The 10 Steps

The 10 Steps

This book has 10 steps (chapters) organized into 3 sections

SECTION 1: THE STEPS TO SALES EFFECTIVENESS

Step 1: Embrace a Sales Mindset
Selling is not simply about encouraging a customer to buy a product or service. It is also about listening, analyzing, problem solving, and persuading. Selling is conversation and communication in order to become a trusted advisor. This chapter focuses on accountability, objectively determining your strengths and weaknesses, understanding your personal selling style, how actions relate to personal outputs, and the Continuous Selling Improvement Cycle, as well as highlights the importance of understanding your role in relation to the buyer and how to become a more competent sales professional by optimizing your strengths.

Step 2: Know Your Job and Your Role
When starting any new job, it is important to understand exactly what is expected so that you can meet or exceed the expectations. Oftentimes, these expectations are not explicit and are nearly impossible to achieve because measures and benchmarks are vague or nonexistent. This chapter focuses on the four key benefits of the sales profession, how organizations define sales strategies and market segmentation, and the seven functions of any sales job.

Step 3: Develop Winning Habits
Every successful sales professional has mastered habits—most of which were learned on the job. Small and consistent changes in your activities can have a significant impact on productivity. This chapter focuses on examining the activities that add value and increase productivity so you can determine how to appropriately allocate your time. In particular, this chapter delves into defining your quota, building a pipeline, determining your priorities, and executing your plan of action.


SECTION 2: THE STEPS TO SALES EFFICIENCY

Step 4: Understand the Buying Process
Understanding how clients buy services or products can make or break your sales pipeline. It isn’t enough to know how to market and sell; you have to understand how your clients buy. This chapter reviews the buying process, how customers define value, who influences the buying decisions in an organization, and negotiating strategies for closing the deal.

Step 5: Leverage the Sales Process
Understanding the buying process is only half of the equation; understanding the selling process is equally important because enables you to customize it in order to meet your own personal needs. This chapter details a seven-part sales process, describes the outputs, and provides strategies to help you master each part of the process.


Step 6: Create Your Own Personal Selling System
To maximize efficiency and make your own success, you need to use your knowledge to customize the buying and selling processes to create your own personal sales selling system. This step is important in becoming a successful sales professional because it focuses your attention on the buyer’s particular situation and enables you to ask the right questions, offer the right solution, and manage the complexity of the buyer–seller relationship.



SECTION 3: THE STEPS TO BECOMING A TRUSTED ADVISOR
Step 7: Accelerate Revenue
Becoming a trusted advisor involves a team all rowing in the same direction. Without organizational support, your own company can become the biggest barrier in your selling success. This chapter discusses the many roles involved in a sales professional’s job, as well as how to effectively manage expectations both internally with your manager and externally with your clients.

Step 8: Communicate Effectively
Salespeople spend most of their time communicating, and often the content of their communication is highly repetitive. This repetition can lead to communicating without really thinking about the quality of the communication. Understanding all facets of communication can propel average salespeople to the top of the sales rankings—and this chapter focuses on the key concepts and tips to help get you there, including minimizing noise, polishing your questioning techniques, and mastering verbal and nonverbal communication skills.

Step 9: Manage Your Sales Organization
Sales professionals have accountability and responsibility for driving revenue, and must excel at the many roles they must play within the buyer–seller relationship. In this step, sales professionals need to maximize their time investment, effectively run productive meetings, and skillfully maneuver within the sales culture of their organizations.

Step 10: Develop World-Class Sales Competence
The most successful sales professionals are passionate about lifelong learning and never rest of their current laurels or skills—instead, they continually focus on improving themselves and developing competencies. This chapter defines sales competencies and discusses strategies for closing sales and protecting your accounts.

BONUS CHAPTERS!
Appendix 1: Introduction to the World of Selling
Sales professionals play one of the most mission-critical roles in an organization—driving revenue. This chapter discusses what all business owners want out of salespeople, provides a brief history of the sales profession, defines key terms and the basic principles of selling, and provides insight and a process to define what success means to you.

Appendix 2: Top 10 Myths of Selling in Today’s Business World
Many stereotypes taint the sales profession. Dispelling these myths and setting the record straight is the first step to understanding what selling and becoming a successful sales professional is all about. This chapter demystifies the top 10 most pervasive myths on what the most successful sales professionals do.

Review these 10 steps as often as needed to help you transition from salesperson to sales professional and attain trusted advisor status with your clients


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