CustomerCentric Selling [Hardcover]

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SOLUTION SELLING

The program that is revolutionizing highend selling, by showing companies how to "clone" their top sales performers

CEOs would pay anything to replicate their best salespeople; CustomerCentric Selling^TM explains instead how to replicate their skills. It details a repeatable, scalable, and transferable sales process that formats the questions that superior salespeople ask, and then uses the results to influence and enhance the words and behaviors of their colleagues.

CustomerCentric Selling^TM shows salespersons how to differentiate themselves and their offerings by appealing to customer needs, steering away from making one-way presentations and toward having meaningful and goal-oriented conversations. Currently offered in workshops and seminars around the world, its program provides step-by-step directions to help sales professionals:

• Transform sales calls into interactive conversations
• Position their offerings in relation to buyer needs
• Facilitate a more consistent customer experience
• Achieve shorter sales cycles
• Integrate sales and marketing into a cooperative, cross-functional team

CustomerCentric Selling^TM details a trademarked sales process that incorporates dozens of elements, skills, and sequences into a coherent and proven methodology. By teaching a specific yet innovative model for selling big ticket, often-intangible products and services, it shows sales professionals and executives how to make the seller-buyer relationship far less adversarial, and take selling to a higher level.

Strategies for Looking Past Your Products--to Uncover What Your Buyers Want

The most difficult task in selling--and the number one key to success--is to get inside the head of your buyer. CustomerCentric Selling presents a dynamic process for first understanding and shaping your buyers' concerns, then helping those same buyers visualize using your offering to achieve goals, solve problems, or satisfy needs.

Renowned sales leaders Michael Bosworth--author of the blockbuster bestseller Solution Selling--and John Holland outline an easy-to-follow, commonsense, and proven-successful approach to selling, one that is based on:

• Engaging in directed conversations instead of making presentations
• Asking relevant questions instead of offering personal opinions
• Targeting decision makers instead of product users

Bosworth and Holland combine nearly three decades of experience in sales process and training. Hundreds of lessons they learned along the way are incorporated into their CustomerCentric Sales approach--an approach proven to work for sales professionals at every level, regardless of industry or product line. Let CustomerCentric Selling show you how to make this revolutionary process work for you, and start you on the path to achieving long-term sales success by first forming partnerships with your buyers--based not on selling what you have but on providing what they need.

"Customercentric behavior has seven basic tenets. These are explained in sequence in the first chapter. As you read these descriptions, we invite you to imagine a spectrum of selling behavior--ranging from traditional on one end to customercentric on the other--and to locate yourself on that spectrum. Are you where you want to be, to be as successful as you can be?

"If not, what needs to change?"

--From Chapter 1

You're probably a successful salesperson, sales manager, sales executive, or CEO. You may even be one of the best.

CustomerCentric Selling can help you to be even better.

Better in that you will stop thinking in terms of your products and their features, and start thinking in terms of your buyers and their goals, problems, and needs. Better in that you will stop forcing products on buyers, and instead start allowing them to convince themselves of their need for your offerings. Better in that you will stop giving long-winded, opinion-laden speeches to lower-level "buyers", and instead begin to have no-nonsense, results-oriented business conversations with decision makers.

Better at virtually every stage of your approach.

Whether you are new to sales or a CEO, the market-proven methods outlined in CustomerCentric Selling will show you how to:

Move beyond impersonal presentations to engage in situation-specific, one-to-one conversations with key decision makers

• Consistently use sales-ready messaging to ensure your approach is both meaningful and on target
• Move buyers from focusing on what your product can do for them to focusing on what they can do with your product
• Convert your product's features into four-step, targeted usage scenarios that drive right to the heart of your buyer's needs
• Transform the sell cycle from a realm of mystery to a rational, orderly, and cooperative process with individual buyers and even committees

CustomerCentric Selling will show you how to transform each sales call from an annoying, artificial one-way speech into a productive, genuine two-way conversation. It will help you understand and shape your customers' needs, and then--and only then--reveal to your customer how your offering will fulfill those needs in the most cost-effective, meaningful, and customercentric manner possible.