Synopses & Reviews
Buyer behavior has evolved and the challenges facing sales professionals have never been greater. Thanks to the Internet and the wealth of information it provides, buyers are more informed and more comfortable evaluating purchasing options on their own. The more information buyers have access to, the less dependent they are on traditional sources of information – including salespeople.
The Collaborative Sale takes a close look at recent changes in buyer behavior as they relate to the primary tenets of the Solution Selling
® methodology and provides a detailed, modern view of what effective sellers need to do to succeed in today’s world.
To succeed today, sellers need to be worthy collaborators with the highly knowledgeable buyers they encounter with increasing frequency. No longer can sellers drive and control the sale, simply because many buyers are too empowered and savvy. Global economic uncertainties and the recent global recessions have also made individual buyers as well as the companies they represent realize, perhaps once and for all, that they must see results and maximize their return on investment in every purchase. This means buyers are more cautious than ever and they are acutely aware of the risks of making bad decisions.
Sellers must align with where the buyers are in their buying process and collaborate with them in an open and transparent manner. The sellers who do this are winning business and they are transforming selling forever.
In The Collaborative Sale, you will learn:
- How buyer behavior has changed, and how sales professionals must adapt to survive
- Why a Solution Selling philosophy is more relevant today than ever before
- How to build and leverage knowledge to become situational experts
- New sales personas: Micro-Marketer, Visualizer, and Value Driver
- How to use social media to gain access to the new buyers
- How to manage buyers’ risk in uncertain economic times
As executive leaders of Sales Performance International (SPI), the authors have helped thousands of clients around the world to implement the highly successful Solution Selling® methodology on which this book is based. By applying the core elements of the methodology to the changing dynamic of more knowledgeable and savvy buyers, Keith Eades and Tim Sullivan have created The Collaborative Sale, a playbook for helping sales professionals align with today’s buyers.
Synopsis
Buyer behavior has changed, putting them much more in control of their purchasing process. They gather information through the Internet from a wide variety of online sources and as a result, most buyers are keeping sellers out of their buying process until much later than what was once the norm. This book helps sales professionals collaborate with today’s buyers, showing how the most effective sellers succeed, and even thrive, in this era of new buyers, new selling roles, and new technologies. In
The Collaborative Sale, you will learn:
- How buyer behavior has changed, and how sellers must adapt to survive
- Three emerging sales roles needed to be effective in today’s market
- Why a Solution Selling philosophy is more relevant today than ever before
- How to build and leverage knowledge to become experts for customers
- How to become a micro-marketer to gain access to prospects
- How to manage risk in today’s complex sales cycles
- How to add real value in every engagement with customers
- How to negotiate effectively, without caving in on price
- How to build a robust pipeline of sales opportunities and achieve goals
- How to use verifiable outcomes to manage deals and predict future revenues
The Collaborative Sale shows how to align effectively with today’s buyers, helping them to succeed in overcoming their problems and challenges, and in so doing, creating value for customers, for solution suppliers, and for sales professionals.
Synopsis
Buyer behavior has changed the marketplace, and sellers must adapt to surviveThe Collaborative Sale: Solution Selling in Today's Customer-Driven World is the definitive guide to the new reality of sales. The roles of buyers, sellers, and technology have changed, and collaboration is now the key to success on all sides. The Collaborative Sale guides sales professionals toward alignment with buyers, by helping them overcome their problems and challenges, and creating value. From building a robust opportunity pipeline and predicting future revenues to mastering the nuances of buyer conversations, the book contains the information sales professionals need to remain relevant in today's sales environment.
Buyers have become more informed and more empowered. As a result, most sellers now enter the buying process at a much later stage than the traditional norm. The rise of information access has given buyers more control over their purchases than ever before, and sellers must adapt to survive. The Collaborative Sale provides a roadmap for adapting through sales collaboration, detailing the foundations, personae, and reality of the new marketplace. The book provides insight into the new buyer thought processes, the new sales personae required for dealing with the new buyers, and how to establish and implement a dynamic sales process. Topics include:
- Selling in times of economic uncertainty, broad information access, and new buyer behavior
- Why collaboration is so important to the new buyers
- The emergence of new sales personae – Micro-marketer, Visualizer, and Value Driver
- Buyer alignment, risk mitigation, and the myth of control
- Situational fluency, and the role of technology
- Focused sales enablement, and buyer-aligned learning and development
- Implementation and establishment of a dynamic sales process
The book describes the essential competencies for collaborative selling, and provides indispensable supplemental tools for implementation. Written by recognized authorities with insights into global markets, The Collaborative Sale: Solution Selling in Today's Customer-Driven World is the essential resource for today's sales professional.
Synopsis
Praise for The Collaborative SaleKeith Eades and Tim Sullivan share a passion for raising the quality of the sales profession. They have taken a close look at the recent changes in buyer behavior and developed a modern view of what effective sellers need to do to succeed in today’s world. The Collaborative Age of Selling is now upon us. The Collaborative Sale will help you make the transition.
—Dave Stein, Founder and CEO, ES Research Group, Inc.
With the pace of innovation continuing to accelerate, buyers can become overwhelmed with the amount of information that is available to them. As a result, they are looking for salespeople who can help them in making an educated decision, define the optimum solution, and attain a maximized return on investment. The job of the sales person is to work with buyers collaboratively to provide them with the right resources, insights and information to help buyers make that educated decision. In The Collaborative Sale, Keith Eades and Tim Sullivan describe how sales professionals can engage with today’s buyers successfully to do this.
—Jim Ninivaggi, Service Director of Sales Enablement Strategies, SiriusDecisions
Our research shows that successful selling requires collaboration – talking to resources within your organization, and both listening and participating in conversations with buyers. The challenge for sellers is knowing how to collaborate effectively – how to matter to people so that you can be an important contributor to what they are looking to accomplish. The Collaborative Sale provides useful and practical guidance for sales professionals about how they can collaborate, and make a difference to their customers.
—Peter Ostrow, Vice President and Group Director for Sales Effectiveness & Strategy, AberdeenGroup
The buying process is changing. The myriad of ways that information is available has changed the dynamics of the sales conversation. Sales professionals need to adapt, in order to succeed – they must know how to engage with an informed and savvy buyer, in order to win their business. Keith Eades and Tim Sullivan, in The Collaborative Sale, describe the reasons for these changes, and what sellers can do to align with buyers’ newly evolving expectations.
—Jim Dickie, Managing Partner, CSO Insights
About the Author
KEITH M. EADES is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sales Performance International, one of the largest sales improvement companies in the world. Founded in 1988, the company does business in over 54 countries. Keith is one of the leading authorities on transforming companies into world-class sales organizations and is a bestselling author of
The New Solution Selling.TIMOTHY T. SULLIVAN is the Director of Business Development for Sales Performance International. Tim is a frequent public speaker and published author on advanced sales and marketing practices.
Table of Contents
Foreword David Stein xi
Preface xv
Acknowledgements xix
Definitions xxi
Part I Foundations of the Collaborative Sale 1
1 “The Story” and What’s Behind The Collaborative Sale 3The Collaborative Sale 7
What is sales collaboration? 9
2 Solution Selling Meets the New Buyer 13The Emergence of the New Buyer - Buyer 2.0 16
The Effect of Information Access on Buyer 2.0 Behavior 16
The Millennials are Coming 21
The Effect of Economic Uncertainty on Buyer 2.0 Behavior 23
Buyer 2.0 vs. Buyer 1.0 27
Adapting to the Buyer 2.0 Paradigm 28
The Relevancy of Solution Selling and the Evolution of the Collaborative Sale 33
The Story (continued) 35
3 What the New Buyers Expect: Situational Fluency 39Seller Agility 42
Situational Fluency 44
Components of Situational Fluency 45
Hiring for Situational Fluency 50
Developing Situational Fluency 51
Technology’s Role in Situational Fluency 53
Part II Three Personae of the Collaborative Sale 574 The Micro-Marketer Persona 59Why Be a Micro-Marketer? 60
Micro-Marketers Demonstrate Situational Fluency – with Constraint 62
Micro-Marketers Create Their Own Personal Brand 63
Planning and Executing a Micro-Marketer Strategy 66
Enabling the Micro-Marketer Persona 74
The Story (continued) 82
5 The Visualizer Persona 85What a Visualizer? 85
Buyer States and Strength of Vision 91
Visualizer Conversations 95
Embracing the Visualizer Persona 99
The Story (continued) 101
6 The Value Driver Persona 105
Focusing on Value 107
What is the Value Driver Persona? 107
Using a Collaboration Plan – a Buyer Alignment and Risk Mitigation Strategy 115
The Myth of Control 118
Create an Online Collaboration Site 119
Collaborating to Close 121
Enabling the Value Driver Persona 122
The Story (continued) 124
Part III Making the Collaborative Sale a Reality 1277 Establishing a Dynamic Sales Process 129
Buyer-Aligned Sales Process 134
Dynamic Sales Process 135
Automating Dynamic Sales Processes 137
Expanding the View of Sales Process 138
Sales Process Enables Management and Marketing 140
8 Coaching the Collaborative Sale 143Sales Management Cadence 144
Motivation 151
9 Implementing The Collaborative Sale 157Right Process: Buyer-Aligned Learning and Development 159
Right People: Talent Assessment and Analytics 162
Right Tools: Focused Enablement 167
Committing to Success – Individually and Organizationally 177
Epilogue 179Afterword 181Appendix 183EssentialCompetencies for The Collaborative Sale 183
Additional Collaborative Selling Tools 186
Contributors 195
KeithM. Eades 195
Timothy T. Sullivan 195
Robert Kear 196
James N. “Jimmy” Touchstone 197
Dave Christofaro 197
Kenneth Cross 198
Tamela M. Rich 198
Index 199