If you’ve been involved in selling in a corporate setting, someone has likely recommended that you read New Strategic Selling by Stephen Heiman and Diane Sanchez. If you haven’t followed their advice, see if you can’t find the time in your schedule to give it a try. More than just a bunch of tips for finding new businesses, it’s one of those rare sales books that offers a new way of thinking about your profession and overall sales strategy.
These days, it’s common to hear all kinds of people, from executives to politicians, talk about “win-win solutions.” But what many marketers fail to recognize is that the term and concept largely originated with the launch of New Strategic Selling.
However, where the new strategic selling really shines is not in the specific buzzwords it has, but in the concept of mastering complex selling within organizations that have many layers … and many personalities. It says a lot about the sales policy, as well as the sales process itself.
Simply put, New Strategic Selling teaches that in any large sale to a large company, it is crucial to identify exactly who the key contacts are and then find out what their main motivations and buying styles are. Much of the work on my own books stems from these same principles, and that’s not just because great minds think alike: If you’re going to close the types of sales that will transform your career, you have to be good at identifying and Mastering all the relevant relationships.
This is because the reasons your prospects have for choosing to buy or not buy from you don’t always have to do with the benefits of your product or service. They may have their own agenda, which involves relationships with other vendors, a desire for a certain project or department to be successful, or even personal feelings they have about another person involved in the purchase decision. Learning to spot and deal with these types of situations, both as sales opportunities and obstacles, is an important skill for any modern salesperson, and especially one who wants to be a sales superstar.
New Strategic Selling is one of those few sales books that really lives up to its name. It may not be heavy on individual tactics that you can use to close sales one at a time, but it can change the way you view a complex sale and ultimately make you more successful when it comes to large companies.