Selling is Dead: Moving Beyond Traditional Sales Roles and Practices to Revitalize Growth - Hardcover

Miller, Marc; Sinkovitz, Jason

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471721115 ISBN 13: 9780471721116

Publisher: Wiley, 2005

Synopsis

A manifesto for reinventing the sales function
Selling Is Dead argues that selling teams and growth-motivated organizations must change to remain competitive. It presents a new selling framework based on research that indicates that buyer behavior can be modeled and that large sales and small sales are fundamentally different. This new framework provides salespeople with a practical structure for giving buyers significantly more value for their dollar-value well beyond the products and services being sold. Rather than focusing on one selling model, regardless of the type of sale, this book offers four different types of large sales and presents specific strategies for succeeding at each. Many sales organizations are systematically mismanaging their selling opportunities and failing to optimize their markets. Through effective selling models, illustrative case studies and examples, and real-world anecdotes, Selling Is Dead brings strategy and efficiency to sales-and shows every sales-based business how to reap the rewards.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Is selling dead? Are salespeople, the traditional champions of growth, adding increasingly less value to both their employers and the buyers on whom they call? Has the faster cadence of business, change, and innovation made sellers less relevant at a time when their performance is most needed?

Whether you're a senior executive, a sales or marketing manager, or a salesperson, your personal and organizational success is tied to the answers to these questions. In this groundbreaking book, the authors examine why salespeople and selling teams must redefine their roles and adopt new selling frameworks—or risk obsolescence.

For major account sellers, traditional growth strategies have become increasingly ineffective in the New Economy. Innovation, the province of future profit, growth, and survival for many firms, is especially challenging to sell. New customers, the lifeblood of most organizations and the driving force behind real and significant growth, have also become more and more difficult for sellers to create. The paths to new customers have become more complex and less forgiving. In Selling Is Dead, two world-class sales consultants reveal that customer scarcity and the delayed and diminished returns from innovation are self-inflicted epidemics.

The key, argue major account sales experts Marc Miller and Jason Sinkovitz, is to transform your transactional sales team into a disciplined unit of "businesspeople who sell." The authors also identify multiple categories of large account selling, each with its own best practices, sales skills, and strategies. To sell successfully in this diverse environment requires a focused framework powerful enough to deliver significantly higher value to buyers—beyond the products and services being sold—yet flexible enough to adapt quickly to radically different types of buyer demands.

Drawing on their experiences with hundreds of companies, the authors present scores of case studies along with proven, research-based approaches that have enabled their clients to fuse their sales, marketing, customer service, and new product departments into sustainable, market-optimizing growth engines. You'll learn how to:

• Understand and identify the multiple types of major account sales
• Create a disciplined and strategic sales framework that mirrors the buyer's "demand type"
• Master the sales process steps and skills that will advance your buyers to "yes"
• Build management systems to maintain a cohesive selling effort across the organization

The old methods of large account selling may be dead, but you can still win the new customers that generate real growth, boost revenues, and send profits soaring. Take an eye-opening business journey in Selling Is Dead and learn how to accelerate revenue growth and sustain a higher level of sales productivity.

From the Back Cover:

Praise for SELLING IS DEAD: Moving Beyond Traditional Sales Roles and Practices to Revitalize Growth

"A collaborative and commercial approach that is a key element of the growth journey. Selling Is Dead not only addresses the importance of a team-focused selling framework, but other critical success factors as well."
—Damian A. Thomas, General Manager and Corporate Sales Leader, General Electric Company

"Selling Is Dead is a wonderful blend of balanced, forward thinking, and practical common-sense guidance on how to mutually win with your customer in today's highly competitive marketplace. Planning from your buyers' point of view to make them more productive and competitive is critical in large account sales . . . and this book will show you how."
—David N. Townshend, Senior Vice President of Global Sales, Marriott International

"The authors articulate the dichotomy of the large sales challenge. Like most companies, our business units at Siemens have unique selling challenges. This is an insightful book that teaches salespeople how to identify, adapt, and adjust to the type of large sales in which they are engaged."
—Thomas Poole, Regional Vice President, Siemens Medical Solutions

"This book is a revelation that builds upon the progression of great books in the selling genre from Carnegie to Rackham. It neatly wraps the essential ingredients of strategies, tactics, organizations, and people into a framework that can continuously produce large sales for your enterprise."
—Jim Daley, Chairman, PCi Corporation

"Sales teams need a better road map for today's sophisticated customer. The authors have laid out a disciplined framework that gives selling teams a common language and logical market-facing structure. I consider this book to be a must-read."
—Ron Newcomb, Senior Vice President of Sales, Trimble Geomatics and Engineering

"Today's selling environment has changed dramatically, and sales teams need to adjust or risk obsolescence. Selling Is Dead teaches salespeople how to strategically adjust, add more value, and create customer abundance."
—David Peckinpaugh, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Conferon Global Services, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0471721115
• ISBN 13: 9780471721116
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320