Selling to Zebras: How to Close 90% of the Business You Pursue Faster, More Easily, and More Profitably [Hardcover]

The book starts with a very positive notion: selling zebras, hunting your natural prey and one that will feed you. Some sound and very useful tools and analysis are unfolded and the reader feels rewarded by a book that looks like a winner. However, the following chapters describe a methodology that looks like solutions selling, value selling and other sales methodology that push the process through an evaluation of the proposal and capabilities. The method is combined with a sort of ROI Selling, but the quality drops to a very low level: the dialogs depict a sort of teller that walks into the meeting saying "I have researched you home, I know what your problems are and here I am with a solution that will bring you 899,89% ROI over the next 3 years.".
If you have ever been in high value sales, you know that you cannot possibly know what are the most painful issues affecting the prospect.
The ROI is presented using the model built by the salesperson, which only works for children. If you really want to use ROI, you should build the model with the prospect, in the way depicted in "The Dollarization Discipline" of Jeffrey Fox and "ROI Selling" of Michael Nick and Kurt Koenig.
My advice - read just the first part of the book and skip the rest!

I have been involved in sales for over 25 years and I have to say this book is one of the best books I've read in years. The simple notion of profiling your best target customers and then getting them to agree to the value you bring to them makes all the sense in the world.It creates focus and a better return on sales and marketing resource investments.

We are just initiating internal sessions to identify our Zebra.

These sessions are just the beginning of an awesome tool that has the potential to vault us past our competition in terms of pursuit win rate and overall company profitability!"

With their book Selling to Zebras: How to Close 90% of the Business You Pursue Faster, More Easily, and More Profitably Jeff and Chad Koser have found themselves a very interesting niche in sales consulting and training. Most of the sales technique books that I have seen in my lifetime on how to sell often have focused on relationship sales, closing or other "me" type sales. In all honesty, much of this might get you into the door but it won't get you a contract when it comes to complex sales that involve corporate or bureaucratic structures. Selling to Zebras on the other hand wipes the slate cleans and starts from square one.

Actually, I found lots to agree with in this book. Especially the authors' starting point: Properly identifying the target. The Kosers use the analogy of a hunt on the African savannah as their key to your success. Lions need to look for zebras to survive and the authors tell us pretty much that salesmen nowadays (the lions) tend not to have the faintest ideas of how to (pardon the pun) "spot" the zebra. They take the reader by the hand and show the way to become a zebra spotting expert. First, know thyself! Once you know exactly who your company is and what you can offer then you can know who your target zebras are. Then you put them in your pipeline and drop any prospects who are obviously not zebras - companies that are ill fitting to your products and services for a variety of reasons. In my own business I find that this is actually very important to the success of sales. It really narrows the amount of cold calling and chasing up dead ends, which kills everyone's quotas.

Once you have identified your zebra there is a process of finding "Power" (the main decision maker), finding Power's pressure points, doing studies of the prospects firms and partnering with them so that the sale is not only assured but will have better chances for the long-term surviving and flourishing of the client-customer relationship. Jeff and Chad Koser have made their book very interactive with their working website and have supplied the readers with easy to use and easy to understand tools that they can download. It was a great extra effort by the authors to give us these tools - they were worth the price of the book alone!

This has to be one of the best books I have read on how to sell to complex accounts. If you are a salesman who needs to have some tweaking of your methods and would like a fresh new look at your sales process or if you are a sales manager or other executive who thinks your sales staff could, and should, have better results, then I recommend that you grab a copy of Selling to Zebras. The only ones who might disagree would be your competition.

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