains the keys to the kingdom that the ‘prime resource’ in any sales profession is looking for. I look forward to using this as a tool to help our team take results to a new level.”

—David B. Patchen, Regional Vice President, Raymond James Financial Services, Inc.

“Exceptional Selling clearly articulates the skills and habits that hold back many sales professionals from maximizing their potential impact. Jeff provides tangible and specific techniques that you can start to implement immediately that will truly differentiate yourself in the eyes of your customer. Additionally, the Exceptional Selling message translates well into the sphere of marketing communications and provides a significant counter tactic to the intense ‘commoditization’ being experienced in our crowded market space.”

—Bruce S. Moloznik, Vice President of Global Marketing, Cookson Electronics Assembly Materials

“The Diagnostic Selling methods in Exceptional Selling represent a step change from consultative sales in working collaboratively with clients to jointly understanding and addressing the needs for complex business performance solutions. They give commercial staff the skills, discipline, and confidence to effectively engage at senior executive levels in client organizations to create and capture increased business value.”

—Ian Galliard, Global Manager, Sales Development, Shell Global Solutions International BV.

“While reading Jeff Thull’s Exceptional Selling, I was struck with the thought that this book not only teaches an exceptional sales process but shows how a healthy mind-set provides the foundation for effective communication for solving any complex problem. If you have watched helplessly as disapproving purchasing agents, onerous requests for proposals, and uncommunicative customers continually commoditize your business, Jeff’s exceptional book will give you a solid path to building a healthy mind-set for effective communication and a powerful ‘non-sales’ sales process for creating true value, both for you and your customers.”

—John Hines, PhD, Business Manager, Georgia-Pacific Resins, Inc.

“To serve the global financial community with enterprise software solutions requires exceptional credibility and precise communication skills. Exceptional Selling is a great guide on how to do exactly that. Read it, follow it and enjoy your success!”

—Pierre Gatignol, President and CEO, GL Trade

Copyright © 2006 by Jeff Thull. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-470-03728-7 ISBN-10: 0-470-03728-8

To Pat Thull, my lifelong spouse and business partner, for her guidance in building this company, her tireless and selfless efforts to assure our customers receive the highest quality programs and professional services, for making Prime Resource Group an exceptional place to work, and for her insights and experience that have greatly enhanced the content of Exceptional Selling.

Foreword

When I’m not looking after the Corporate Education Program at Duke University, I teach courses on social and organizational psychology in Duke’s Department of Psychology. Both aspects of my professional life have taught me that having a good conversation—in business or anywhere else for that matter—is not as simple as it might appear. In fact, it’s a major challenge, especially in the world of complex sales and multicultural business relationships in which Jeff Thull works.

As Jeff was leading a seminar with our managing directors, it struck me that business today in general, and sales and business development professionals specifically, are not design or solution constrained; in fact, we are far more “diagnose” constrained. There is a great tendency to leap before we listen. I made that observation to our group and Jeff was so moved by its brevity and its accuracy that he suggested it would be the perfect insight for the Foreword to his new book. Thus, I find myself introducing you to a book that is a great read.

Authentic and compelling customer conversations are the key to what Jeff refers to as “privileged access” and “privileged insight.” Privileged access is what we need to tap into the best sources of information within our customer’s organizations. To gain the richest insights, we often need to hold conversations at senior levels and it seems like everyone is trying to gain access there. The crass commercial reason is that the revenues are bigger up there. But more important is the fact that senior managers are the ones who best understand the critical issues in their businesses. Privileged insight is what we need to clearly understand our customers, their responsibilities, and their metrics. It is the only way we can create compelling offers and it is the reason customers will understand and embrace those offers. To create exceptional sales, we need to earn access and develop insight.

One of the insights that I drew from Jeff’s first book is that the best salespeople are integrators—they orchestrate all the pieces needed to solve customers’ problems in novel and intriguing ways. To be the integrator, you have to understand your customers and their issues and bring them to a deeper understanding of their situation. You also have to understand the solution capabilities your company offers and bring your customers to a deeper understanding of how those capabilities apply to their businesses. Somehow, you have to integrate all of that information in a collaborative effort with your customer to ensure that it yields a coherent and compelling exchange of value.

How do you accomplish this? It is usually achieved through a structured series of conversations in which you listen to and talk with your customers at a higher level of understanding on both sides. Jeff’s book is about how to conduct exceptional conversations. Instead of treating conversations as something we do all the time, frequently with no preparation before, no special consciousness during, and no particular analysis afterward, Jeff proposes that we become expert conversationalists and raise the bar of professional excellence. We should become so good, in fact, that the style and substance of our conversations create all of the credibility and relevance we need to win our customers’ confidence and their business.

The strategies and techniques that Jeff describes in this book can help you improve your ability to communicate with customers in ways that will far exceed your expectations and theirs. You will be able to really hear what customers are telling you and add value to what you are hearing. I think of it as having “diagnostic ears.” Customers will actually want to tell you more, give you access, and invite you deeper inside their world. Finally, you will be able to convert what you are hearing into compelling solutions. Customers will clearly understand their situation and see how the value of your solution applies to the challenges in their business.

Jeff’s work can help you raise the tenor of your conversations on a number of levels.

Understanding Your Customer’s World

How do we understand their world? Most sales books tell us to become better listeners. They’re right, of course, but the idea of being a good listener seriously oversimplifies what we need to be doing in successful business conversations. We need to listen beyond our customer’s words and look beyond nuances of body language. We need to understand the client’s meaning system—the whole set of assumptions, experiences, values, and beliefs that create the context for their perceptions, judgments, and decisions.

Before we can listen at this level, our customers have to be willing to talk to us as equals. We need to establish peer-to-peer relationships with them. How can this be done when everyone is competing for their attention?

It’s not an easy task. As CEO of Duke Corporate Education, if I’m talking to you about the corporate educational curriculum we can provide to your business, I need to acknowledge that you know your business better than I do. At the same time, I need to have a point of view and be able to make some preliminary assumptions about your business or I don’t belong in the room with you. Since I live in the world of professional development and education, it is likely that I know education better than you do. At the same time, I better recognize and respect what you know about education or you are not going to engage and pay attention to any advice I’m going to give you.

Establishing a mind-set of mutual respect is the secret to walking this fine line. We have to assume that our customers are experts in their businesses and, furthermore, that they know their own organizations far better than any outsider ever will. And then, from that context of respect, we need to establish parity by demonstrating our own expertise in the customer’s business. We also have to assume that our customers are knowledgeable about our solutions and capabilities, and again, from that context of respect, demonstrate our own expertise in those solutions.

This is the most constructive and respectful way to approach a sales conversation. We don’t have to insult customers by telling them everything we think they don’t know, nor do we have to defer to them if they choose to treat us as inferiors. It’s a great way to set the stage for a clearer and more useful understanding of the customer’s world.

Getting to the Customer’s Real Problem Together

I frequently see salespeople jump to the solution. In the rush to sell something, as soon as the customer mentions a problem, the salespeople start talking about how to solve it with their solution. They make premature judgments, and in doing so, they shut down or change the direction of their conversations and miss the richness of insight, perspective, and depth of knowledge that the customer could provide. The usual outcome is a dissatisfied customer—dissatisfied because he knows that the salesperson has stopped listening and won’t know enough about his situation to propose the best solution.

The ideal sales conversation starts with actually hearing customers in their own terms and with their own meanings. As a conversation progresses, you migrate to a more structured discourse in which you are trying to make sense of what customers are telling you in light of the frameworks in which you are expert. You’re situating your expertise inside the customer’s world. This is what leads customers to begin to experience “ah-ha” moments and start to see their world in a new light. They begin to connect the conversation to their reality rather than some nebulous general perspective and give the access required to further explore the possibilities of a solution.

Jeff shows you how the diagnostic conversation is the mechanism that will allow you to place your expertise in the customer’s context. This is not a shallow interview that presumes the first hint of a problem justifies the solution, but one that gets deep into symptoms, causes, and consequences. It has to be a true partnership, founded on a mutually agreed upon premise that guides an inquiry and journey that is shared and jointly conducted. Otherwise, you are simply selling. This is how customers and sales professionals avoid bias and predetermined outcomes. They construct meaning together and develop a broader perspective on and deeper understanding of the customer’s situation.

Designing Solutions That Sell Themselves

Solution design doesn’t really exist in many sales processes. Salespeople don’t design solutions; they most often present prepackaged and off-the-shelf solutions. Even when design has a place in the sales process, solutions tend to be created in a vacuum by the seller with the customer having little or no participation. And we wonder why customers are skeptical about the efficacy of our offerings and don’t leap to take advantage of them.

This is a problem that we face in the business of education. Universities are based on specific disciplinary expertise. Students pass through the various disciplines and integrate them in their own minds. That’s the way the whole system is designed, and if you look at most executive education programs, they are also designed supplier-out, as opposed to client-in. That’s why education is not considered a strategic tool today—it’s expert centered rather than client centered. I believe the fact that we are aware of it and struggle to avoid it, that we are working at understanding and solving clients’ problems rather than declaring our expertise, has helped earn Duke’s Corporate Education Program its number-one ranking.

Jeff’s work is well aligned to a client-in perspective. He has virtually eliminated the unhealthy dependence on presentations that causes so much suffering among salespeople and their customers. Jeff’s emphasis on establishing design parameters that are based on customer criteria and independent of solutions is also an important factor in designing solutions that don’t need to be sold. If you help the customer create the criteria that she needs to make a quality decision and then offer her a solution that meets those criteria, there is no “close” required. What usually happens is that your customer looks at you and says, “When can we get started?” That’s a great thing to hear a customer say.

Sales professionals who are exceptional conversationalists as well as exceptional diagnosticians are like chess masters. They know the pattern of the board, the strategies of the game, and they know where they are, where they’re going, and their options at every instant. This not only takes innate talent, it also takes systems, skills, and discipline and, of course, a serious amount of practice. In this book, Jeff identifies the conversations that need to happen in a successful business relationship (the openings, the interactions of the middle game, and the end game, an outcome of mutual benefit), and describes the detailed dynamics of each of those conversations in a way that you can apply to your own customer conversations. He will help you raise the bar of excellence and achieve great results.

BLAIR SHEPPARD, CEO Duke Corporate Education Durham, North Carolina, USA www.dukece.com

Preface

As a boy, I was privileged to watch my dad sell. In the summer during school break, he would take me along on a few of his business trips. He sold granite that was used in the construction of multimillion-dollar commercial buildings. I accompanied him on trips to visit the architects who could specify his company’s granite for the buildings they designed.

I remember being impressed with the conversations my father had with his customers. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but he wasn’t acting like the stereotypical salesperson, talking up the quality of his product, or with order pad in hand, pushing people to buy. Instead, he seemed to work with the architects as an equal, poring over blueprints and renderings. He talked with them about the aesthetics of their designs, what their firms were trying to accomplish with their projects, and the requirements and vision of the buildings’ owners. Together they would examine samples my father brought and discuss the color of the stone, size of the panels, and the finish. In retrospect, my dad created a very strong image in my mind of how professional salespeople sound and act, and how customers respond to them.

In today’s world, I continually seek out and study high-performing salespeople, the best of the best. They think differently, behave differently, and produce exceptional results. I have been defining the skills of high-performing sales professionals, providing research, and most importantly, establishing systems, skills, and disciplines into a methodology that can be replicated to produce very profitable results.

Considering the thousands of people whom our practice has worked with over the years, I have also encountered a lot of struggling salespeople. Over and over again, I’ve watched them engage in conversations with their customers in which they unknowingly shoot themselves in the foot and undermine their own best efforts. They’re so ingrained in their traditional and standardized approach that they have difficulty stopping to think about what they’re doing to themselves.

Even today, with so much experience around us, the marketplace is cluttered with seminars, consultants, trainers, and books espousing antiquated approaches to selling. Many salespeople, unknowingly caught up in the conventional sales approach, continue their self-sabotage and end up alienating and shutting down customers. But by replicating the top-performing professionals you read about in this book, there are new, exceptional ways to sell that can set you apart and pull you ahead of the pack. And those of you who have been very successful and are looking to notch up your skills to continually compete effectively in an ever-evolving market will see that fine-tuning some areas of your approach can make a major impact on your results.

In this book, you will also be warned about the pitfalls that can get us into trouble. Have you ever heard yourself say to a customer, “You’ve probably never thought of this, but . . .” or “We save companies like yours millions of dollars in wasted . . .” Both of these statements could very well be true, but they create what I refer to as “dangling insults.” They imply that the customer doesn’t think and wastes millions of dollars. While you believe you are enlightening your customers, they may be hearing a criticism. You can tell when customers and best-qualified prospects hear these dangling insults: They lean back, cross their arms, and shut down. The salesperson can keep talking, but the conversation is over.

Sales conversations are rife with traps like these. This book exposes those traps and offers logical and proven alternatives that enhance the clarity, relevancy, credibility, and trust we are trying to create in our conversations with customers.

In the chapters that follow, we drill down into the core of exceptional selling practices and expose three root causes of failure that can prevent us from succeeding: confrontation, comprehension, and compliance.

You will see how ingrained reactions and traditional selling strategies and techniques combine to create an atmosphere of confrontation between salespeople and their customers.

You will find it incredible how preprogrammed behaviors and reactions often get us into trouble. As an example, as salespeople, we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that if we can secure an appointment with the right people and put forth our best presentation, we can turn most opportunities into sales, that objections are meant to be overcome, and that with the proper grit and persistence, we should be able to close any account. However, the more we wrestle with indecisive customers, aggressive competitors, drawn-out sales cycles, and unpredictable outcomes, the more dependent we become on these unquestioned behaviors. The reality that we are ignoring, however, is that our conditioning, along with traditional selling lore, promotes an adversarial style of communication that only exacerbates our problems and causes us to work harder and with less successful outcomes.

In this book, we will look at specific examples of how salespeople consistently overestimate the customer’s comprehension of the problem to be solved, the solutions we propose, and above all, the customer’s readiness to make decisions. Think about how the complexity of our products and services has escalated, how the customer’s workload has increased, how their staff and technical evaluation resources have decreased, and how the pressure to perform has increased. This harsh reality becomes even more problematic. As complexity increases, customers require more outside expertise to make high-quality decisions, but for the most part, our customers understand less and less of what we tell them. And what are we doing in response? We are trained and encouraged to present relentlessly, to work hard to convince, to persuade, and above all, to be persistent. We lecture our customers about solutions that they don’t comprehend, can’t differentiate, and really aren’t sure they need. Then, we wonder why they buy a suboptimal solution or, as happens too often, don’t buy any solution at all, not from you or your competitor.

Finally, in this book you will see how communication can fail when customers place pressure on salespeople with their buying processes in an attempt to control the sales process themselves. If our customers don’t have a complete comprehension of their problems and our solutions, compliance with their process has a high probability of suboptimal results. Yet, when prospects send us requests for proposals (RFPs), invitation to tender bids (ITBs), or requests for information (RFIs), and invite us to reply, there is this irresistible tendency to jump. Granted, the customer may have made considerable efforts in preparing the request, yet we have no idea whether this is a viable opportunity for the customer or our company, yet we willingly contribute limited time and resources.

The goal is exceptional selling systems, skills, and disciplines to manage exceptional conversations for exceptional results for both you and your customers. You may have the world’s greatest solution, but if you can’t communicate with relevancy, build credibility and respect, and build clarity for your customers, your potential will be severely constrained.

I’ve devoted my career to studying sales strategy and the behaviors that drive exceptional conversations and have consulted with individuals and executive teams involved in high-stakes sales environments. This book is loaded with conversation examples built around business-to-business sales scenarios. Don’t feel constrained by that focus. High-stakes or complex sales include any sale in which the customer requires personal assistance or guidance to make a high-quality decision. Fundamentally, the conversation is between two people and therefore these conversational strategies and techniques will work in business-to-business as well as business-to-consumer sales. As the scale of the decision increases, the number of conversations will increase, yet at the heart of any relationship is the one-to-one communications that we will focus on. The decisions may range in complexity from quick turnover transactions, to the most complex multimillion-dollar multi-organizational “value exchanges.” As you’ll see, it is a matter of scale and you can easily adjust that to match your situation.

Further, this book can also help you become more effective within your own company. One of the commonly overlooked elements in a career in business-to-business sales is the fact that sales professionals often have to sell the same deals within their own companies that they sell to their customers. More often than not, the internal sale is even more difficult than the external sale. When sales professionals don’t approach their internal customers with the same processes and discipline, their deals and credibility often fall apart because they did not equip their colleagues and superiors with what is needed to make high-quality business decisions. You can use the lessons in this book to ensure that doesn’t happen to you. The bottom line is: This book is about creating conversations that achieve relevancy, credibility, and respect between individuals, no matter what the context.

An overview of the book’s chapters is important so you will have a sense of its contents and how it is organized, especially for future reference. However, I don’t recommend using this as a guide to cherry-picking the text. The style and substance of exceptional sales conversations are based on the critical components of clarity, relevancy, credibility, and respect that you build throughout the sales process. You are given a guided path. Each step in the process supports and facilitates the next step. This book shows you how to be more efficient and more effective, but there aren’t any shortcuts to exceptional sales results.

In Part I, we will explore the communication barriers that stand between salespeople and their customers. The fact is that most salespeople are working harder for diminishing returns because of fundamental and widespread miscommunication with customers. This miscommunication has two facets: errors in style, or how salespeople talk with customers, and errors in substance, what they choose to talk to customers about.

In Chapter 1, “The More You Sweat, the Less You Sell,” we will examine the style facet. You will begin to understand why salespeople often have two strikes against them every time they engage a customer: they are relying on unconscious patterns that were already set in stone by the time they entered kindergarten; and they are working with a sales process that encourages an atmosphere of confrontation. You will see how these combine the pressure and stress of sales to sabotage our relationships with customers.

In Chapter 2, “Nobody Buys a Value Proposition,” we will explore the substance facet of customer conversations. All sales, at their essence, are value transactions, but too often salespeople misunderstand the realities of value. They communicate in the simplistic, generic terms of value propositions, that is, in hypothetical terms that do not have the power to compel customers to connect and therefore act. Customers find these propositions indistinguishable from one another and often, undistinguished to boot. This is why customers act as if all salespeople sound alike and the only relevant differentiating factor between their offerings is price.

In Chapter 3, “You’ve Got to Get Your Mind Right,” we get to the good news. You can make the greatest leaps in sales performance and raise your results from average to good or good to great by simply changing your mind. How we think precedes how we behave and our mind-set is without a doubt the critical foundation for success. We will analyze the five fundamental elements of the mind-set that opens the way to value achievement, as well as creating, expanding, and protecting customer relationships.

In Part II of “Exceptional Selling,” we will travel through four series of conversations that result in exceptional sales. These conversations enable sales professionals to guide customers through the value life cycle as it applies to the customer’s unique situation and how the sales professional can create a robust dialogue that yields privileged insight into the customer’s world.

In Chapter 4, “Earning the Keys to the Elevator,” we will detail the conversations a salesperson must undertake to identify and initiate optimal opportunities. You will learn how to conduct initial engagements that quickly and effectively gain executive sponsorship and privileged access to the customer organization.

In Chapter 5, “Diagnosis Trumps Presentation Every Time,” you will see why sales presentations stunt customer relationships and sales results, and learn how to conduct diagnostic conversations that help customers fully comprehend the inefficiencies and performance gaps that are constraining their business results. In doing so, you provide the customer with the incentive to change.

In Chapter 6, “Cutting Through the Smoke and Mirrors,” we will explore the problems inherent in designing solutions in a vacuum. You will learn how to work with customers to define solutions, and in doing so, capture an unparalleled opportunity to set yourself apart from your competitors, anchor the customer in your solution, and gain an inside track to winning the sale. This is where you see how to give your customer the confidence to invest.

In Chapter 7, “It Doesn’t Pay to Surprise a Corporation,” you will see how salespeople sabotage themselves when they avoid discussing the challenges and risks associated with their offerings, and as a result, set the stage for mistrust and destructive surprises. In essence, they end up losing customers because they are afraid to lose customers. You learn how to conduct constructive conversations about negative issues and how to further enhance your customer relationships.

In Part III, we will explore how to establish exceptional credibility and cement it with the ability to overcome two of the most difficult conversational challenges in today’s complex sales environment: the urgent need to quantify value and the demand that salespeople engage with customers at the highest levels of their organizations.

In Chapter 8, “Show Me the Money,” you will see why customers do not respond to standard return on investment presentations and salespeople are intimidated by financial conversations. You will learn how to harness the most effective sales accelerant. You will also learn how to guide customers through conversations that enable them to quantify the cost of their problems, as well as to establish the expected return on solution and the appropriate investment to earn that return.

Finally, in Chapter 9, “Connecting at the Level of Power and Decision,” you will see why salespeople lose their confidence and ruin their chances when they reach the C-level in their customers’ organizations. You learn the five rules of senior executive conversations and discover how to gain credibility with, sponsorship of, and guidance by the top leaders.

That’s the big picture and enough said. Let’s get started learning the conversational mind-set, strategies, and skills that power exceptional selling.

Acknowledgments

I’m not sure how many people read the Acknowledgments in a book, but I would like to share some thoughts on exceptional performance as well as my personal thank-yous. Exceptional Selling has been published during my 25th year as a professional consultant / trainer / speaker and my 35th year as a business owner.

I believe there are few areas where exceptional performance occurs as the result of a single individual’s effort. Even individual athletic pursuits involve considerable support from teachers, coaches, audiences, and in some cases, equipment makers. One of the top characteristics of Exceptional Sellers is that they have learned the value of their team of supporters and deeply respect and care for their well being. Before you go on to read my Acknowledgments, I’d like to suggest you write your own Acknowledgments, listing all those who have educated you, supported you, and coached you. Make sure your supporters know how much you appreciate each and every one of them. You don’t have to wait to write a book; send them all a copy of your Acknowledgments today!

I’ve dedicated this book to my lifelong partner in business and marriage. Pat continues to support me, teach me, and coach me. There is no one who has had a larger impact on my success and my joy.

The number of people who have touched the writing of this book is in the hundreds. In 15 years, we have gathered an incredibly gifted group of colleagues within Prime Resource Group who continue to support, teach, and coach clients, and each other and have contributed their expertise to the development of this book and the on-going support of our clients.