Exceptional Selling Exceptional Selling

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Summarized by permission of the publisher, Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint, 989 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94103. Exceptional Selling by Jeff Thull. © 2006 by Jeff Thull.

Recommended ReadingIf you enjoyed this summary of Exceptional Selling, we encourage you to visit your favorite bookseller to purchase a copy for your personal success library. You may also want to check out:

Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness by Jeffrey Gitomer

Selling 101: What Every Successful Sales Professional Needs to Know by Zig Ziglar

Secrets of Question Based Selling: How the Most Powerful Tool in Business Can Double Your Sales Results by Thomas Freese

by Je� Thull John Wiley & Sons Inc. © 2006, Je� Thull ISBN: 9780470037287 230 pages$24.95

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A FINAL WORD ON THE SEQUENCE OF EXECUTIVE CONVERSATIONS

Most often, executives simultaneously play two roles in high-stakes sales. First, they act as cast members, with their own job responsibilities and personal perspective. That is, we ask them to provide direct input into the “nuts and bolts” of the decision and work with them to develop the information we need in the diagnosis of the problem and the design of the solution.

At the same time, however, executives act as sponsors. In this role, they are only indirectly involved in the mechanics of the sale. When we work with sponsoring executives, our role in the sale changes. This new role can be challenging for salespeople to manage and it bears additional examination.

When executives act as sponsors, their direct participation is required only at key milestones, such as the sponsorship decision, the sanity checks that communicate � ndings and value reportage. But in between, they are positioned outside the action. You aren’t “selling” to them at all. In fact, you are more like one of the executive’s sta� members than a salesperson.

CLOSE With these thoughts � rmly in mind, you will be best able to

understand what questions to ask, diagnose the client’s problem, help the client determine the absence of the value your company o� ers, help the client craft a solution, and establish not only a sale but a relationship that continues to be win-win for you, your company and the client.

Asking the Right QuestionsWHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO SELL ANYTHING

QUICK OVERVIEW Have you ever said to a customer, “You’ve probably never thought of this, but…”

or “We save companies like yours millions of dollars in wasted….” Both of these statements could very well be true, but they are also received as thinly disguised insults. Statements like these imply the customer doesn’t think and wastes millions of dollars. While you believe you are enlightening your customers, they may be hearing a criticism. When customers and prospects hear these insults, they lean back, cross their arms and shut down. The salesperson can keep talking, but the conversation is over.

Sales conversations are rife with traps like these. Exceptional Selling exposes these mistakes and o� ers logical and proven alternatives that enhance the clarity, relevancy, credibility and trust salespeople endeavor to create in conversations with customers.

In Exceptional Selling, author Je� Thull explains that the core of best selling practices includes listening to situations, diagnosing problems and helping the client craft a solution. Thull also identi� es three root causes of failure that can prevent us from succeeding: confrontation, comprehension and compliance. With this information, salespeople are equipped to move the decision maker from prospect to satis� ed client.

APPLY AND ACHIEVE One � aw in conventional sales training is the concept of the salesperson as persuader.

The problem is that we rarely stop to think about how customers perceive the tactics of persuasion that salespeople are taught and encouraged to use. They are going to see you as the “lecturing professor.” Consider this from the customer’s perspective: If someone is trying to push you into taking a certain course of action, even when you have misgivings about it, or if he is implying that he knows better than you, that he is smart and you are not, or that you just don’t get it, how would you react?

When someone pressures you to take a certain course, it’s only natural to question his motives. Why is he pushing me so hard? Whose interests is he actually looking out for?

Justi� ed or not, the answers to these questions seem obvious to customers, and that is why this type of behavior doesn’t build credibility or engender trust. Overzealous

CLOSING IS NOT THE END OF THE SALES PROCESS

This Is Where the Proposal Comes In Another fundamental f law in conventional selling is that

the post-sale process tends to be treated as anticlimactic and is often addressed in a haphazard, piecemeal fashion. This represents the abandonment of your most valuable source of new business. If a proposal shouldn’t be a document of consideration, what should it be? This may sound anticlimactic, but it should be a document of confirmation. The purpose of a proposal is to document the series of decisions that have already been made.

It should confirm everything we’ve done with the customer to this point. The proposal should reprise all of the elements of the incentive to change and the confidence to invest that we’ve already established with the customer. It connects all of the elements of value in a single, formal document.

Show Me the Money One of the most misguided instructions salespeople

receive is “Never give the customer the price before you’ve completed your pitch.”

The idea behind this is that customers will walk away if they hear your price before they hear everything they are going to get for their money.

I don’t agree. You should never be afraid or unwilling to tell a customer

your price, or at least provide as honest an estimate as you can at the moment the question is asked. The right question is not whether the price is reasonable or not. The right question is “Does the customer’s situation warrant our level of solution in financial terms?”

The financial conversations that we conduct during the sales engagement are all aimed at answering that question. They are designed to inform our customers and ourselves:

What is the absence of our value costing the customer? • What return (net financial impact) can the customer • reasonably expect from the solution? How much should the customer invest to achieve their • desired results?

When we help a customer answer these questions, the price of our offering becomes a simple fact that can easily be evaluated. It either meets the customer’s predetermined investment criteria or it does not.

Cost of the Problem When you engage the appropriate cast members in cost of

the problem conversations, you can follow a generic four-step pattern:

State the purpose of your call and name the indicator 1. you’re focused on. Describe the consequence(s) of the indicator that you’ve 2. called to discuss. Break down each consequence by asking the cast 3. member to describe what happens in his part of the business when it occurs. (As necessary, expand the breakdown of consequences based on your experience and knowledge.) Ask the customer to put a dollar amount on the cost of 4. each element within each consequence.

CONNECTING AT THE LEVEL OF POWER AND DECISION

Executive customers shouldn’t have to, and usually won’t, bother to translate our technical talk into their language. Yet, I think many salespeople shoot themselves in the foot by talking to executives in the language of the product or service they sell.

If we want to craft compelling executive conversations, it is important to speak to executives in their own language. We need to stop thinking and speaking like salespeople and start thinking and speaking like businesspeople. You must be aware of what executives want to know before they buy.

One good way to think about their decision criteria is in terms of � ve rules:

The issues we propose to address must be relevant in the 1. larger context of the business. The statement of value assumption must be valid. 2. The problem and the solution must be actionable. 3. The solution’s value must be measurable. 4. There must be consensus and alignment around the 5. � ndings, conclusions and � nal decision.

SUCCESS PointsIn this book you’ll learn how to:

Get information on • situations the client faces

Diagnose the • client’s problem

Help the client determine • the value of your product or service

Help the client craft a • solution that is win-win for the client and you and your company

JAN

UA

RY 2

01

0

Exceptional Sellingby Jeff Thull

About the AuthorJeff Thull is president and CEO of Prime Resource Group. He

is a widely acknowledged thought-leader in sales and marketing

strategies, particularly for companies involved in complex

sales, as well as startups with a desire to emerge quickly as

front-runners. Organizations such as Shell Global Solutions,

Siemens, Honeywell, 3M, Microsoft, Citicorp, IBM, Raymond

James and Georgia-Pacifi c rely on Thull’s expertise for business

transformation and professional development.

His anecdote-rich, humor-fi lled style has garnered Thull a

reputation as a keynote speaker able to equip teams with real-

time solutions geared toward bottom lines, and an ability to set

the bar for performance excellence.

Thull’s best-selling books include Mastering the Complex

Sale: How to Compete and Win When the Stakes Are High and

The Prime Solution: Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins and

Win the Complex Sale.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CALLOUT: Three root causes of failure that can prevent us from succeeding: confrontation, comprehension and compliance. SUGGESTED READING If you enjoy Exceptional Selling, we encourage you to visit your favorite bookseller and add this title to your personal success library. You may also want to

check out: SIDEBAR

BODY COPY (Begin with big start letter)

Exceptional SellingExceptional Selling

You Are a Translator The ability to translate value proposed to value achieved results in exceptional sales success. Once you know how to translate value, you are on your way to regular and predictable success in sales. If you can de� ne value in stages that enable your customers to understand the absence of value and build con� dence in their ability to acquire and achieve that value for themselves, you will compel them into action.

When a value translation is done properly, the pieces of your customer’s puzzle come together and you get the credit. They understand how your offering relates to their world and can evaluate its worth. They are able to answer for themselves those nagging questions that are always undermining the conventional sales presentation: “So what?” “Who cares?”

Page 4Page 3Page 2 SUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIESSUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIES SUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIES

EARNING THE KEYS TO THE ELEVATOR

The � rst conversations we should be having with customers are not sales conversations. They are discovery conversations. We shouldn’t be presenting or selling anything right now; we should be equipping ourselves with the elements that will make us credible and our value capabilities relevant.

Those elements are the symptoms, the physical evidence of the absence of our value. We conduct these conversations with people who are closest to the action—people who are working at the point where the absence of our value manifests itself. They are the “victims” of the absence of our value.

Who you call for these discovery conversations depends on the various places where the symptoms of the absence of your value can be observed. There are, however, three resource pools in and around your customer companies to draw from:

their employees • their vendors • their customers •

These discovery conversations are not sales calls. We need to learn about this company’s reality—its internal characteristics, what it is they are experiencing, the potential consequences and the customer’s viewpoint on those consequences.

Think like a lawyer during the discovery phase of a case. The lawyer’s purpose at this point is the objective discovery of facts and evidence. She is not presenting her case in front of a judge.

This same purpose should be directly re� ected in the questions you ask and don’t ask during these calls. You should be solely focused on the existence of the symptoms of the absence of your value.

Research calls are not covert missions into enemy territory. We are fully disclosing what we are doing to the people we call. We are open, honest and straightforward. We explain exactly what we are doing, why we are doing it and what we will do with the information we gather. It could open like this:

Jos, I’m Wayne Stanley with Six Sigma Software, and I’m not sure if it’s appropriate that we should be talking, but I’d like to run what I am trying to do by you and see if you can decide if it makes sense and if you might be able to help me or not. Do you have a moment to speak? [They say yes; we proceed.]

We work with companies like yours in the area of process manufacturing, and I am thinking about calling your vice president of manufacturing about our software. Typically, before I do that, I like to talk to a few quality-control people like yourself in the organization to see if you’re encountering any of the issues or di� culties that we work with customers to address. That will help me determine if it might make sense to speak with your management about the issue. I’d like to ask you a couple of questions and see if there might be some application here.

This all comes back to a professional mindset. There is no reason to sneak around.

DIAGNOSIS TRUMPS PRESENTATION EVERY TIME

Transactions that end in “no decision” stem from the root cause of “Why should I change?” When customers do not understand the risk of doing nothing and are faced with the risk of change, they tend to end up in the “do nothing” category.

The Decision to Buy Lives in the Negative Present

The best way to manage this risk is to move customers through the Progression to Change before you begin the discussion about solutions. The further we move customers along this progression, the more ready they become to change. Thus, our goal is to move them to the state of crisis.

Crisis is de� ned as the point of decision. It is the point where the customer decides, “I don’t want this to happen to me any

persuaders regularly trigger reactions like these that close down communications. They alienate customers.

The most common forms of sales self-sabotage are stylistic. How we talk with customers can easily undermine our ability to position ourselves to succeed and win business. No one does this intentionally, but

the fact remains, if you don’t know how to e� ectively structure and conduct customer conversations, what you talk about doesn’t make much di� erence. Our conversational style has a huge impact on building credibility and trust. How you speak with your customers has a powerful impact on your career. Your ability to constructively attract and engage a customer in a relevant dialogue requires a conversation style as well as substantive content. When customers are engaged, they learn. When what they learn is compelling enough to make them want to change, to take action, they will buy.

NOBODY BUYS A VALUE PROPOSITION

All sales, at their essence, are value transactions, but too often, salespeople misunderstand the realities of value. They communicate in hypothetical terms that do not have the power to compel customers to connect and therefore act.

Customers � nd these propositions indistinguishable from one another and, often, undistinguished to boot. This is why customers act as if all salespeople sound alike and the only relevant di� erentiating factor between their o� erings is price.

What is the one strategy that must be at the heart of every 1. conversation with prospects and customers? What do you use to position yourself when you enter into 2. your � rst conversations and throughout the rest of the sales process? What is the one and only thing that your customers 3. really want to know?

In the sales world, the answer to these questions is one word: value. When I say this to an audience of sales professionals, I see nods all around and I can almost hear their thoughts: “Check. That’s exactly what I do; I’m very into selling value. I don’t have to listen to this part.”

All salespeople are talking about value. Yet, at the same time, their sales cycle times are growing, the number of “no decisions”

is increasing, and it’s tougher than ever to engage C-level executives. If we’ve got the value strategy in play, why aren’t customers responding?

Customers don’t buy value propositions because the more complex the value proposition, the more di� cult it is for the customer to translate value proposed into value achieved.

Remember, you can’t count on customers to recognize on their own the value you bring to the table, to calculate what it’s worth or to accurately determine if they should pay its price. (If they could, there would be little need for salespeople.)

That’s why, when you’re sitting across the table from a prospect, you’ve come to a place where a value proposition is not enough to win the sale and get your full price. You must help the customer connect the dots. Consider the following questions to determine how you can establish your product or service’s value with your prospect:

What are your o� ering’s most compelling value capabilities?

What are your customers’ most compelling value requirements?

What are the observable indicators of absence of value among your customers?

YOU’VE GOT TO GET YOUR MIND RIGHT

We discovered that salespeople’s thought processes have far more in common with successful professionals in other disciplines who depend on credible communication, such as doctors, lawyers, psychologists and so on, than they do with other salespeople. In addition, the qualities of top sales professionals run a close parallel with the qualities of top leaders:

Creativity • Insight • Change management •

Integrity • Respect•

There are many others, too. What they taught us is that the foundation of their mindsets is, � rst and foremost, an intense focus on bringing value to their clients. In other words, they believe and behave as if their success is an automatic by-product of their clients’ success.

longer.” This is the point where customers decide to change; it’s where they decide to buy. There is very profound selling insight in this. It is the realization that customers can decide that they have a problem without having a solution in mind. In fact, they can decide they have a problem even if no solution exists. They can also calculate how serious that problem actually is without having a solution in mind. And, they can decide that they can’t live with a problem without having a solution in mind.

This contradicts the conventional sales approach, which says, “I have to tell you all about my solution to make you want to buy.”

How do you move a customer to the crisis stage? Crisis lives in the negative present in the Psychology of Change matrix, not in the positive future. So, you must focus on the customer’s present situation, not your solutions or the future state that customers will be able to attain with the help of those solutions.

You must raise customers’ consciousness of their current state as fully as possible. This creates relevancy, and if the situation is unacceptable, it creates the incentive to change and compels customers to act. This work requires a primary and intense examination of the customer’s situation—that is, diagnosis.

CUTTING THROUGH THE SMOKE AND MIRRORS

It’s ironic. Salespeople tend to depend too heavily on the customer’s view when it comes to problem diagnosis and not enough when it comes to solution design.

Exceptional sales professionals, however, work through the Design (a Solution) phase with their customers. They co-create the parameters of the solution. The best way to prepare customers to purchase your solution is not to create a glitzier presentation than the competition. It is to work with customers to de� ne the design parameters of a solution that can best solve their problem.

There are important advantages to this strategy, including: Customers can provide important insights regarding the • optimal solution. Design parameters supply customers with the questions that • need to be asked in order to cut through competitive smoke and mirrors. By acting as co-authors of the design parameters, customers also become anchored in the solution and don’t get blown o� course as easily. Salespeople capture an unparalleled opportunity to set • themselves apart from their competitors and gain an inside

track to winning the sale by taking a leading role in the creation of the rules on which the solution decision will be made. It’s much easier to win the game if you’ve had a hand in establishing legitimate solution criteria.

There are fundamentally only two reasons why customers do not buy:

1. They don’t believe they have a problem (or they do have a problem, but it’s not serious enough to do anything about). In our terms, they don’t have the incentive to change.

2. They don’t believe the solution proposed will work. In this case, they have a problem and they want to take action, but they do not have con� dence in the proposed solution. In our terms, they don’t have the con� dence to invest.

Instead of leaving our customers’ reserve and resistance unaddressed until the end of the sales process, we should be using a process that manages these issues in real time. Our process should be front-loaded, in terms of customer consideration.

Ideally, we have established relevancy and gained privileged access to key individuals in the cast of characters. We’ve identi� ed and explored the actual indicators of the absence of value, as well as their causes and consequences. We’ve worked with the customer to determine the � nancial impact of those consequences. We’ve guided the customer through a Design conversation that addressed how these indicators can be impacted, eliminated or altered by a viable solution.

In the process, we have developed rapport, credibility and trust. Everything the customer needs to know to make a high-quality decision is in place. Everything we need in order to successfully complete the sale is in place. The last thing we would want to do now is surprise the customer with previously unconsidered issues.

It might not be obvious, but positive surprises are problematic, too. No one will � re a vendor for delivering more value than promised, but corporations and their stakeholders depend on predictability.

So, it’s always better to be able to forecast improved results and then meet those forecasts. By the way, if you’re over-delivering unexpectedly, are you getting paid for it? You have to be able to factor in the full value of your o� ering to get the best price.

Exceptional SellingExceptional Selling

You Are a Translator The ability to translate value proposed to value achieved results in exceptional sales success. Once you know how to translate value, you are on your way to regular and predictable success in sales. If you can de� ne value in stages that enable your customers to understand the absence of value and build con� dence in their ability to acquire and achieve that value for themselves, you will compel them into action.

When a value translation is done properly, the pieces of your customer’s puzzle come together and you get the credit. They understand how your offering relates to their world and can evaluate its worth. They are able to answer for themselves those nagging questions that are always undermining the conventional sales presentation: “So what?” “Who cares?”

Page 4Page 3Page 2 SUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIESSUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIES SUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIES

EARNING THE KEYS TO THE ELEVATOR

The � rst conversations we should be having with customers are not sales conversations. They are discovery conversations. We shouldn’t be presenting or selling anything right now; we should be equipping ourselves with the elements that will make us credible and our value capabilities relevant.

Those elements are the symptoms, the physical evidence of the absence of our value. We conduct these conversations with people who are closest to the action—people who are working at the point where the absence of our value manifests itself. They are the “victims” of the absence of our value.

Who you call for these discovery conversations depends on the various places where the symptoms of the absence of your value can be observed. There are, however, three resource pools in and around your customer companies to draw from:

their employees • their vendors • their customers •

These discovery conversations are not sales calls. We need to learn about this company’s reality—its internal characteristics, what it is they are experiencing, the potential consequences and the customer’s viewpoint on those consequences.

Think like a lawyer during the discovery phase of a case. The lawyer’s purpose at this point is the objective discovery of facts and evidence. She is not presenting her case in front of a judge.

This same purpose should be directly re� ected in the questions you ask and don’t ask during these calls. You should be solely focused on the existence of the symptoms of the absence of your value.

Research calls are not covert missions into enemy territory. We are fully disclosing what we are doing to the people we call. We are open, honest and straightforward. We explain exactly what we are doing, why we are doing it and what we will do with the information we gather. It could open like this:

Jos, I’m Wayne Stanley with Six Sigma Software, and I’m not sure if it’s appropriate that we should be talking, but I’d like to run what I am trying to do by you and see if you can decide if it makes sense and if you might be able to help me or not. Do you have a moment to speak? [They say yes; we proceed.]

We work with companies like yours in the area of process manufacturing, and I am thinking about calling your vice president of manufacturing about our software. Typically, before I do that, I like to talk to a few quality-control people like yourself in the organization to see if you’re encountering any of the issues or di� culties that we work with customers to address. That will help me determine if it might make sense to speak with your management about the issue. I’d like to ask you a couple of questions and see if there might be some application here.

This all comes back to a professional mindset. There is no reason to sneak around.

DIAGNOSIS TRUMPS PRESENTATION EVERY TIME

Transactions that end in “no decision” stem from the root cause of “Why should I change?” When customers do not understand the risk of doing nothing and are faced with the risk of change, they tend to end up in the “do nothing” category.

The Decision to Buy Lives in the Negative Present

The best way to manage this risk is to move customers through the Progression to Change before you begin the discussion about solutions. The further we move customers along this progression, the more ready they become to change. Thus, our goal is to move them to the state of crisis.

Crisis is de� ned as the point of decision. It is the point where the customer decides, “I don’t want this to happen to me any

persuaders regularly trigger reactions like these that close down communications. They alienate customers.

The most common forms of sales self-sabotage are stylistic. How we talk with customers can easily undermine our ability to position ourselves to succeed and win business. No one does this intentionally, but

the fact remains, if you don’t know how to e� ectively structure and conduct customer conversations, what you talk about doesn’t make much di� erence. Our conversational style has a huge impact on building credibility and trust. How you speak with your customers has a powerful impact on your career. Your ability to constructively attract and engage a customer in a relevant dialogue requires a conversation style as well as substantive content. When customers are engaged, they learn. When what they learn is compelling enough to make them want to change, to take action, they will buy.

NOBODY BUYS A VALUE PROPOSITION

All sales, at their essence, are value transactions, but too often, salespeople misunderstand the realities of value. They communicate in hypothetical terms that do not have the power to compel customers to connect and therefore act.

Customers � nd these propositions indistinguishable from one another and, often, undistinguished to boot. This is why customers act as if all salespeople sound alike and the only relevant di� erentiating factor between their o� erings is price.

What is the one strategy that must be at the heart of every 1. conversation with prospects and customers? What do you use to position yourself when you enter into 2. your � rst conversations and throughout the rest of the sales process? What is the one and only thing that your customers 3. really want to know?

In the sales world, the answer to these questions is one word: value. When I say this to an audience of sales professionals, I see nods all around and I can almost hear their thoughts: “Check. That’s exactly what I do; I’m very into selling value. I don’t have to listen to this part.”

All salespeople are talking about value. Yet, at the same time, their sales cycle times are growing, the number of “no decisions”

is increasing, and it’s tougher than ever to engage C-level executives. If we’ve got the value strategy in play, why aren’t customers responding?

Customers don’t buy value propositions because the more complex the value proposition, the more di� cult it is for the customer to translate value proposed into value achieved.

Remember, you can’t count on customers to recognize on their own the value you bring to the table, to calculate what it’s worth or to accurately determine if they should pay its price. (If they could, there would be little need for salespeople.)

That’s why, when you’re sitting across the table from a prospect, you’ve come to a place where a value proposition is not enough to win the sale and get your full price. You must help the customer connect the dots. Consider the following questions to determine how you can establish your product or service’s value with your prospect:

What are your o� ering’s most compelling value capabilities?

What are your customers’ most compelling value requirements?

What are the observable indicators of absence of value among your customers?

YOU’VE GOT TO GET YOUR MIND RIGHT

We discovered that salespeople’s thought processes have far more in common with successful professionals in other disciplines who depend on credible communication, such as doctors, lawyers, psychologists and so on, than they do with other salespeople. In addition, the qualities of top sales professionals run a close parallel with the qualities of top leaders:

Creativity • Insight • Change management •

Integrity • Respect•

There are many others, too. What they taught us is that the foundation of their mindsets is, � rst and foremost, an intense focus on bringing value to their clients. In other words, they believe and behave as if their success is an automatic by-product of their clients’ success.

longer.” This is the point where customers decide to change; it’s where they decide to buy. There is very profound selling insight in this. It is the realization that customers can decide that they have a problem without having a solution in mind. In fact, they can decide they have a problem even if no solution exists. They can also calculate how serious that problem actually is without having a solution in mind. And, they can decide that they can’t live with a problem without having a solution in mind.

This contradicts the conventional sales approach, which says, “I have to tell you all about my solution to make you want to buy.”

How do you move a customer to the crisis stage? Crisis lives in the negative present in the Psychology of Change matrix, not in the positive future. So, you must focus on the customer’s present situation, not your solutions or the future state that customers will be able to attain with the help of those solutions.

You must raise customers’ consciousness of their current state as fully as possible. This creates relevancy, and if the situation is unacceptable, it creates the incentive to change and compels customers to act. This work requires a primary and intense examination of the customer’s situation—that is, diagnosis.

CUTTING THROUGH THE SMOKE AND MIRRORS

It’s ironic. Salespeople tend to depend too heavily on the customer’s view when it comes to problem diagnosis and not enough when it comes to solution design.

Exceptional sales professionals, however, work through the Design (a Solution) phase with their customers. They co-create the parameters of the solution. The best way to prepare customers to purchase your solution is not to create a glitzier presentation than the competition. It is to work with customers to de� ne the design parameters of a solution that can best solve their problem.

There are important advantages to this strategy, including: Customers can provide important insights regarding the • optimal solution. Design parameters supply customers with the questions that • need to be asked in order to cut through competitive smoke and mirrors. By acting as co-authors of the design parameters, customers also become anchored in the solution and don’t get blown o� course as easily. Salespeople capture an unparalleled opportunity to set • themselves apart from their competitors and gain an inside

track to winning the sale by taking a leading role in the creation of the rules on which the solution decision will be made. It’s much easier to win the game if you’ve had a hand in establishing legitimate solution criteria.

There are fundamentally only two reasons why customers do not buy:

1. They don’t believe they have a problem (or they do have a problem, but it’s not serious enough to do anything about). In our terms, they don’t have the incentive to change.

2. They don’t believe the solution proposed will work. In this case, they have a problem and they want to take action, but they do not have con� dence in the proposed solution. In our terms, they don’t have the con� dence to invest.

Instead of leaving our customers’ reserve and resistance unaddressed until the end of the sales process, we should be using a process that manages these issues in real time. Our process should be front-loaded, in terms of customer consideration.

Ideally, we have established relevancy and gained privileged access to key individuals in the cast of characters. We’ve identi� ed and explored the actual indicators of the absence of value, as well as their causes and consequences. We’ve worked with the customer to determine the � nancial impact of those consequences. We’ve guided the customer through a Design conversation that addressed how these indicators can be impacted, eliminated or altered by a viable solution.

In the process, we have developed rapport, credibility and trust. Everything the customer needs to know to make a high-quality decision is in place. Everything we need in order to successfully complete the sale is in place. The last thing we would want to do now is surprise the customer with previously unconsidered issues.

It might not be obvious, but positive surprises are problematic, too. No one will � re a vendor for delivering more value than promised, but corporations and their stakeholders depend on predictability.

So, it’s always better to be able to forecast improved results and then meet those forecasts. By the way, if you’re over-delivering unexpectedly, are you getting paid for it? You have to be able to factor in the full value of your o� ering to get the best price.

Exceptional SellingExceptional Selling

You Are a Translator The ability to translate value proposed to value achieved results in exceptional sales success. Once you know how to translate value, you are on your way to regular and predictable success in sales. If you can de� ne value in stages that enable your customers to understand the absence of value and build con� dence in their ability to acquire and achieve that value for themselves, you will compel them into action.

When a value translation is done properly, the pieces of your customer’s puzzle come together and you get the credit. They understand how your offering relates to their world and can evaluate its worth. They are able to answer for themselves those nagging questions that are always undermining the conventional sales presentation: “So what?” “Who cares?”

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EARNING THE KEYS TO THE ELEVATOR

The � rst conversations we should be having with customers are not sales conversations. They are discovery conversations. We shouldn’t be presenting or selling anything right now; we should be equipping ourselves with the elements that will make us credible and our value capabilities relevant.

Those elements are the symptoms, the physical evidence of the absence of our value. We conduct these conversations with people who are closest to the action—people who are working at the point where the absence of our value manifests itself. They are the “victims” of the absence of our value.

Who you call for these discovery conversations depends on the various places where the symptoms of the absence of your value can be observed. There are, however, three resource pools in and around your customer companies to draw from:

their employees • their vendors • their customers •

These discovery conversations are not sales calls. We need to learn about this company’s reality—its internal characteristics, what it is they are experiencing, the potential consequences and the customer’s viewpoint on those consequences.

Think like a lawyer during the discovery phase of a case. The lawyer’s purpose at this point is the objective discovery of facts and evidence. She is not presenting her case in front of a judge.

This same purpose should be directly re� ected in the questions you ask and don’t ask during these calls. You should be solely focused on the existence of the symptoms of the absence of your value.

Research calls are not covert missions into enemy territory. We are fully disclosing what we are doing to the people we call. We are open, honest and straightforward. We explain exactly what we are doing, why we are doing it and what we will do with the information we gather. It could open like this:

Jos, I’m Wayne Stanley with Six Sigma Software, and I’m not sure if it’s appropriate that we should be talking, but I’d like to run what I am trying to do by you and see if you can decide if it makes sense and if you might be able to help me or not. Do you have a moment to speak? [They say yes; we proceed.]

We work with companies like yours in the area of process manufacturing, and I am thinking about calling your vice president of manufacturing about our software. Typically, before I do that, I like to talk to a few quality-control people like yourself in the organization to see if you’re encountering any of the issues or di� culties that we work with customers to address. That will help me determine if it might make sense to speak with your management about the issue. I’d like to ask you a couple of questions and see if there might be some application here.

This all comes back to a professional mindset. There is no reason to sneak around.

DIAGNOSIS TRUMPS PRESENTATION EVERY TIME

Transactions that end in “no decision” stem from the root cause of “Why should I change?” When customers do not understand the risk of doing nothing and are faced with the risk of change, they tend to end up in the “do nothing” category.

The Decision to Buy Lives in the Negative Present

The best way to manage this risk is to move customers through the Progression to Change before you begin the discussion about solutions. The further we move customers along this progression, the more ready they become to change. Thus, our goal is to move them to the state of crisis.

Crisis is de� ned as the point of decision. It is the point where the customer decides, “I don’t want this to happen to me any

persuaders regularly trigger reactions like these that close down communications. They alienate customers.

The most common forms of sales self-sabotage are stylistic. How we talk with customers can easily undermine our ability to position ourselves to succeed and win business. No one does this intentionally, but

the fact remains, if you don’t know how to e� ectively structure and conduct customer conversations, what you talk about doesn’t make much di� erence. Our conversational style has a huge impact on building credibility and trust. How you speak with your customers has a powerful impact on your career. Your ability to constructively attract and engage a customer in a relevant dialogue requires a conversation style as well as substantive content. When customers are engaged, they learn. When what they learn is compelling enough to make them want to change, to take action, they will buy.

NOBODY BUYS A VALUE PROPOSITION

All sales, at their essence, are value transactions, but too often, salespeople misunderstand the realities of value. They communicate in hypothetical terms that do not have the power to compel customers to connect and therefore act.

Customers � nd these propositions indistinguishable from one another and, often, undistinguished to boot. This is why customers act as if all salespeople sound alike and the only relevant di� erentiating factor between their o� erings is price.

What is the one strategy that must be at the heart of every 1. conversation with prospects and customers? What do you use to position yourself when you enter into 2. your � rst conversations and throughout the rest of the sales process? What is the one and only thing that your customers 3. really want to know?

In the sales world, the answer to these questions is one word: value. When I say this to an audience of sales professionals, I see nods all around and I can almost hear their thoughts: “Check. That’s exactly what I do; I’m very into selling value. I don’t have to listen to this part.”

All salespeople are talking about value. Yet, at the same time, their sales cycle times are growing, the number of “no decisions”

is increasing, and it’s tougher than ever to engage C-level executives. If we’ve got the value strategy in play, why aren’t customers responding?

Customers don’t buy value propositions because the more complex the value proposition, the more di� cult it is for the customer to translate value proposed into value achieved.

Remember, you can’t count on customers to recognize on their own the value you bring to the table, to calculate what it’s worth or to accurately determine if they should pay its price. (If they could, there would be little need for salespeople.)

That’s why, when you’re sitting across the table from a prospect, you’ve come to a place where a value proposition is not enough to win the sale and get your full price. You must help the customer connect the dots. Consider the following questions to determine how you can establish your product or service’s value with your prospect:

What are your o� ering’s most compelling value capabilities?

What are your customers’ most compelling value requirements?

What are the observable indicators of absence of value among your customers?

YOU’VE GOT TO GET YOUR MIND RIGHT

We discovered that salespeople’s thought processes have far more in common with successful professionals in other disciplines who depend on credible communication, such as doctors, lawyers, psychologists and so on, than they do with other salespeople. In addition, the qualities of top sales professionals run a close parallel with the qualities of top leaders:

Creativity • Insight • Change management •

Integrity • Respect•

There are many others, too. What they taught us is that the foundation of their mindsets is, � rst and foremost, an intense focus on bringing value to their clients. In other words, they believe and behave as if their success is an automatic by-product of their clients’ success.

longer.” This is the point where customers decide to change; it’s where they decide to buy. There is very profound selling insight in this. It is the realization that customers can decide that they have a problem without having a solution in mind. In fact, they can decide they have a problem even if no solution exists. They can also calculate how serious that problem actually is without having a solution in mind. And, they can decide that they can’t live with a problem without having a solution in mind.

This contradicts the conventional sales approach, which says, “I have to tell you all about my solution to make you want to buy.”

How do you move a customer to the crisis stage? Crisis lives in the negative present in the Psychology of Change matrix, not in the positive future. So, you must focus on the customer’s present situation, not your solutions or the future state that customers will be able to attain with the help of those solutions.

You must raise customers’ consciousness of their current state as fully as possible. This creates relevancy, and if the situation is unacceptable, it creates the incentive to change and compels customers to act. This work requires a primary and intense examination of the customer’s situation—that is, diagnosis.

CUTTING THROUGH THE SMOKE AND MIRRORS

It’s ironic. Salespeople tend to depend too heavily on the customer’s view when it comes to problem diagnosis and not enough when it comes to solution design.

Exceptional sales professionals, however, work through the Design (a Solution) phase with their customers. They co-create the parameters of the solution. The best way to prepare customers to purchase your solution is not to create a glitzier presentation than the competition. It is to work with customers to de� ne the design parameters of a solution that can best solve their problem.

There are important advantages to this strategy, including: Customers can provide important insights regarding the • optimal solution. Design parameters supply customers with the questions that • need to be asked in order to cut through competitive smoke and mirrors. By acting as co-authors of the design parameters, customers also become anchored in the solution and don’t get blown o� course as easily. Salespeople capture an unparalleled opportunity to set • themselves apart from their competitors and gain an inside

track to winning the sale by taking a leading role in the creation of the rules on which the solution decision will be made. It’s much easier to win the game if you’ve had a hand in establishing legitimate solution criteria.

There are fundamentally only two reasons why customers do not buy:

1. They don’t believe they have a problem (or they do have a problem, but it’s not serious enough to do anything about). In our terms, they don’t have the incentive to change.

2. They don’t believe the solution proposed will work. In this case, they have a problem and they want to take action, but they do not have con� dence in the proposed solution. In our terms, they don’t have the con� dence to invest.

Instead of leaving our customers’ reserve and resistance unaddressed until the end of the sales process, we should be using a process that manages these issues in real time. Our process should be front-loaded, in terms of customer consideration.

Ideally, we have established relevancy and gained privileged access to key individuals in the cast of characters. We’ve identi� ed and explored the actual indicators of the absence of value, as well as their causes and consequences. We’ve worked with the customer to determine the � nancial impact of those consequences. We’ve guided the customer through a Design conversation that addressed how these indicators can be impacted, eliminated or altered by a viable solution.

In the process, we have developed rapport, credibility and trust. Everything the customer needs to know to make a high-quality decision is in place. Everything we need in order to successfully complete the sale is in place. The last thing we would want to do now is surprise the customer with previously unconsidered issues.

It might not be obvious, but positive surprises are problematic, too. No one will � re a vendor for delivering more value than promised, but corporations and their stakeholders depend on predictability.

So, it’s always better to be able to forecast improved results and then meet those forecasts. By the way, if you’re over-delivering unexpectedly, are you getting paid for it? You have to be able to factor in the full value of your o� ering to get the best price.

Exceptional Selling Exceptional Selling

© 2010 SUCCESS Media. All rights reserved. Materials may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any form without prior written permission. Published by SUCCESS Media, 200 Swisher Rd., Lake Dallas, TX 75065, USA. SUCCESS.com.

Summarized by permission of the publisher, Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint, 989 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94103. Exceptional Selling by Jeff Thull. © 2006 by Jeff Thull.

Recommended ReadingIf you enjoyed this summary of Exceptional Selling, we encourage you to visit your favorite bookseller to purchase a copy for your personal success library. You may also want to check out:

Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness by Jeffrey Gitomer

Selling 101: What Every Successful Sales Professional Needs to Know by Zig Ziglar

Secrets of Question Based Selling: How the Most Powerful Tool in Business Can Double Your Sales Results by Thomas Freese

by Je� Thull John Wiley & Sons Inc. © 2006, Je� Thull ISBN: 9780470037287 230 pages$24.95

SUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIES SUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIESPage 1Page 6Page 5 SUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIES

A FINAL WORD ON THE SEQUENCE OF EXECUTIVE CONVERSATIONS

Most often, executives simultaneously play two roles in high-stakes sales. First, they act as cast members, with their own job responsibilities and personal perspective. That is, we ask them to provide direct input into the “nuts and bolts” of the decision and work with them to develop the information we need in the diagnosis of the problem and the design of the solution.

At the same time, however, executives act as sponsors. In this role, they are only indirectly involved in the mechanics of the sale. When we work with sponsoring executives, our role in the sale changes. This new role can be challenging for salespeople to manage and it bears additional examination.

When executives act as sponsors, their direct participation is required only at key milestones, such as the sponsorship decision, the sanity checks that communicate � ndings and value reportage. But in between, they are positioned outside the action. You aren’t “selling” to them at all. In fact, you are more like one of the executive’s sta� members than a salesperson.

CLOSE With these thoughts � rmly in mind, you will be best able to

understand what questions to ask, diagnose the client’s problem, help the client determine the absence of the value your company o� ers, help the client craft a solution, and establish not only a sale but a relationship that continues to be win-win for you, your company and the client.

Asking the Right QuestionsWHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO SELL ANYTHING

QUICK OVERVIEW Have you ever said to a customer, “You’ve probably never thought of this, but…”

or “We save companies like yours millions of dollars in wasted….” Both of these statements could very well be true, but they are also received as thinly disguised insults. Statements like these imply the customer doesn’t think and wastes millions of dollars. While you believe you are enlightening your customers, they may be hearing a criticism. When customers and prospects hear these insults, they lean back, cross their arms and shut down. The salesperson can keep talking, but the conversation is over.

Sales conversations are rife with traps like these. Exceptional Selling exposes these mistakes and o� ers logical and proven alternatives that enhance the clarity, relevancy, credibility and trust salespeople endeavor to create in conversations with customers.

In Exceptional Selling, author Je� Thull explains that the core of best selling practices includes listening to situations, diagnosing problems and helping the client craft a solution. Thull also identi� es three root causes of failure that can prevent us from succeeding: confrontation, comprehension and compliance. With this information, salespeople are equipped to move the decision maker from prospect to satis� ed client.

APPLY AND ACHIEVE One � aw in conventional sales training is the concept of the salesperson as persuader.

The problem is that we rarely stop to think about how customers perceive the tactics of persuasion that salespeople are taught and encouraged to use. They are going to see you as the “lecturing professor.” Consider this from the customer’s perspective: If someone is trying to push you into taking a certain course of action, even when you have misgivings about it, or if he is implying that he knows better than you, that he is smart and you are not, or that you just don’t get it, how would you react?

When someone pressures you to take a certain course, it’s only natural to question his motives. Why is he pushing me so hard? Whose interests is he actually looking out for?

Justi� ed or not, the answers to these questions seem obvious to customers, and that is why this type of behavior doesn’t build credibility or engender trust. Overzealous

CLOSING IS NOT THE END OF THE SALES PROCESS

This Is Where the Proposal Comes In Another fundamental f law in conventional selling is that

the post-sale process tends to be treated as anticlimactic and is often addressed in a haphazard, piecemeal fashion. This represents the abandonment of your most valuable source of new business. If a proposal shouldn’t be a document of consideration, what should it be? This may sound anticlimactic, but it should be a document of confirmation. The purpose of a proposal is to document the series of decisions that have already been made.

It should confirm everything we’ve done with the customer to this point. The proposal should reprise all of the elements of the incentive to change and the confidence to invest that we’ve already established with the customer. It connects all of the elements of value in a single, formal document.

Show Me the Money One of the most misguided instructions salespeople

receive is “Never give the customer the price before you’ve completed your pitch.”

The idea behind this is that customers will walk away if they hear your price before they hear everything they are going to get for their money.

I don’t agree. You should never be afraid or unwilling to tell a customer

your price, or at least provide as honest an estimate as you can at the moment the question is asked. The right question is not whether the price is reasonable or not. The right question is “Does the customer’s situation warrant our level of solution in financial terms?”

The financial conversations that we conduct during the sales engagement are all aimed at answering that question. They are designed to inform our customers and ourselves:

What is the absence of our value costing the customer? • What return (net financial impact) can the customer • reasonably expect from the solution? How much should the customer invest to achieve their • desired results?

When we help a customer answer these questions, the price of our offering becomes a simple fact that can easily be evaluated. It either meets the customer’s predetermined investment criteria or it does not.

Cost of the Problem When you engage the appropriate cast members in cost of

the problem conversations, you can follow a generic four-step pattern:

State the purpose of your call and name the indicator 1. you’re focused on. Describe the consequence(s) of the indicator that you’ve 2. called to discuss. Break down each consequence by asking the cast 3. member to describe what happens in his part of the business when it occurs. (As necessary, expand the breakdown of consequences based on your experience and knowledge.) Ask the customer to put a dollar amount on the cost of 4. each element within each consequence.

CONNECTING AT THE LEVEL OF POWER AND DECISION

Executive customers shouldn’t have to, and usually won’t, bother to translate our technical talk into their language. Yet, I think many salespeople shoot themselves in the foot by talking to executives in the language of the product or service they sell.

If we want to craft compelling executive conversations, it is important to speak to executives in their own language. We need to stop thinking and speaking like salespeople and start thinking and speaking like businesspeople. You must be aware of what executives want to know before they buy.

One good way to think about their decision criteria is in terms of � ve rules:

The issues we propose to address must be relevant in the 1. larger context of the business. The statement of value assumption must be valid. 2. The problem and the solution must be actionable. 3. The solution’s value must be measurable. 4. There must be consensus and alignment around the 5. � ndings, conclusions and � nal decision.

SUCCESS PointsIn this book you’ll learn how to:

Get information on • situations the client faces

Diagnose the • client’s problem

Help the client determine • the value of your product or service

Help the client craft a • solution that is win-win for the client and you and your company

JAN

UA

RY 2

01

0

Exceptional Sellingby Jeff Thull

About the AuthorJeff Thull is president and CEO of Prime Resource Group. He

is a widely acknowledged thought-leader in sales and marketing

strategies, particularly for companies involved in complex

sales, as well as startups with a desire to emerge quickly as

front-runners. Organizations such as Shell Global Solutions,

Siemens, Honeywell, 3M, Microsoft, Citicorp, IBM, Raymond

James and Georgia-Pacifi c rely on Thull’s expertise for business

transformation and professional development.

His anecdote-rich, humor-fi lled style has garnered Thull a

reputation as a keynote speaker able to equip teams with real-

time solutions geared toward bottom lines, and an ability to set

the bar for performance excellence.

Thull’s best-selling books include Mastering the Complex

Sale: How to Compete and Win When the Stakes Are High and

The Prime Solution: Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins and

Win the Complex Sale.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CALLOUT: Three root causes of failure that can prevent us from succeeding: confrontation, comprehension and compliance. SUGGESTED READING If you enjoy Exceptional Selling, we encourage you to visit your favorite bookseller and add this title to your personal success library. You may also want to

check out: SIDEBAR

BODY COPY (Begin with big start letter)

Exceptional Selling Exceptional Selling

© 2010 SUCCESS Media. All rights reserved. Materials may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any form without prior written permission. Published by SUCCESS Media, 200 Swisher Rd., Lake Dallas, TX 75065, USA. SUCCESS.com.

Summarized by permission of the publisher, Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint, 989 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94103. Exceptional Selling by Jeff Thull. © 2006 by Jeff Thull.

Recommended ReadingIf you enjoyed this summary of Exceptional Selling, we encourage you to visit your favorite bookseller to purchase a copy for your personal success library. You may also want to check out:

Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness by Jeffrey Gitomer

Selling 101: What Every Successful Sales Professional Needs to Know by Zig Ziglar

Secrets of Question Based Selling: How the Most Powerful Tool in Business Can Double Your Sales Results by Thomas Freese

by Je� Thull John Wiley & Sons Inc. © 2006, Je� Thull ISBN: 9780470037287 230 pages$24.95

SUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIES SUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIESPage 1Page 6Page 5 SUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIES

A FINAL WORD ON THE SEQUENCE OF EXECUTIVE CONVERSATIONS

Most often, executives simultaneously play two roles in high-stakes sales. First, they act as cast members, with their own job responsibilities and personal perspective. That is, we ask them to provide direct input into the “nuts and bolts” of the decision and work with them to develop the information we need in the diagnosis of the problem and the design of the solution.

At the same time, however, executives act as sponsors. In this role, they are only indirectly involved in the mechanics of the sale. When we work with sponsoring executives, our role in the sale changes. This new role can be challenging for salespeople to manage and it bears additional examination.

When executives act as sponsors, their direct participation is required only at key milestones, such as the sponsorship decision, the sanity checks that communicate � ndings and value reportage. But in between, they are positioned outside the action. You aren’t “selling” to them at all. In fact, you are more like one of the executive’s sta� members than a salesperson.

CLOSE With these thoughts � rmly in mind, you will be best able to

understand what questions to ask, diagnose the client’s problem, help the client determine the absence of the value your company o� ers, help the client craft a solution, and establish not only a sale but a relationship that continues to be win-win for you, your company and the client.

Asking the Right QuestionsWHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO SELL ANYTHING

QUICK OVERVIEW Have you ever said to a customer, “You’ve probably never thought of this, but…”

or “We save companies like yours millions of dollars in wasted….” Both of these statements could very well be true, but they are also received as thinly disguised insults. Statements like these imply the customer doesn’t think and wastes millions of dollars. While you believe you are enlightening your customers, they may be hearing a criticism. When customers and prospects hear these insults, they lean back, cross their arms and shut down. The salesperson can keep talking, but the conversation is over.

Sales conversations are rife with traps like these. Exceptional Selling exposes these mistakes and o� ers logical and proven alternatives that enhance the clarity, relevancy, credibility and trust salespeople endeavor to create in conversations with customers.

In Exceptional Selling, author Je� Thull explains that the core of best selling practices includes listening to situations, diagnosing problems and helping the client craft a solution. Thull also identi� es three root causes of failure that can prevent us from succeeding: confrontation, comprehension and compliance. With this information, salespeople are equipped to move the decision maker from prospect to satis� ed client.

APPLY AND ACHIEVE One � aw in conventional sales training is the concept of the salesperson as persuader.

The problem is that we rarely stop to think about how customers perceive the tactics of persuasion that salespeople are taught and encouraged to use. They are going to see you as the “lecturing professor.” Consider this from the customer’s perspective: If someone is trying to push you into taking a certain course of action, even when you have misgivings about it, or if he is implying that he knows better than you, that he is smart and you are not, or that you just don’t get it, how would you react?

When someone pressures you to take a certain course, it’s only natural to question his motives. Why is he pushing me so hard? Whose interests is he actually looking out for?

Justi� ed or not, the answers to these questions seem obvious to customers, and that is why this type of behavior doesn’t build credibility or engender trust. Overzealous

CLOSING IS NOT THE END OF THE SALES PROCESS

This Is Where the Proposal Comes In Another fundamental f law in conventional selling is that

the post-sale process tends to be treated as anticlimactic and is often addressed in a haphazard, piecemeal fashion. This represents the abandonment of your most valuable source of new business. If a proposal shouldn’t be a document of consideration, what should it be? This may sound anticlimactic, but it should be a document of confirmation. The purpose of a proposal is to document the series of decisions that have already been made.

It should confirm everything we’ve done with the customer to this point. The proposal should reprise all of the elements of the incentive to change and the confidence to invest that we’ve already established with the customer. It connects all of the elements of value in a single, formal document.

Show Me the Money One of the most misguided instructions salespeople

receive is “Never give the customer the price before you’ve completed your pitch.”

The idea behind this is that customers will walk away if they hear your price before they hear everything they are going to get for their money.

I don’t agree. You should never be afraid or unwilling to tell a customer

your price, or at least provide as honest an estimate as you can at the moment the question is asked. The right question is not whether the price is reasonable or not. The right question is “Does the customer’s situation warrant our level of solution in financial terms?”

The financial conversations that we conduct during the sales engagement are all aimed at answering that question. They are designed to inform our customers and ourselves:

What is the absence of our value costing the customer? • What return (net financial impact) can the customer • reasonably expect from the solution? How much should the customer invest to achieve their • desired results?

When we help a customer answer these questions, the price of our offering becomes a simple fact that can easily be evaluated. It either meets the customer’s predetermined investment criteria or it does not.

Cost of the Problem When you engage the appropriate cast members in cost of

the problem conversations, you can follow a generic four-step pattern:

State the purpose of your call and name the indicator 1. you’re focused on. Describe the consequence(s) of the indicator that you’ve 2. called to discuss. Break down each consequence by asking the cast 3. member to describe what happens in his part of the business when it occurs. (As necessary, expand the breakdown of consequences based on your experience and knowledge.) Ask the customer to put a dollar amount on the cost of 4. each element within each consequence.

CONNECTING AT THE LEVEL OF POWER AND DECISION

Executive customers shouldn’t have to, and usually won’t, bother to translate our technical talk into their language. Yet, I think many salespeople shoot themselves in the foot by talking to executives in the language of the product or service they sell.

If we want to craft compelling executive conversations, it is important to speak to executives in their own language. We need to stop thinking and speaking like salespeople and start thinking and speaking like businesspeople. You must be aware of what executives want to know before they buy.

One good way to think about their decision criteria is in terms of � ve rules:

The issues we propose to address must be relevant in the 1. larger context of the business. The statement of value assumption must be valid. 2. The problem and the solution must be actionable. 3. The solution’s value must be measurable. 4. There must be consensus and alignment around the 5. � ndings, conclusions and � nal decision.

SUCCESS PointsIn this book you’ll learn how to:

Get information on • situations the client faces

Diagnose the • client’s problem

Help the client determine • the value of your product or service

Help the client craft a • solution that is win-win for the client and you and your company

JAN

UA

RY 2

01

0

Exceptional Sellingby Jeff Thull

About the AuthorJeff Thull is president and CEO of Prime Resource Group. He

is a widely acknowledged thought-leader in sales and marketing

strategies, particularly for companies involved in complex

sales, as well as startups with a desire to emerge quickly as

front-runners. Organizations such as Shell Global Solutions,

Siemens, Honeywell, 3M, Microsoft, Citicorp, IBM, Raymond

James and Georgia-Pacifi c rely on Thull’s expertise for business

transformation and professional development.

His anecdote-rich, humor-fi lled style has garnered Thull a

reputation as a keynote speaker able to equip teams with real-

time solutions geared toward bottom lines, and an ability to set

the bar for performance excellence.

Thull’s best-selling books include Mastering the Complex

Sale: How to Compete and Win When the Stakes Are High and

The Prime Solution: Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins and

Win the Complex Sale.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CALLOUT: Three root causes of failure that can prevent us from succeeding: confrontation, comprehension and compliance. SUGGESTED READING If you enjoy Exceptional Selling, we encourage you to visit your favorite bookseller and add this title to your personal success library. You may also want to

check out: SIDEBAR

BODY COPY (Begin with big start letter)