Selling to the C-suite : what every executive wants you to know about successfully selling to the top. Nicholas A.C. Read and Stephen J. Bistritz. 2010. ISBN 9780071628914.  This is the next read in your growth as a super sales person  titled  listen to the words of the client.   The authors did exhaustive interviews with executives as to what they wanted from a vendor, what they got and what was important to them.  This should open most of your eyes folks.  It is really good material. For example, most executives are closely involved long before the sales person learns about an opportunity, and by then it is likely  the worst time to approach the C Suite.  The book has terrific ideas for doing the homework that is necessary and how this changes from culture to culture.  The sectiopn on China is worth the price of the book.  Simple down to earth advice, easy to read but do not whip through this book, it is too valuable a read.  Their blog http://www.sellingtothec-suite.com.

more articles about the book http://www.salesandmarketing.com/msg/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004001881
http://www.salesandmarketing.com/msg/content_display/publications/e3id519a27d3f06495af655298805bdaeb2

Other sources on this topic http://www.closebiz.org/images/Selling_to_the_C-Suite.pdf

If the rest of the books I look at in 2010 are as good as this I am really looking forward to them

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Soar Despite Your Dodo Sales Manager. Lee B. Salz. 2007. ISBN 9780832950094.   I previously posted Salz’s ideas for sales people looking for work (Time to look for a new sales job? New and seasoned sales guys???? )   The rest of the book is as brilliant.  This is a book which truly architects a salesman’ s success, despite their manager or lack of a manager and little help from marketing.   Much useful and familiar content such as :

• How do you really differentiate your product/service?
• Look at the buyers process, not a selling process.
• What are you doing for personal growth?

What is your ideal client?

• Size?
• Circumstances (new vs takeaway?)
• Process?
• Budget?
• Buying habits?

Who are the personalities in a client?

• Beneficiaries?
• Saboteurs?
• Mentors?
• Wizards (he who pays)?

His chapters on territory management and responding to RFPs are better than anything I have seen in a long time.

If there is something missing it would be the extensive work of Sharon Drew  Morgen on the the early identification of stuff that will get in the way of the sale. Her material is unbeaten at the qualifying stage, to make you more efficient as well as more effective.  Plus you really do need to get marketing to help you with some of this stuff, if you can.

See lots of Lees content belowhttp://changingminds.org/articles/lee_salz_articles.htm

Well written, clear and a great guide, this is a book for every salesperson to have in his library, I would keep in your bag, as the tips and examples are of great immediate use.

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Time to look for a new sales job?.

I am devouring a book called Soar Despite Your Dodo Sales Manager. (www.wbusiness.biz) by Lee B. Salz. (Maybe a theme developing?) This is a good book (Review will follow)  His second chapter is all about finding the right sales job and I loved it.  He talks about interviewing  the company while they interview you  since you have as much to lose as the company by signing up for the wrong job.

Its usually the wrong job if:

• The company has no proven plan in place to help salesmen succeed
• The company hires  hunters but you see they need farmers
• They want strong salespeople with no idea what strong really means
• The manager is stuck in ABC thinking
• There is no demand for the product, yet no plans to develop it.
• Or there is no name recognition, no brand, few marketing dollars, no prospects calling in

Sound familiar? It rang my bell a few times. we have seen all this and more in helpin gtech companies through the year.  Here’[s a clue, if you do not see why this is a costly problem for you, do not worry, your company will not make it anyway.

Points about finidng the ideal company (like finding the ideal client right? ) :

1. Define what is the ideal company for you
2. Where and what are the opportunities for you?
3. What do they expect of a sales person? What do you expect of them?
4. What skills are they willing to teach? What do you want to learn?
5. What is their commitment to training and development? What is your commitment?
6. What won’t they teach?What don’t you want to be taught?
7. What do they feel can’t be taught?
8. Services sellers need to know how to customize, configure and create based on customer requirements. Are you that type?
9. Product sellers are limited by what the box does. Is that your success type?
10. Did you thrive on short cycle or long cycle sales?
11. Same with single buyers or multiple enterprise buyers?
12. What type of hunter are you? Do you generate your own leads or answer in-bounds?
13. Are you able to straddle the likable/driven divide of the farmer?
14. How do you adapt to change? How flexible are you? Is the comp plan overly  changable?
15. What is the size of your financial risk? Will your cheques clear?
16. Where do they stand with the competition; leaders. followers. laggards, off the radar?  Which do you prefer?
17. Are they boutique or low price?  Where do they win or lose sales?
18. What is the offering breadth? All of it, or just part of the puzzle?
19. How do they differentiate themselves? Do you believe it?
20. How is sales managed? Your preferance?
21. What sales support is there?  Proof materials?
22. The money; salary, recoverable/nonrecoverable draws, commission how does it all work together?  What defines revenue? What about chargebacks?
23. Any deal breakers such as ; pay is too low to survive on , commute too long, location?

Told you it was thorough. This is just Chapter 2!

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How to Sell to an Idiot. 12 steps to sell anything to anyone. John Hoover & Bill Sparkman. 2006. ISBN 0471718548.  It does not take too long when reading this book to realize there is only one idiot in the sales prccess and that person is liklely you , not the customer.  A decent job of revisiting the basics that get forgotten. I appreciated their take on the different personalities of customers. They use these categories:

• Machiavellian
• Sadist
• Masochist
• Paranoid
• Greek Gods
• Best Buddy
• Decent Souls

Quite hilarious but I am sure we have met all these types in our day  Using these personlaity types the authors lead you through understanding their i-story, and how to talk to them during each of the 12 steps:

1. Be prepared or be the idiot
2. Connect
3. Confuse with clarity
4. matching
5. Showtime
6. Ask for the business
7. Circle again
8. ask again
9. Appreciate
10. Referral
11. Follow-up
12. Practise

Not a heavy read and decent for a 3 hr plane ride.  Good motivating language.

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How to write proposals,  sales letters, & reports. Neil Sawers. 2004. ISBN 0969790147.   This is a very useful small book on essential skills that many small business people do not have. The author is very organized and systematic about the  how, why and what of proposals, letters and reports.  His writing style is very direct and pragmatic.  There are lots of books on this topic around, but I liked his for being very focused on small business people.

Selling in a New Market Space. Getting customers to buy your innovative and disruptive products. Brain C. Burns & Tom U. Snyder.  2010. ISBN 9780071636100.  A worthy succesor to books like Selling in th ehigh technology market, this book speaks about a Maverick Selling  Principles.  It explains how to build highly successful sales teams that create markets from scratch by:

1. Articulating a compelling vision for the future
2. Pinpointing your target market
3. Controlling the decision making process
4. Exposing exactly how large organizations make product sections

The authors use true-life case studies showing how the Maverick Method has resulted in landmark deals and long-term success for innovative new products. I appreciated their understanding of short windows of opportunity.  Pay attention as they teach you how to build sales money maps, an often lost art these days.

Rethinking Sales Management.  A strategic guide for practitioners. Beth Rogers. 2007. ISBN 9780470513057. This is a very thorough book with a specific focus on sales strategy It is needed for selling is getting tougher every day.  She uses her form of  “customer portfolio matrix” , based on what I appreciate, the customers point of view.   I think her approach will assist managers in  setting  realistic objectives, designing  new strategies that add real customer value,  avoiding  wasting time on price-oriented customers and deployingresources for maximum results. Beth is from the UK which means her English is precise , but like the Economist, has depth on every page.  Not a quick read.

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Winning the Professional Services Sale. Unconventional strategies to reach more clients, land profitable work, and maintain your sanity. Michael W. McLaughlin. 2009. ISBN 9780470455852.  A very valuable book and at the front of my line to be the sales book for 2009 IMHO.  There is just too much great stuff in this book to summarize for you.  The author published with Jay Levinson Guerilla Marketing for Consultants, which I also found very useful.  The core (book jacket)  is  rather than pressing the sale, salespeople must help clients buy–the way that works best for each client.  Only by fully understanding a sale from every angle, including its impact on the client’s business and career, can salespeople thrive in the new era of the service economy.  He really makes the point that selling is getting harder all the time, and the pro salesman must  always search for and learn  new things. I really liked hearing his comments on long term clients expecting more from you over time as well as expecting you to be always getting faster at doing it.

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Targets look for any reason to disqualify you. This was said to me by a client this week.  At first blush it seemed a harsh statement.Then I asked one of my usual suspects, Colin McWhinney  (SalesXperts) about it. He said, ” Yes! They are absolutely looking for anything to disqualify you.  That’s why the more you give a target, the more they have to say no to.  So we send short vs long emails, terse vs long case studies and we never ever send out a brochure . That is  the kiss of death.”

That comment  rang my bell.  I know how I react to blatant pitches, strident emails.  I quickly trash anything with misspelling, mis naming, grammar and content errors, garish HTML, long messages.  I absolutely never return salesy voice messages as well as those from “acquaintances” who are only ever looking to get free help for themselves  with nothing (no money) offered to me.

What I hear, is that if a target ever really asks you for something it must be tightly focused on what they say they want. Generic does not cut it. Except to cut you out of the running.

Why targets do this is likely a survival tactic to help deal with the increasing amount of incoming info.  Its not personal, nor is it that conscious. It just happens. Why is not as important as to what you do about it.

As sales guys we can be  (and sometimes rightly so) accused of poor attention to detail.  We need to be confident that we are doing things in the best  way  that works, in order to keep at this work, since hearing no is a part of our everyday life.  So we must be diligent that all our communication is free from anything that  gives a target any reason to disqualify us.  Let’s not create our own nos!

• Memo to Startups: Waiting for that Moment (cloudave.com)

The Complete Guide to Selling Yourself in Today’s Competitive Market. Thomas A. Freese. 2009. ISBN 9781891892660. I am a Thomas Freese fan.  His approach just makes so much sense.  IMHO if you combined Sharon Drew Morgen’s work with Freese’s, you would have a pretty complete and powerhouse sales approach. He discards the traditional sales approaches and leads you to a much smarter and better (for the client and yourself) way.  This is his fifth book , and I have read them all.  With this one he takes his methods to look at selling yourself in an interview, but if you follow his guides, you will become a better sales person overall. Check out his resources at www. qbsresearch.com

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101 Cold Calling Tips For Building New Customers in a Down Economy. Wendy Weiss.  2009. ISBN: 978-0-9671268-5-2.  The author says she is the Queen of Cold Calling.   These are very useful tips laid out in the right logical order.  For those of us in telesales, we can always use a boost and this book does a good job.   It is an e-book available from her website . I especially liked the clear and well thought out instructions on scripts and your  approach. I know of  some recent clients sales folks I met who just need  that  daily “boost” to keep going.  Almost-cold calls are still a part of the sales life , until you get your marketing lined up well enough to drive the traffic to you. Yet for really innovative new  products, no one knows about you so you have to go find the clients in order to have the conversation.

For daily desktop renewal I suggest you buy it and then print out this book so its a quick referral.  These tips work as many of them can also be gleaned from Art Sobczak the Business By Phone guy whose little Telesales Tips That Work book has been on my desk for a decade now.

Taming the Search and Switch Customer. Earning customer loyalty in a compulsion-to-compare world. Jill Griffin. 2009. ISBN 9780470345047.

The author is called the Loyalty Maker and this book is evidence that she really does know her stuff. see www.loyaltysolutions.com The book covers large and small B2C and B2B sales so well.  The compulsion to compare seems to be now part of our human nature.

Her thoughts about using some of the new solution media channels are bang on.  The demographics in clients are changing and the new guys on the block are used to the social media. They are certainly keen on using the Internet to keep all vendors honest. Your product/service can rise and fall on customer reviews online.

The chapters are short enough that you can take it all in and she uses good real world examples to illustrate the points. I think sales is all about the story and the author has good stories.  I  think that any business person  would benefit from reading this book.  Very readible, highly interesting and perfect for a coast to coast plane ride. So pick it up and enjoy it.

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