CustomerCentric Selling and The Leadership Experience

CustomerCentric Selling

Author: Michael Bosworth

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 sal es 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, andtake selling to a higher level.

Michael Bosworth and John Holland are cofounders of CustomerCentric Selling. Bosworth is the author of the seminal bestseller Solution Selling. He has helped tens of thousands of salespeople and execut ives define and implement new selling methodologies. Holland, formerly with IBM's General Systems Division, has trained hundreds of sales organizations in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Canada.

Soundview Executive Book Summaries

Even if you are the best salesperson in your company, you could be even better. Forget everything you think you know about selling products to buyers - the rules are changing, and it's about time.

In CustomerCentric Selling, sales experts Michael T. Bosworth and John R. Holland lay out a new approach to sales, one in which salespeople stop forcing products on buyers and start listening to their goals, problems and needs. Stop giving your "expert" opinion on why a buyer should snap up your products, and start engaging decision makers in business conversations that yield results. CustomerCentric Selling will help you stop working inefficiently, and start moving toward better, longer, more mutually beneficial relationships with your customers.

Customer-centric behavior has the following seven basic tenets that set it apart from more traditional selling behavior:

1. Having situational conversations v ersus making presentations. Traditional salespeople rely on making presentations because they believe this approach gives them the opportunity to add excitement to an offering with snazzy visuals and the supposed innovative use of such presentation tools as PowerPoint. Such dramatics, however, are unnecessary. In order to be effective, a salesperson must be able to relate his or her offering to the buyer in a way that will enable the buyer to visualize using the offering to satisfy his or her needs. The most effective way to determine those needs is through honest conversations with the buyer.
2. Asking relevant questions versus offering opinions. People love to buy, but hate feeling sold to. Most salespeople come to a vision of the buyer's problem before the buyer does, usually to the buyer's chagrin. Customer-centric salespeople use their expertise to frame interesting and helpful questions, rather than to deliver opinions, drawing out of the buyer a reali zation of his or her needs, and building toward a more useful solution.
3. Solution-focused versus relationship-focused. Salespeople who are not trained to converse with decision makers about product usage gravitate toward focusing on their relationship with their buyers, which can be fleeting, depending on the product and market. In situations where the buyer is attempting to satisfy a need, the successful seller must first earn the buyer's respect by knowing how his or her wares can provide a solution to that need.
4. Targeting businesspeople versus gravitating toward users. Traditional salespeople gravitate toward the users of their products, while customer-centric salespeople target business decision makers. Most traditional salespeople can talk a great deal about a product's features, but very little about how it is used in day-to-day applications. Customer-centric sellers, conversely, focus on how to use a product and what results can be expec ted, and how much it costs versus the benefits it presents.
5. Relating product usage versus relying on product. Traditional salespeople educate buyers about a product, and assume buyers will know how to apply the product's features to meet their needs. Customer-centric sellers are able to relate conversationally with buyers about product usage.
6. Managing their managers versus needing to be managed. Traditional sales managers monitor activity, rather than progress; they are promoted to management positions, in part, because they were good salespeople - management skills are rarely used as criteria for promotion. Managers of customer-centric salespeople, on the other hand, must only monitor their charges' progress and, when necessary, provide company resources to help them make a sale.
7. Empowering buyers versus attempting to sell them. Selling is not about persuasion, pressure or coercion; it is about empowerment. A seller's objectiv e, going into a new customer relationship, should be to help the buyer solve a problem, satisfy a need, or achieve a goal. The difference between the two sales approaches is fundamental. Copyright © 2004 Soundview Executive Book Summaries

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
Ch. 1	What Is Customer-Centric Selling?	1
Ch. 2	Opinions - The Fuel That Drives Corporations	11
Ch. 3	Success without Sales-Ready Messaging	29
Ch. 4	Core Concepts of CustomerCentric Selling	47
Ch. 5	Defining the Sales Process	61
Ch. 6	Integrating the Sales and Marketing Processes	81
Ch. 7	Features versus Customer Usage	89
Ch. 8	Creating Sales-Ready Messaging	99
Ch. 9	Marketing's Role in Demand Creation	115
Ch. 10	Business Development: The Hardest Part of a Salesperson's Job	135
Ch. 11	Developing Buyer Vision through Sales-Ready Messaging	151
Ch. 12	Qualifying Buyers	167
Ch. 13	Negotiating and Managing a Sequence of Events	181
Ch. 14	Negotiation: The Final Hurdle	193
Ch. 15	Proactively Managing Sales Pipel ines and Funnels	207
Ch. 16	Assessing and Developing Salespeople	217
Ch. 17	Driving Revenue via Channels	235
Ch. 18	From the Classroom to the Boardroom	245
	Index	251

Book review: Management and Therapists Guide to Clinical Intervention

The Leadership Experience (with InfoTrac?)

Author: Richard L Daft

Packed with interesting examples and real world leadership, the 4th edition of THE LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE will help you develop an understanding of theory while acquiring the necessary skills and insights to become effective leaders. Written expressly for courses teaching leadership theory and application, the text integrates recent ideas and practices with established scholarly research in a way that makes the topic of leadership come alive.

Table of Contents:

Part I: INTRODUCTION TO LEADERSHIP.
1. What Does It Mean to Be a Leader?
Part II: RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES ON LEADERSHIP.
2. Traits, Behaviors, and Relationships.
3. Contingency Approaches.
Part III: THE PERSONAL SIDE OF LEADERSHIP.
4. The Leader as an Individual.
5. Leadership Mind and Heart.
6. Courage and Moral Leadership.
7. Followship.
Part IV: THE LEADER AS RELATIONSHIP BUIDER.
8. Motivation and Empowerment.
9. Leadership Communication.
10. Leading Teams.
11. Developing Leadership Diversity.
12. Leadership Power and Influence.
Part V: THE LEADER AS SOCIAL ARCHITECT.
13. Creating Vision and Strategic Direction.
14. Shaping Culture and Values.
15. Designing and Leading a Learning Organization.
16. Leading Change.