Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Erik Peterson, Vice President of Strategic Consulting, Corporate Visions, helps companies and salespeople around the world win at the three-foot level—when they’re sitting across the table from their most important prospects. Companies such as GE, AmerisourceBergen, and Oracle have sought his help to create their simple, differentiated, and memorable story. Peterson has delivered consulting, keynotes, and messaging skills workshops to more than 10,000 salespeople in 13 countries, and he leads a team that’s delivered this work in 56 countries around the world.
Tim Riesterer, Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President of Products and Consulting, Corporate Visions, is a recognized thought leader and practitioner in the area of marketing and sales messaging. His first book,Customer Message Management, focused on increasing a marketing department’s impact on selling by providing customer-relevant, salesready messaging and tools that salespeople will actually use. Now, he’s turned his attention to salespeople themselves and what actually happens when they are in front of the customer with their lips moving.

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CONVERSATIONS THAT WIN THE COMPLEX SALE

McGraw-Hill

Contents

Chapter One

Babe Ruth began his baseball career using a 54-ounce bat. That's a big bat. For those of you who are not familiar with what's "normal" for baseball bats, most professional baseball players today use a bat that weighs between 31 and 35 ounces.

From the beginning of his career, Ruth was a remarkable hitter. He first led the league in home runs in 1918, when he hit 11. And then he led the league in home runs in 11 of the next 13 seasons. Arguably his best hitting season was 1927, when he hit 60 home runs. He hit more home runs that season than all but two teams.

That year, the bat he used weighed only 40 ounces.

That's right. Even though he started his professional baseball career as a feared hitter, he didn't become the greatest hitter of his generation, and arguably the greatest hitter in history, until he dramatically changed his approach to hitting, reducing the weight of his bat by more than 25 percent.

Why did it take him so long to realize that he needed to reduce the weight of his bat?

Because it went against his instincts.

His instincts told him that to have the power he needed to hit home runs, he had to swing the heaviest bat he could carry and still make contact with a pitch.

In fact, you can understand why he would think that the heavier the bat, the better. It just makes sense, doesn't it? You must get more power from swinging a heavy bat than from swinging a light one, right? I mean, it's obvious!

It turns out that it's wrong. Most of us share that instinct, but it's wrong.

To hit for power, you also need to think about bat speed.

Now, you're not going to hit home runs with a toothpick, but most people's instincts tell them to put too much emphasis on bat weight and not enough emphasis on bat speed.

Baseball isn't the only activity where your instincts lead you down the wrong path.

There was a famous experiment in which people were assigned the task of being either a "tapper" or a "listener." The tapper's job was to tap out the tune of 1 of 25 famous songs, like "Happy Birthday." The listener's job was to guess the song that was being tapped.

Before the experiment started, the tappers were asked to predict how often the listener would guess the song correctly. The tappers predicted that the listeners would guess the song correctly about 50 percent of the time.

But when the experiment was conducted, a surprising thing happened. The listeners guessed the song correctly less than 3 percent of the time!

Why did the listeners do such a poor job? Well, it turns out that while the tappers could hear the music in their own head, to the listeners it just sounded like a disconnected series of taps.

But really, this isn't about the listeners doing a poor job. What this is really about is the bad instincts of the tappers.

It was the tappers who assumed that the listeners would do much better. It was the tappers whose instincts were wrong.

This is a book about your sales instincts and how they are killing you when it comes to sales. Just like Babe Ruth, you can still be successful even though your instincts are leading you astray. But if you want to be the best in the world, you need to learn where your instincts are right and where your instincts are wrong.

You see, when salespeople fail to achieve their potential, it's almost never because they are lazy, and it's not because they aren't doing their best.

If you're like the vast majority of the salespeople on the planet, your intentions are great and your effort is great, but your instincts are wrong. They are taking you down the wrong path.

And you are often delivering a message that your customers just don't hear. At least, they don't hear it the way it sounds in your head. They don't hear the tune you're playing.

That's the core, radical idea that's at the heart of this book.

If you can take having some of your instincts challenged . . . If you can be open to hearing your message the way your customer hears it . . .

You can make a remarkable change in your sales performance.

The approach and techniques in this book have been shaped through 20 years of delivering our Power Messaging workshops. During that time, we've worked with tens of thousands of salespeople in 56 countries. The companies that use this approach range from high-tech to lowtech and have familiar names like GE, Oracle, Volvo, and Amerisource Bergen.

Here's how this book is going to help you make the changes that you will need to make if you are to succeed in today's sales world. It is divided into three sections:

What needs to change. Recognize the forces that are changing the selling environment, and learn several major new concepts for the way you approach prospects and customers. These concepts include the following:

• How to create more opportunities by bringing bad news

• Why playing 20 Questions with your prospects isn't the answer

• How to provoke your prospects to create more opportunities

• The often ignored opportunities already in your pipeline that can make all the difference

• The approach to loosening the status quo with a distinct point-of-view pitch

Finding your story. Learn why your message needs to be more than just compelling facts, and how to shape your message into a story that wins more deals. This goes beyond ordinary value propositions to give you a specific approach to finding your winning story. It includes

• How to differentiate yourself in crowded markets by finding your Value Wedge

• How to avoid parity in your value propositions by creating Power Positions

• How changing one word in your message can double the number of deals that you close

• What a great message has in common with Star Wars and the Harry Potter books

Making your story come alive. Go deeper into the science and art of customer conversations, and learn specific techniques for making yours simpler, more memorable, and compelling. Here you'll learn about

• The hammock—why your customers go there, and how it kills your conversations

• How to spike customer attention and create "wow" in your conversations

• The real decision maker in every deal and how you sell to it

• Why salespeople overuse facts and figures and how you can do better in proving your claims

• Where presentation skills training misses the point

If you're a student of these techniques, this book will give you depth that it's not always possible to get to in the two-day course, as well as a refresher on the core concepts. And we welcome you back.

If you're new to the ideas in this book, you will never look at selling the same way again.

It's time to get started.

Chapter Two

Have you heard the ancient story of Buridan's donkey? It refers to a hypothetical situation in which a donkey is placed precisely midway between two identical piles of hay. The donkey stands there contemplating his options and is paralyzed with indecision.

Unable to make a rational decision to choose one haystack over...