Selling to Big Companies Book Review – Part Two

📅  29th December 2022 | 2022 Sales Book ReviewsSelling

“Top sellers constantly think about how they can help customers improve their business”

ICYMI, here’s Part One

Read on…..

What’s Old

One of the best passages in the entire book comes on page 30. Jill Konrath lays out, in no uncertain terms, what today’s sellers should be doing – making a difference – whereas the 1980’s seller would just be prioritising on getting an order. Also ‘old’ are features, advantages and benefits or F.A.B for short. These terms along with the slick sales presentations they used to be wrapped up in really don’t cut in the 2020’s (that stuff is for the self-serving sales executive). Your customer, whether they are large or small, corporate or SME can find out information very easily on the internet well in advance of any sales appointment you’ve set up. What sellers need to do, as the author points out, is to be “fully cognizant that their knowledge and expertise are the reasons that customers want to work with them”.

What’s Better

Where do I start?

Apparently, it takes twenty-seven views of an advert on a Tube train on the London Underground system before a member of the public decides to take action and make contact. It’ll come as no surprise to you that getting into a big account takes multiple contacts too. Jill Konrath laid out the steps she took to ‘get in’ to a certain corporate over a two-month period. But it wasn’t done randomly. She knew the customer and the customer’s particular sales issue and focused on onlyy that. The result? A healthy and profitable contract.

The pages outlining ‘how to leave an effective voice mail message’ really shows the reader what to do and say and when. The information laid out at the end of Chapter 12 and throughout Chapter 13, (where the author goes in to the finer detail of voice and text messaging) is invaluable.

Chapter 18 runs through what to do and say to ‘gatekeepers’ so they become ‘gate openers’ and that should be your goal as a corporate sales person. I’ve always advocated turning the gatekeeper into a colleague. It works wonders.

What’s Worse

Hardly anything.

Jill Konrath in less than two-hundred and fifty pages wrote a superb publication on how to be successful at selling to large corporates. The book may have been published in 2006 yet what she serves up is as relevant today in the post-pandemic world as it was just a few short years ago.

 

 

Tags: goals, sales

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