by Mark Horne, Guest Writer
What books do the Initial Call staff think are most foundational and helpful? I started to answer that question in an earlier post. Now here are three more. Just remember, like I wrote earlier, I’m not listing them in any particular order of value.
In Why Johnny Can’t Sell...And What to Do About It Michael Nick and Bob Kantin address the problem of sales people (and their supervisors) thinking or at least acting like it is sufficient to “show up and throw up” to generate sales, especially technology sales. Merely making appointments to list the features one is selling is not enough. They argue that bad habits were formed during the economy of the nineties, habits that are not going to produce increased sales now that the nineties are over.
Nick and Kantin want to teach not only sales people, but also their managers and supervisors, what is necessary to sell to a business where the decision-makers typically won’t buy unless the question of return on investment has been answered. The book enables readers to
- Recognize gaps in sales training that need to be filled
- Increase selling power by creating the right tools
- Convey to customers assurance of success
- Measure for a prospect the value of a product or service
- Use persuasive proposals and presentations to prove that value
CustomerCentric Selling by Michael Bosworth and John Holland stresses the importance of knowing a product or service from the perspective of the person who is in a position to make the decision and who will benefit from it. This means that mere user knowledge isn’t really helpful for making a great sale. Knowing a product’s features as a user is not identical to being able to articulate how it can achieve a goal, solve a problem, or satisfy a need of the decision-maker.
Bosworth and Holland are concerned that both traditional salesmanship, and the more-or-less instinctive understanding of naturally-gifted salespeople is product centered and feature focused rather than customer centered. Such sales people tend to gravitate toward users of the product rather than aiming at businessmen who make the decisions about the product for their company. Bosworth and Holland have a website that provides an excellent summary of their ideas about customer centric selling as opposed to traditional selling.
Brian Carroll is the president of his own lead generation company and a blogger. Lead Generation for the Complex Sale: Boost the Quality and Quantity of Leads to Increase Your ROI sets out the issues facing sales people when they are forced to waste time on “leads” that aren’t really leads, or else simply do their own lead generation. No one should be surprised to know that sales people would rather have more time to devote to more promising leads, but many times a company will devote their resources in a way that heads in exactly the opposite direction (hiring more sales people rather than spending more on marketing, for example).
Carroll argues that quality lead generation is good for any sales, but, for complex sales typical of a business-to-business transaction, it is imperative. His book lays out the basics on how to get sales and marketing departments in sync, how to improve leads, and walks readers through the fundamental steps such as using various methods for generating demand, creating value for prospective customers during the process, and prioritizing leads.
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