Selling complex products or services can be intimidating, particularly when you feel you are not "cut out" for sales. You may even dislike the thought of selling itself. If so, you are not alone. Many, if not most, technical professionals (consultants, attorneys, CPAs, coaches, IT professionals) are most comfortable and passionate about solving problems, delivering solutions, and providing excellent service to their clients. Yet, they also have a need, responsibility, and expectation to contribute effectively to the growth of their business. Does this describe you?Relationships are critically important in complex sales, and yet, relationships alone cannot carry the day. This is particularly the case when dealing with new prospects where we haven't had an opportunity to build relationships and trust over time. When the stakes are high and we are in a competitive market - the very way we assist our clients and prospects through their exploration and decision process can play a huge role in the outcome of the pursuit. Your guidance and strategic assistance can help your client or prospect to make a better and more well-informed decision, and you build trust and credibility with them through this process. Fortunately, you likely have just the skills you require - you simply need a framework to put them into practice. Simplifying Complex Sales will help you provide the assistance your client or prospect needs, assisting them to make a well-informed decision. It walks you through a simple process to identify the decision stage your buyer is in, and the obstacles they are facing. It will show you how to help them to advance their decision by exploring and finding practical ways to address their real obstacles. It provides you an easy but effective process to determine next steps. Simplifying Complex Sales will also provide you some helpful tips for leading and coaching your practice or sales team and to better managing your overall growth efforts.

Selected by HubSpot as one of the Top 20 Sales Books of All Time No matter how much repeat business you get from loyal customers, the lifeblood of your business is a constant flow of new accounts. Whether you're a sales rep, sales manager, or a professional services executive, if you are expected to bring in new business, you need a proven formula for prospecting, developing, and closing deals. New Sales. Simplified. is the answer. You'll learn how to: * Identify a strategic, finite, workable list of genuine prospects * Draft a compelling, customer-focused "sales story" * Perfect the proactive telephone call to get face-to-face with more prospects * Use email, voicemail, and social media to your advantage * Overcome-even prevent-every buyer's anti-salesperson reflex * Build rapport, because people buy from people they like and trust * Prepare for and structure a winning sales call * Stop presenting and start dialoguing with buyers * Make time in your calendar for business development activities * And much more Packed with examples and anecdotes, New Sales. Simplified. balances a blunt (and often funny) look at what most salespeople and executives do wrong with an easy-to-follow plan for ramping up new business starting today.

Win more deals with the perfect sales story! “Power Messaging is a foundational element in our global marketing campaigns and sales training programs. We believe the concepts are core to engaging in customer conversations that are focused on their outcomes and what they want to achieve.” —Karen Quintos, CMO and SVP, Dell Inc. “The concepts outlined in this book are critical skills to building a world-class presales organization.” —Ken Hamel, Senior Vice President, Global Solutions and Presales, SAP “Our new messaging, using the approaches presented in this book, is great and is being widely used by our sales team. We’ve never had a year end sales meeting with content that was met with such widespread acceptance and enthusiasm.” —Jerry D. Cline, Senior Vice President, Retail Sales and Marketing, AmerisourceBergen Drug Company “The best salespeople sit across the table and make change easy for their customer by creating a succinct story and vision for what to change, how to change it, and how it will impact customer results. An enterprise focus on sales messaging, using the concepts in this book, is the hidden secret to driving incremental sales productivity and overwhelming customer success!” —Ken Powell, Vice President, Worldwide Sales Enablement, ADP “The Power Messaging techniques in this book are the foundation of how our marketing team creates our sales messages, as well as the process our field sales teams use for delivering that message in a unique and compelling way. At Kronos our results are a reflection of the power of the tool.” —Aron Ain, CEO, Kronos About the Book: In today’s highly competitive world of complex sales, commoditization of your brand is one of the greatest dangers. You must differentiate yourself from the competition—or you will lose out. And the way to do that is through customer engagement. Rather than sell your own corporate story and brand message, you need to tell customers their story—the one in which they are the heroes and they achieve success. Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer have been developing and honing their Power Messaging sales technique for more than 20 years, and now they reveal all their secrets in Conversations That Win the Complex Sale. Presenting a catalog of facts or playing 20 questions with prospective customers is the surest way to lose the sale. Peterson and Riesterer provide the tools you need to recraft your message into a compelling story that wins more deals. With Conversations That Win the Complex Sale, you’ll learn how to: Differentiate yourself from the competition by finding your “Value Wedge” Avoid parity in your value propositions by creating “Power Positions” Create a message that can literally double the number of deals you close Spike customer attention and create “Wow” in your conversations Prove all your claims without resorting to lists of boring facts and statistics Your competitors are out there telling their own corporate story—a story customers don’t want to hear. Now is the time to seize the moment. This book is the one and only source you need to reframe your sales story and turn the tables on the competition by fully engaging their would-be customers. Conversations That Win the Complex Sale helps you create and deliver messages that customers care about, giving your brand the clear edge in today’s crowded markets.

Packed with case studies, Sales Management. Simplified. offers a proven formula for prospecting, developing, and closing deals—in your time, on your terms. Why do sales organizations fall short? Every day, expert consultants like Mike Weinberg are called on by companies to find the answer - and it's one that may surprise you. Typically, the issue lies not with the sales team but with how it is being led. Through their attitude and actions, senior executives and sales managers can unknowingly undermine performance. Weinberg tells it straight by calling out the problems plaguing sales forces and the costly mistakes made by even the best-intentioned sales managers. The good news is that with the right guidance, results can be transformed. In Sales Management. Simplified., Weinberg teaches managers how to: Implement a simple framework for sales leadership Foster a healthy, high-performance sales culture Conduct productive meetings Put the right people in the right roles Retain top producers and remediate underperformers Point salespeople at the proper targets Blending blunt, practical advice with funny stories and examples from the field, Sales Management. Simplified. delivers the tools every sales manager needs to succeed. Managing sales doesn't have to be complicated, and the solution starts with you!

For the past forty years, Richard Koch has worked to uncover simple and elegant principles which govern business success. To qualify, a principle must be so overwhelmingly powerful that anyone can reliably apply it to generate extraordinary results. Working with venture capitalist Greg Lockwood and supported by specially commissioned research from OC&C Strategy Consultants, Koch has now found one elemental principle that unites extraordinarily valuable companies: simplifying. Some firms simplify on price - consider budget flights stripped of all extras that still take you from A to B - creating new, huge mass markets for their wares. Others, such as Apple, simplify their proposition, bringing a beautifully easy-to-use product or service to a large premium market. How can your business become a simplifier? With case studies of some of the most famous firms of the last hundred years, from finance to fast food, this enlightening book shows how to analyse any company's potential to simplify, and enrich the world.

The Maverick Method is a powerful and unique selling method that provides the complete picture of how complex sales work. The Method has been researched, developed and practiced over a twenty-year period. We have studied and modeled over one hundred of the most successful salespeople. Unlike other selling methods the Maverick Method has been proven by salespeople on the front lines of the most difficult selling environments imaginable. The Mavericks that we have modeled have been able to create new markets, dominate their market segments and marginalize their competitors. What you will learn from the Maverick Selling Method: How a complex sale really works How to control the buying process How to customize your selling process for your unique product How to set and change the rules that will justify the buying decision How to marginalize any competitor How to close the deal in a predictable manner before your competitor even knows they have lost What Mavericks do differently How you can become a Maverick

From the bestselling author of What the CEO Wants You to Know? How to rethink sales from the outside in We have to face the truth: the process of selling is broken. Customers have more choices and are under intense pressure. Yet few companies are facing this reality. When they don't, a lingering malaise sets in. More than ever these days, the sales process tends to be a war about price-a frustrating, unpleasant war that takes all the fun out of selling. But there's a better way to think about sales, says bestselling author Ram Charan, who is famous for clarifying and simplifying difficult business problems. What the customer wants you to know is how his or her business works, so you can help make it work better. It sounds simple, but there's a catch: you won't be able to do that with your traditional sales approach. Instead of starting with your product or service, start with your customer's problems. Focus on becoming your customer's trusted partner, someone he can turn to for creative, cost-effective solutions that are based on your deep knowledge of his values, goals, problems, and customers. This book defines a new approach to selling which Charan calls value creation selling-that while radical is nonetheless practical. VCS has been battle-tested in companies in a variety of industries, such as Unifi, Mead-Westvaco, and Thomson Financial. It will enable you to: • Gain a deeper knowledge of your customer's problems • Understand how your customer's company really makes decisions • Help your customer improve margins and drive revenue growth • Connect sales with other key functions such as finance and manufacturing • Come up with new customized offerings • Make price much less of an issue VCS gets you out of the hell of commoditization and low prices. It differentiates you from the competition, paving the way to better pricing, better margins, and higher revenue growth, built on win-win relationships that deepen over time. Someday, every company will listen more closely to the customer, and every manager will realize that sales is everyone?s business, not just the sales department?s. In the meantime, this eye-opening book will show you how to get started.

For decades, Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn have championed simplicity as a competitive advantage and a consumer right. Consulting with businesses and organizations around the world to streamline products, services, processes and communications, they have achieved dramatic results. In Simple, the culmination of their work together, Siegel and Etzkorn show us how having empathy, striving for clarity, and distilling your message can reduce the distance between company and customer, hospital and patient, government and citizen-and increase your bottom line. Examining the best and worst practices of an array of organizations big and small-including the IRS, Google, Philips, Trader Joe's, Chubb Insurance, and ING Direct, and many more-Siegel and Etzkorn recast simplicity as a mindset, a design aesthetic, and a writing technique. In these illuminating pages you will discover, among other things: Why the Flip camera became roadkill in the wake of the iPhone What SIMPLE idea allowed the Cleveland Clinic to improve care and increase revenue How OXO designed a measuring cup that sold a million units in its first 18 months on the market Where Target got the idea for their "ClearRX" prescription system How New York City simplified its unwieldy bureaucracy with three simple numbers By exposing the overly complex things we encounter every day, SIMPLE reveals the reasons we allow confusion to persist, inspires us to seek clarity, and explores how social media is empowering consumers to demand simplicity. The next big idea in business is Simple.

Winning Complex Enterprise Sales is an instruction book that details the fundamentals of developing positive consensus among a group of stakeholders involved in complex decisions. The book instructs on the important steps of the complex sales process, which leads to significant improvement in forecasting. Forecasting large opportunity closing is a major concern to salespeople, sales managers and senior executives. Unless a sales team thoroughly understands the expected events and specific phases of a complex enterprise opportunity, forecasting accuracy will suffer. Winning Complex Enterprise Sales details 30 optional events to conduct, the results of which lead to superb forecasting accuracy. Equally important, knowing the required success in specific events of a complex enterprise campaign allows a sales team to know very early whether the campaign will succeed or not. The Cardinal Sin of long, complex sales campaigns is coming in a close second. This book goes a long way to solving that problem.