Former CEO and founder of The Sant Corporation
Inventor of ProposalMaster and RFPMaster
Author of Persuasive Business Proposals
Introduction
Think about it. Who are the top-performing salespeople you know? They are the ones with the most long-term customers. Over the years, top performers earn long-term customers by fulfilling their expectations measurably better than competitors can. In return, these superstars earn their expected profit levels for doing so. This book will teach you how to make sure you are one of those sales superstars.
The Science of Sales Success shows you how to ensure that customers’ expectations are not moving targets. It will show you how to fast-forward the sales process to get prospects and new customers to act like long-term ones. They will be eager to share the measurable dollar benefits of their goals and the nine critical details of their purchasing decisions. Customers will see how sharing purchasing criteria with you empowers them.
Now, you can reach the pinnacle of sales success, which is called relationship selling, in a matter of two to three sales calls. You no longer need to invest dozens of sales calls over months or years to achieve that status. You (and your customers) will make well-informed, advance-or-abandon decisions at what will feel like the speed of light. When you and customers do not waste each other’s time, everyone wins—and your productivity explodes as a result. Rest assured, there are no gimmicks and this is not science fiction. Logic and science are what power this book.
The Big Picture
This book explains the objective benchmarks you need to use to manage your selling efforts and duplicate success on a planned basis. It provides all the tools a salesperson needs to outvalue the competition. You’ll help customers manage their expectations so that the potential for unfulfilled ones disappear. Customer satisfaction rises along with profits, so everyone wins. Yet, it is a blueprint, not a wrecking ball. It builds on your foundation of skills, style, talents, knowledge, personality, and customer relationships to accomplish this goal. Its plug-and-play framework inserts your sales knowledge into a format that makes it easy to retrieve and apply. The faster you can look up answers, the more efficient and productive you will be.
The Science of Sales Success also pieces together all the key components of the sales and marketing puzzle. It shows how the different pieces interact to create customer value. When you understand these interactions, you can harness their power to make your sales soar. (See Exhibit I-1.)
Exhibit I-1: Connecting all the pieces in selling.
Measuring Up
The Science of Sales Success uses the MeasureMax selling system as its plug-and-play framework for you to custom-tailor the book’s concepts to your sales situations. MeasureMax is short for “Measure to Maximize.” The powerful business axiom, “You can only manage what you can measure,” is its engine. By using this unique selling system, you learn how to help customers measure in financial terms the value they receive from achieving their goals via your products and services. Some examples are shown in Exhibit I-2.
With traditional selling, customers venture:
With the plug-and-play format of MeasureMax, customers state:
“I need to improve reliability by 5 percent over last year.”
“My goal is to prevent annual production losses of $50,000 due to unscheduled downtime.”
“I need to reduce operating expenses significantly.”
“My top priority is to save $30,000 on administrative paperwork.”
“I need to increase revenues by 15 percent.”
“My number one objective is to add $1,000,000 to net profits.”
“I need to gain market share.”
“My top-ranked goal is to generate $5 million in sales for every one percent of increased market share.”
“I need to upgrade quality.”
“My most pressing priority is to reduce mean time between failures to lower warranty costs by $250,000.”
Exhibit I-2: Comparing traditional selling to the MeasureMax selling system.
This selling system also provides you with the means to influence results by measuring the progress of your sales opportunities while they are occurring. No more postmortems on lost sales after it’s too late to do anything. You and customers learn how to take the guesswork out of advance-or-abandon decisions. Some examples are shown in Exhibit I-3.
With traditional selling, salespeople venture:
With the plug-and-play format of MeasureMax, salespeople state:
“I have a great chance to get the sale.”
“In this market segment and dealing with a vice president of manufacturing, I can demonstrate that our two unique strengths will achieve her goal of improving productivity by 15 percent or $2,000,000 annually.”
“Both of my sales opportunities are in the qualifying stage.”
“For the first sales opportunity, I only have six of the nine critical purchasing criteria measurable. In the second opportunity, I only have four of the nine purchasing criteria measurable. My first opportunity is definitely more qualified at this stage.”
“My proposal should meet all their requirements.”
“I can connect seven different features to the customers’ three measurable benefits; four with measurable value; three with an external focus, and two of them are unique strengths. I can definitely value-justify their investment (and our price).”
“It looks like our products and services will be a good fit for this customer.”
“In this market segment, manufacturing managers’ primary goal is to reduce the number of returns. They typically use a system of evaluation that measures warranty expenses on a dollar-cost-per-incident basis.”
“I am pretty sure the customer will be able to afford our products.”
“The way they are measuring the benefits from achieving their goals to increase production by $3,000,000 annually makes me question whether they will be able to justify their investment.”
“I seem to be making good progress.”
“I have made three in-person sales calls without understanding how they will know whether they achieved their goal of ‘increasing market share.’ If I cannot find out what measurements they will use on the next sales call, I’m going to invest my selling efforts elsewhere.”
Exhibit I-3: Comparing traditional selling to the MeasureMax selling system.
This book also shows you better methods for applying best practices. Best practices are the strategies and tactics from past sales successes that you repeat in similar situations. Logic seems to dictate that if they worked in one situation they should work in similar ones. Yet, how do you know these sales situations share enough similarities to make these best practices apply?
You probably rely on gut instinct and common sense. The Science of Sales Success adds to your insight by providing you with the means to put to use not only anecdotal war stories involving how “Joe sold Mary” but also analytical evaluations. You learn not only what best practices worked but also how and why they worked. You learn to predict and duplicate success so sales orders become planned events, not random occurrences.
The common denominators you will use to make best practices analytical are:
Customers’ goals and benefits
Market segments that share those goals
Strongest features or unique strengths that achieve those goals
Systems of evaluation used to calculate the value of those goals, and the “costs” of doing nothing
Positions of customers that determine their goals
Competitive offerings that match up to customers’ goals
Profit levels earned from achieving customers’ goals
Note that each common denominator contains the word goals. The Science of Sales Success revolves around helping your customers achieve their goals, thereby making you the person they want to do business with. Its selling system increases in value the more you use it, as your database of sales knowledge increases.
The Science of Sales Success will work for you because it encourages you to answer, in very specific terms, the following four questions:
What do you know about new sales opportunities from your past experiences that will help you to earn higher profits for providing measurable value?
What do you need to find out to determine the potential for success in any particular sales opportunity?
How well did you find out from customers the specifics involving your sales opportunities?
What do you still need to find out or do next in your sales opportunities based on what you have already found out?
A Systematic Approach
This book’s systematic approach embodies Peter Drucker’s comments from his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship when he states that, “Every practice rests on a theory, even if the practitioners themselves are unaware of it.” [1] Typically, salespeople concentrate mainly on how they conduct sales calls—not on what comes before or after the calls occur. Yet, for the most part, the probabilities for success are set before salespeople even contact customers. To determine those probabilities, you need to take a systematic approach to the theory that governs your sales opportunities from five perspectives before, during, and after sales calls.
[1]Peter Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1985), p. 26.
Before Making Sales Calls
In sales, like most professions, success is 90 percent planning the work, and 10 percent working the plan. You need to make sure that you understand who the ideal customers are—and who are not. You need to ensure that you select your customers, not settle on them, if you are going to sell compensated value—that is, provide more measurable dollar benefits than competitors or the cost of doing nothing (status quo is often a salesperson’s biggest competitor)—and receive your expected profit margins for doing so. The five perspectives, or viewpoints, from which a salesperson views opportunities are illustrated in Exhibit I-4.