The New Strategic Selling summary

Strategy is about planning – but where do you get started? The answer is simple: positioning.

You have to assess your current situation before you can outline a good selling strategy. Get to know your position in the market, so you can adjust your company accordingly and put yourself in the best position to reach your objective.

Sales used to be about finding and making deals with the right people in another organization. These days, however, it’s much more complicated. Modern markets require you to conduct complex sales, where multiple people must be on board before you can close a deal.

You can find the people who will have a major influence on your sales process by paying attention to the roles they have. There are four important roles to consider when you’re trying to sell your product or service.

Now you know which people you need help from in the selling process; but there are other things to look out for, like red flags.

Red flags are signals that tell you you’re not in the right position. They indicate threats that might jeopardize your sales efforts.

We’ve seen that it’s important to identify potential changes in your environment, whether they’re threats or opportunities. However, sometimes changes you perceive as opportunities can be threats to your buyer influence.

You can avoid this by making sure you always understand how your buyer influences feel about potential opportunities; this is the only way to accurately predict how they’ll respond to your proposal.

Good salesmen never try to trick buyers into agreeing to just one sale. Instead, they aim to foster long-term relationships, satisfy their customers, get good referrals and close deals repeatedly. There are a few ways you can go about this.

First off, don’t make any sales that treat one side as the winner and one side as the loser. If a deal isn’t a win-win situation for both you and your buyer, it’ll end up as a lose-lose.