Sale (Photo credit: Gerard Stolk (vers le Mardi gras))

High-Profit Selling. Win the sale without compromising on price. Mark Hunter. 2012. ISBN 9780814420096. This a core book for your sales library on selling value and not discounting on price.  But that’s not all this book is, it is chock full of great sales strategies and the tactics to pull them off.  In a slump , and had a really bad sales call?  Bounce back by calling your best customer and rebuild your confidence.  Torn with what to do with RFPs, here are four approaches that you may want to consider before you do not respond. ie how to win even if you chose to lose the bid. What you want to work through the Christmas to New Years break.   How to get a sale from a buyer on a Friday afternoon.  A very valuable, clearly organized and well written book. A must buy for sales and sales managers.  His blog is a great resource.

Related articles

• Value-Added Selling. How to sell more profitably, confidently and professionally by competing on value not price. Tom Reilly (regnordman.com)
• How to Say It:Business to Business Selling. Geoffrey James. (regnordman.com)
• Accelerate the sale. Kick start your personal selling style to close more sales, faster. Mark Roberts. (regnordman.com)
• Bottom-Line Selling. The sale’s professional’s guide to improving customer profits. Jack Malcolm. (regnordman.com)
• Hunter and farmers – it’s time to change sales strategy – A STC Classic (customerthink.com)
• What Great Salespeople Do. The science of selling through emotional connection and the power of story. Michael Bosworth & Ben Zoldan (regnordman.com)
• Sell Now! Adaptive Strategies for Today’s Marketplace.Stacia Skinner. (regnordman.com)
• Pricing and Profitability Management. A practical guide for business leaders. Meehan, Simonetto, Montan & Goodin. (regnordman.com)
• Selling to Sales People With War Stories (frontofficebox.com)

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What Great Salespeople Do. The science of selling through emotional connection and the power of story. Michael Bosworth & Ben Zoldan. 2012. ISBN  9780071769716.  Michale Bosworth, the writer of Customer Centric Selling and Solution Selling, has written a game changing book for sales training.  His ideas changed when after decades of sales training ( SPSS, Rackham and Solution Selling)  trying to improve the sales skills of the 60% of the salespeople who were not in the top 20%, that now the top was only 17%. The best had become even better but most had not improved.  He went back to basics and started to take apart the top sales guns “mojo”. That is when he identified how much of an emotional connection they made before they ever started on a sales effort.  This book is the result of years of training sales teams on emotional connecting to power the sales effort. He has tied together the common principle that we decide to buy emotionally and then justify with logic. with the power of storytelling. There is lots of good science drawn upon that will resonate with you. I could immediately relate to two sales situations this year that did not go well for myself and the client, despite “doing all the right things”. I realize now that the emotional connection was not present or the sales people.  To make a change you  commit emotionally  Easily the most impactful sales book of the last few years. Check them out on Storyleaders.com



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Bottom-Line Selling. The sale’s professional’s guide to improving customer profits.  Jack Malcolm.  2011. Second Edition. ISBN 9781935961321. This was first published in 1999, but the story is is even more true today as then. If you want to sell in value, you need to prove it to  the client using their data. To be more than a discount salesperson this is the type of book you must devour on your way to the top 5%.

A long time ago I built and used a presentation,  “What Your  CFO Can Teach Your Sales Team”. In it I laid out the various simple quick ratios a salesman can use to analyze a prospects annual reports to see if they would qualify for terms, their profits and where they came  from , growth rates, and several others.

Malcolm’s book goes much further than that PowerPoint of mine in a a very readable and digestible manner.  Any solution seller will recognize the terms used and also learn many more.  I always ask clients, “Do your salespeople  deserve to take the client meeting?  Have they done their homework.? “  Malcolm’s book has the right kind of homework here for all the value sellers. Excellent revision and a valuable addition to any sales managers/salesman’s library.

Paul McCord does a terrific review of this very valuable book.  See http://salesandmanagementblog.com/2011/12/05/book-review-bottom-line-selling-by-jack-malcolm/

Related articles

• Book Review: Bottom-Line Selling by Jack Malcolm (salesandmanagementblog.com)
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• Value-Added Selling. How to sell more profitably, confidently and professionally by competing on value not price. Tom Reilly (regnordman.com)
• Accelerate the sale. Kick start your personal selling style to close more sales, faster. Mark Roberts. (regnordman.com)
• Pricing and Profitability Management. A practical guide for business leaders. Meehan, Simonetto, Montan & Goodin. (regnordman.com)
• Zero-Time Selling. 10 Essential steps to accelerate every company’s sales. Andy Paul (regnordman.com)

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Pricing and Profitability Management. A practical guide for business leaders. Meehan, Simonetto, Montan & Goodin. 2011. ISBN 9780470825273.   I chatted to Michael Simonetto a few months back while doing pricing strategy research. He  sent along this recent Deloitte‘s publication and I am very glad he did. My research was already indicating the multi-layered needs in a company when looking at strategic pricing . This book carries that thought through into a very comprehensive analysis and several work plans.  The case studies are very appropriate and reflect what happens in the marketplace.

Among several great quotes;

• “  Pricing strategies simply cannot, and should not, be developed without obtaining direct and meaningful input from customers.”
• “Fix the process first, than add technology,”

The authors have a good emphasis on sales execution and how that one needs to very competent in this area well before making any changes to pricing.

This is not a book for the trivial reader,yet it should be read by every CEO and the leaders of Sales, Marketing, Finance and Customer Service.

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Value-Added Selling. How to sell more profitably, confidently and professionally by competing on value not price. Tom Reilly. 3rd ed. 2011. ISBN 9780071702683.  This is the complete sales book for anyone who wants to break out of the zero sum game of selling on price.  Great point in the book- when asked, a majority of B2B customers see that 25% of the value of the products they buy comes from the salesman himself. Ask yourself, what have you done to deserve to take the meeting with the high value prospect? have you done the work to bring value yourself?

This is a  very current salesman’s bible.  Plus its a  very practical easy to read guide to getting the job done whether you are a part of a huge well supported multinational team or a single sales guy in a start up.  He starts where you need to and has lots of guidance for the sales person who has been forced into a price only style but wants to move to selling value ( the smarter way).  A must have for a sales manager and a salesperson who wants to be a high earner.

If selling on price has you or your organization trapped in a cycle of tightening of margins and unrelenting price pressure then this book is essential to your sales team and will be  a very valuable resource for you.

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• Accelerate the sale. Kick start your personal selling style to close more sales, faster. Mark Roberts. (regnordman.com)
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How to Generate Real Sales Results from Digital Tools Like Social Media, Webinars and e-Content

Best Practices for Using Leading Edge Tools for Sales Success.

I am measured on results.  At Rocket Builders we have found that today’s digital tools give us those results.

- most sales people have not been successful using social media to generate revenue

- most webinars fail to engage the prospect sufficiently to advance the opportunity

- most content a salesperson shares with a prospect raises more questions than addresses the buyer’s needs

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Social Marketing to the Business Customer. Listen to your B2b market, Generate major account leads and build client relationships. Paul Gillin & Eric Schwartzman.  2011. ISBN 9780470639337.  Timely, current and very well written this is the book you have been waiting for to dish up how and why you can leverage social media through the entire buying cycle.  I was very impressed with their chapters on  Getting ROI and Generating Leads. In our two courses, Content marketing and Digital Tools for Sales we use very similar approaches to the topics covered in this book.  The two authors are old hands at this and technology marketing, so their advice is immediately usable while helping build good plan for long term sales growth.   If you read one book this year on this topic , make it this one.

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In order to sell based on value, the sales team must know (and believe in) the value their product brings.  The previous post sketched out the how marketing needs to extract and describe the value stories.  Now  the sales department needs to learn and add new skills based on the value stories coming from the  marketing department.  The proper evidence, examples, testimonials, and success stories will help grow a salesman’s confidence to successfully sell on value.

These are not quick skills to learn as old habits and beliefs are hard to change.  There is also a basic skills gap in the younger sales forces. There are fewer firms that still provide a quality sales training program. Many of those new to sales will learn their basics  in the school of  hard knocks, which leads to bad habits.

A proactive sales organization, recognizing this,  can shape a sales person’s behaviors toward value  selling through a planned combination of training and reward systems. By shifting comp schemes toward a very heavy weighting on margin vs volume, salespersons will shift their approach.  This will not happen however if the revised relevant support material from marketing is not present.  A further impediment is having a C-Suite which still recognizes volume and lacks the maturity/patience to shift to margin based rewards.

We know that questions on pricing  will occur in two separate parts of a sale,  the early “give me a ballpark (budget)  price” time  and the  very late stage when the “your price is too high” negotiation statement occurs. Sales departments  which show success in growing margins and profits by using value selling techniques  possess well crafted  resources and training to anticipate these pricing question times.  This is a team effort between marketing, sales, customer service and finance to make this adjustment.

A great reference for thought leadership on this is Ardath Albees website

Next some successful training tactics for value selling organizations.

Related articles

• Implementing a value based sales approach. Part 1. Introduction. (regnordman.com)
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Part 1 of these posts talked about how power in the market has shifted to the buyer. (Reference Voice of the Customer Marketing by Eaman).  Thus the focus in of marketing and sales  is to learn as much as possible about the buyer’s journey.

The marketing and sales departments must work together to extract value stories to help marketing build out:

• Agreement with sales on what is a sales ready lead (Reference: Brian Carroll)
• Knowledge of all the stages that a buyer goes through internally prior to and during a decision to purchase  ( Reference: Sharon Drew Morgen)
• The unique value(s) that they can demonstrate they bring to the buyer ( Reference: see how LeveragePoint can help)
• Knowledge of what buyers find valuable from dealing with your sales force. (Have salespeople earned the right to talk to buyers?)
• Campaigns that place the needed proof in front of the targeted buyers well before they engage with sales. (Lead your prospects to value, not a sale. Reference: Ardath Albee)
• The changing proof needed for each stage of the buyers journey.
• Segmented value proofs for the many different individuals participating on the buyer’s side (You deal with a committee).
• Compelling value stories that bolster the salesman’s efforts/confidence in using a value based, not pricing based approach.

This is an investment in time and effort that builds a long term sustainable sales funnel. Research has shown that at any one time only 5% of your “suspects” are in buying mode. This leaves 95% which need to be nurtured by marketing until they raise their hand.  As I said in the first post, the buyer decides when they will interact with you.

A recent LinkedIn Answer by Ian Dainty is relevant at this time on  Who is Responsible for Generating Leads, Sales or Marketing?

Ian Dainty • Here is my two cents worth.
Because I have been in the B2B tech space for over 35 years, as a sales rep, marketer, executive and owner, I have seen all kinds of scenarios. I came from the “dialing for dollars” days, when no SMB tech company had a marketing department. The sales rep did it all.
However, after all of this time, and through years of research, executive interviews, and being in the trenches, I have been able to make some good observations that work.
If you have a company, with under $100M in revenue, then marketing’s main function should be to generate leads. (or as we used to call them – suspects). This should be done through Direct Response Marketing (DRM). DRM includes emails, letters, Social Media, PPC, advertising, etc., anything that asks a suspect to put their hands up and ask for your free content, whether that be a white paper, a free download, etc

.
I have seen too many marketing VP’s spend their time designing logos (seriously) as if this is going to help build a company brand. Marketing needs to bring in and nurture leads, until they are qualified by sales.
Sales should qualify leads. Unfortunately, very few sales people know how to qualify properly, and end up chasing leads for months. Hence the long sales cycle in most B2B tech companies. Please go to my blog for more information, especially “How to Stop Chasing Dead Leads” http://bit.ly/mgCTGo But I digress from the topic here.

Once a lead has been qualified as far as timeframe and need, and this where most qualification processes fail, then sales should take over. If it is simply a tire kicker, then marketing needs to keep nurturing.

Too many sales people spend their time either cold calling, not needed if you have at least $1M in revenue, and/or not knowing how to qualify, and chasing dead leads.

Sales should also generate leads, through three main avenues. They should be asking for referrals from clients. They should be getting testimonials for use by marketing. And more importantly, they should be generating more business in each of their current clients.

Many sales people fail on all fronts. But marketing needs to take on the lead (suspect) generation for a company.

Thanks Ian, I could not say this any better. Next what does Sales have to do to implement a value based selling approach.

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Selling is harder every day. This topics series is presented to help you better meet the challenges of resisting discounting and over time increasing your prices)

Selling processes/methods/tactics that were successful become less so over time. Marketplace noise increases daily.  The standard practise of push marketing plus outbound sales adds to the noise with targets increasing their use of a Delete key. In order to get to talk to a prospect about how a  product
or service brings value, sales needs high quality help from marketing and different sales skills.

This change is necessitated by a market power shift. Power in the process has shifted to the buyer, because the seller is no longer the sole source of information for the purchase.  Buyers have ready access to a sea of information about products through the Web. Buyers determine when and how the
seller will interact with them.

In my own case, I  receive numerous mail and phone requests every day for “just a few minutes of your time to discuss a new product or service that will bring benefit to your business“. Delete.  I need to be engaged by the sellers content and knowledge of my situation before I will respond.

Many sales and marketing teams still misunderstand this point, wasting millions of dollars yearly of  internal funds. If a selling company was effective in fixing this they would experience:

1. Marketing having ongoing conversations with their target market
2. The bulk of the sales conversations would be initiated by the buyer.
3. The momentum of the sales cycles would be increasing (shorter cycles)
4. Reduction  of the cost of sales and
5. Rising profits.

In our consulting practise we see the opposite happening for many companies.

Any modern selling process (what the seller does) now takes a distant back seat to fully the knowing the buyer, the  buyer’s (hidden) process (what the buyers do) and the value the seller brings during the  buying process. This is a sea change in how many previously successful sales people have been trained.

(In part 2 I describe one of the changes needed – in marketing )

Your comments and examples are welcomed.

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