Slow Down, Sell Faster!: Understand Your Customer's Buying Process and Maximize Your Sales / Edition 2

Name: Slow Down, Sell Faster!: Understand Your Customer's Buying Process and Maximize Your Sales / Edition 2
Brand: AMACOM
SKU: 9780814416853
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Description

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

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: AMACOM

Publication Date: 01-05-2011

Pages: 272

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

KEVIN DAVIS is president of TopLine Leadership, a sales and sales management training company. His revolutionary eight-step process is used at Citigroup, ADP, Bayer, Sprint-Nextel, IKON Office Solutions, Global Imaging Systems (a XEROX company), and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies.

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!

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Slow Down, Sell Faster!: Understand Your Customer's Buying Process and Maximize Your Sales / Edition 2

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Table of Contents

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