The problem for those selling more complex products and services is that their actual goal is to have a long term relationship with their clients. However, our traditional model for selling focuses on pinning targets on the backs of potential clients and going for the kill .
The object is not to kill our clients but instead to become valuable and essential members of their trusted inner circle.
So how do you do that?
By using some of the key principles from Stop Selling and Do Something Valuable .
1. Know Your Client Warm Knowing your client warm is what will differentiate you from every other salesperson. Knowing your client warm means knowing more than their golf score, or how many sugars they take in their coffee or where their children go to school; it s understanding what drives them in their role and how they are measuring their performance.
2. Forget your message . Share the power. Make it theirs. Forget your message; forget the need to control the room through charisma and razzle-dazzle. Sharing the power means share the power of the meeting with the client give them the chance to dictate what s important to them and to talk about it. Ask them what s important and then put it front and center. Make their needs more important than yours.
3. Create value at every step until you become invaluable. This book asks you to be valuable from the get go. Sometimes salespeople get into diagnosing the problem endlessly before feeling like they can provide answers. Sometimes they get scared and think they might be giving too much away. Sometimes they get stuck trying to have all the answers instead of asking great questions. Sometimes salespeople don t know enough to know what will create value.
4. ABO - Always be opening. You don t have to close everyone. People tend to approach sales like they ve always got to create activity, activity, activity. It s exhausting and unnecessary. Bury the phrase always be closing deep in the ground and use ABO instead Always Be Opening. Learn how to dialogue with clients, on what they want to achieve and how you can help them achieve it or not. We want to keep opening the possibilities, not trying to close them off and toss them away if they don t immediately yield to our prospecting.
5. Make any selling true to your style so it feels authentic and true. Selling can t come from a one size fits all Acme Sales kit. People can t squeeze into someone else s process and hope to duplicate their success. In order for a process to work, it has to feel comfortable and natural. That s why the tools are designed so that they can work with how each individual reader works, and can be adapted to their particular style. But ultimately readers can take each of these tools and do it their way, not the Steve Walmsley way.
This Book Is Valuable To Anyone Who Sells For A Living Most of all, these are tools that let people be more of who they are, to provide more value for their clients. The goal is to stop selling, and instead, do something experientially valuable for the client from before the first face-to-face interaction.
The tools presented in Stop Selling and Do Something Valuable are simple to execute and yield powerful results. They can be used by diverse types of people; buttoned-down silver foxes and technical logically-minded professionals to results-focused business managers and client-focused independent consultants.