Mastering the Complex Sale - businesstraining.com.mx

1 Published by Soundview executive book Summaries, Box 1053, Concordville, Pennsylvania 19331 USA 2003 Soundview executive book Summaries All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part is to Compete and Win When the Stakes are High!MASTERINGTHE COMPLEXSALETHE SUMMARY IN BRIEFTo compete successfully and win more business in today s turbulentworld of business-to-business sales, sales professionals need a new businessparadigm that is specifically designed for the Complex sales arena, one thatoffers a system and the skills and the mental discipline needed to execute need, says business strategist, consultant and speaker Jeff Thull, asmarter way to smarter way to sell transforms the conventional sales pitch that cus-tomers must endure into a high quality decision-making process that cus-tomers value.

2 It transforms salespeople from predators into valued businesspartners in the customer s mind. It transforms the sales process from pre-mature presentations to a process of mutual confirmation. And it transformsthe conventional solutions-based, seller-first approach to sales into a diag-nostic-based, customer-centric approach. In fact, a smarter way to sell,Thull persuasively argues in Mastering the Complex Sale,is to stop sellingin the conventional sense and adopt a practical proven approach calledDiagnostic Business Development (or the Prime Process).Concentrated Knowledge for the Busy executive 25, No. 11 (3 parts) Part 2, November 2003 Order # 25-27 CONTENTSThe High Stakes World ofComplex SalesPages 2, 3, 4 Four Phases of the PrimeProcessPages 4, 5, 6 Discover the PrimeCustomerPage 4 Diagnose the ComplexProblemPages 4, 5 Design the ComplexSolutionPages 5, 6 Deliver on the PrimeProcessPage 6 Leading the Complex SalesOrganizationPages 6, 7 Turning OrganizationalStrategy into Sales ResultsPages 7, 8By Jeff ThullFILE: SALES What You ll Learn In This SummaryIn this summary, you'll learn how to: Gain access to and manage multiple decision makers at the highest lev-els of power and influence in the customer s organization.

3 Differentiate yourself from the competition early and often. Dramatically reduce the sales cycle time. Avoid the trap of unpaid consulting. Identify untapped sources of opportunity and develop new businessinstead of chasing the usual suspects along with the rest of the crowd. Develop a common process and language with which the entire sales,marketing, and support team can present a unified voice to the High Stakes World ofComplex SalesComplex sales are primarily business-to-business andbusiness-to-government transactions. They involve mul-tiple people with multiple perspectives, sometimes frommultiple companies and across multiple cultural andcountry borders. Complex sales cycles can run fromdays to years. Undertaking this level of sale requiressignificant investment in time and is no single buying decision in the complexsale.

4 The buying process is actually a long chain ofinterrelated decisions, impacting multiple departmentsand disciplines in the customer s organization. There isno single decision maker. The Complex sale has multipledecision makers, each seeing the issues of the transac-tion from his or her own perspective and operating inthe context of his or her job responsibilities and self-interest. These are not run-of-the-mill transactions; thecustomer requires help to complete the sale. The Forces Squeezing Sales ProfessionalsExperiences with more than 10,000 salespeople eachyear confirm that, in the Complex environment, the out-come of the conventional sales process is increasinglyrandom and unpredictable. Two opposing forces aresqueezing these sales professionals: rapid commoditiza-tion and increasing ,the pressure from customers todevalue the differences between goods and services andreduce the buying decision to the lowest commondenominator selling price is a phenomenon thatsalespeople face every the second force squeezing sales pro-fessionals.

5 The very structure of organizations is becom-ing more Complex . Customers are demanding morecomplex relationships. They are drastically reducingtheir supply bases and asking the remaining vendors totake a more active role in their business levels of complexity can also be found in thesituations and problems our customers face theirbusiness environments are more competitive than ever,technological advances are radically altering their indus-tries and markets, and their margins for error are by Conventional ThinkingThe common response to the squeeze produced by theconverging forces of commoditization and complexity isto sell harder. The sad reality is that selling harder fitsthe popular definition of insanity: You are doing thesame thing again and again and expecting a differentresult.

6 This happens because the conventional sellingprocess prospect, qualify, present and close thatmost sales people use has not kept pace and adapted tothe new realities of the Complex sale. When salespeople follow conventional thinking, theyMASTERING THE Complex SALEby Jeff Thull THECOMPLETESUMMARYFor Additional Information on the author, go to: by Soundview executive book Summaries(ISSN 0747-2196), Box 1053, Concordville, PA 19331 USA, a division of Concentrated Knowledge Corporation. Published monthly. Subscriptions: $195 per year in ,Canada & Mexico, and $275 to all other countries. Periodicals postage paid at Concordville, PA and additional :Send address changes to Soundview, Box 1053, Concordville, PA 19331. Copyright 2003 bySoundview executive book ailable formats:Summaries are available in print, audio and electronic formats.

7 To subscribe, call us at 1-800-521-1227 (1-610-558-9495 outside & Canada), or order on the Internet at Multiple-subscrip-tion discounts and Corporate Site Licenses are also book Summaries THEODOREKINNI Senior Contributing EditorDEBRAA. DEPRINZIO Art and DesignCHRISLAUER Managing EditorCHRISTOPHERG. MURRAY Editor-in-ChiefGEORGEY. CLEMENT PublisherSoundview executive book Summaries 2 The author:Jeff Thull is the President, CEO andfounder of Prime Resource Group, a leading consultancythat delivers optimal market strategies for business successwhose clients include 3M, Microsoft, Siemens, Citicorpand 2003 by Jeff Thull. Summarized by per-mission of the publisher, John Wiley & Sons, 111 RiverStreet, Hoboken, NJ 07030. 220 pages. $ ISBN 0-471-43151-6.(continued on page 3)Is Your Hand Raised?

8 Conventional selling, on which many of today smost popular sales methodologies are based,depends on the ability of salespeople to understandand fit into the customer s decision process. WhenThull asks the participants in his seminars if this iswhat they have been taught and are encouraged todo, the room is full of hands held high. Then, heasks the participants to keep their hands up if theythink that their customers have a high-quality deci-sion process for evaluating the specific complexoffering they sell. Seldom is a single hand left in theair. The disconcerting realization flashes from face toface: If our customers don t have a high-quality deci-sion process, why are we trying to understand it andfit into it?run head first into a series of traps that grow progres-sively more difficult to avoid and that make a positiveoutcome for the sale less and less likely.

9 The assumption trap. The first trap of convention-al selling causes salespeople to depend on their cus-tomers decision-making processes, which frequentlyare missing key elements. The belief that customershave a high-quality decision process leads to a seconderroneous assumption: Customers ability to understandtheir own problems and evaluate all the solutions avail-able allows them to discern the true value of the sales-person s unique solutions. The presentation above assumptionscause salespeople to fall into the second trap of conven-tional sales. Because they assume higher levels of com-prehension and decision-making ability on the part oftheir customers than actually exist, salespeople focusthe majority of their efforts on presentation. In doing so,they largely ignore the customers world, the most sig-nificant source of credibility, differentiation and deci-sion criteria in any sale thus creating a major discon-nect between customers and solutions.

10 The adversarial , the emphasis onsales presentations exacerbates the communication gapbetween buyer and seller, leading to frustration, misun-derstandings, conflict and adversarial relationships all of which impede the salesperson s ability to createcooperative and trust-based relationships with cus-tomers. This schism is the major cause underlying theprotective behaviors customers so often adopt whendealing with New Approach to Complex SalesTop-performing salespeople can t rely on traditionalselling techniques, but they still need a dependable, pro-fessional body of knowledge. A professional body ofknowledge has three primary elements: a system,whichdefines what to do; skills,which show how to do it; and discipline,which supports the will to do it. The discipline, or mind-set, with which salespeopleapproach their work is perhaps the most critical compo-nent of their success.