Slow Down, Sell Faster!: Understand Your Customer's Buying Process and Maximize Your Sales - Softcover

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KEVIN DAVIS is president of TopLine Leadership, a sales and sales management training company. His revolutionary eight-step process is used at Citigroup, ADP, Bayer, Sprint-Nextel, IKON Office Solutions, Global Imaging Systems (a XEROX company), and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies.

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“This is a great book, a breakthrough in modern selling! Kevin shows you how to make more sales, easier, and with greater certainty than ever before.” — Brian Tracy, author of The Psychology of Selling

“The Chally Group Worldwide has interviewed over 80,000 business-to-business customers and found they are most loyal to salespeople who understand their buying needs and buying processes. Slow Down, Sell Faster! shows you how to become one of those salespeople —a world-class sales professional.” — Howard Stevens, Chairman and CEO, The Chally Group, Worldwide

Faster sales pitches won’t lead to faster sales. The key to speeding up the sales process is to actually slow down and get in sync with your customer’s buying process.

Customers don’t care about your selling process. They’re moving through their own buying process, a set of predictable steps that doesn’t match how most salespeople sell. With the highly effective techniques in Slow Down, Sell Faster!, you’ll learn how to help your customers through each step of their buying process faster, and with the odds shifted in your favor.

Sales guru Kevin Davis has taught thousands of salespeople at a veritable “who’s who” of Fortune 500 companies. His eight-step method unleashes the power of slowing down each sales conversation, asking more questions, identifying needs, and supplying solutions—in the right sequence, with the right approaches. It’s an especially effective formula for high-stakes sales involving multiple decision-makers that delivers big rewards. You’ll learn how to:

• match your sales behaviors to your customers’ needs at every step of the buying process • get more appointments—especially at the C-level—by using a problem-focused approach • combat your most lethal competitor: customer complacency • use probing questions to diagnose small problems that can point to bigger needs • master the complicated politics of complex sales • overcome common selling dilemmas, such as customers who go silent at the eleventh hour • and more.

You already know how to sell. It’s time to learn how people buy—to slow down so you can sell faster!

“As the provider of choice for our customers’ business technology needs it is imperative that we have a sales process focused on the customer buying cycle. Years ago, we selected Kevin Davis’ sales model. We’ve used the flexibility of the program to train the majority of our sales force on this powerful consultative selling methodology. We’ve measured outstanding results.” - Dan Cooper, Executive VP, Field Operations, Xerox, Global Imaging Systems

“The need to be more buyer-focused is clear to most all Chief Sales Officers; how to do it is not. In Slow Down, Sell Faster! Kevin Davis offers a concise roadmap for how to stop paying lip service to this concept and make it a reality for sales reps and their managers.” - Jim Dickie, Managing Partner, CSO Insights

“Salespeople involved in today's high value, complex sale will find that Kevin Davis' book provides exactly what they need to know to close the deal. This book provides solid, practical advice that professional salespeople can immediately use and apply.” - Stephen J. Bistritz, Ed.D., President and Founder, SellXL.com; Co-author, Selling to the C-Suite

Kevin Davis is president of TopLine Leadership, Inc., a leading sales and sales management training company serving clients from diverse sectors. He has 30+ years of experience as a salesperson, sales mana­ger, sales trainer, and consultant. His 1996 book, Getting into Your Customer’s Head, helped redefine how salespeople approach selling. Contact Kevin at www.toplineleadership.com

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Introduction

Years ago I was selling an office equipment solution to the CEO

of a 100-person company. I was selling to him the way I had

been taught: I established comfortable conversation while

building trust, asked questions to diagnose his needs, then presented

my solution as an answer to his needs. Everything appeared

to be going along as planned. Suddenly he leaned forward and

asked, “Aren’t you going to close me now?”

Why is it that customers know more about selling techniques

than most salespeople know about buying behavior? That’s not

right. An understanding of buying is where selling should start.

We need to redefine “selling” to mean helping people buy.

What might “helping people buy” actually mean? The HR Chally

Group, founded in 1973 through a grant from the United States Justice

Department to create validated assessments that accurately predict

on-the-job effectiveness—including sales performance, has a lot

to say. For their most recent report Chally interviewed over 2,500 customers

who provided opinions about more than 4,000 salespeople.

The results appear in The Chally World Class Sales Excellence Research Report.

Among their findings was that “customers usually award the

prize to the salesperson who has been there through every step of

their buying process, meeting customer need after customer need by

presenting the right information at the right time. To win a sale, then,

a salesperson’s sales process must match perfectly with the customer’s

buying process. The two should be mirror images.”1

We can take a lesson as well from Dr. Steven Covey’s classic

book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. (I’d bet many of you have a

copy on your bookshelf right now.) Dr. Covey says, “We have such a

tendency to rush in, to fix things up with good advice. But we often

fail to take the time to diagnose, to really, deeply understand the

problem first.”2

This rushing in and “fixing things up with good advice” occurs

a lot in our profession because we have been conditioned to see

things through a salesperson’s eyes, and our sales behaviors are

based on these perceptions. But your buyers have a different frame

of reference. They have their own point of view.

So let me ask you, when selling, do you think as much about the

customer’s buying process as you do about your sales process? Are

you with your customers “through every step of their buying

process”?

If not, it’s not your fault. Despite the evidence before us that a

new sales paradigm is needed, few sales books or training courses

teach salespeople how to deeply understand the purchasing decision

from their customers’ perspective, how to adapt their selling

behavior to customers’ buying behavior. If you don’t think about

the buying process on every call, you can get out of sync with your

customer, and that can lead to lost sales.

That’s why I wrote this book, to demonstrate the why and the

how of getting in sync with your customer’s buying process. When

you do that, you realize that you need to slow down each conversation

you have with a customer so you can ask more questions, and

help the customer do a better job of buying. When you slow down

your selling, you can help customers move more quickly through

each step of their buying process. Hence the paradoxical title of this

book: Slow Down, Sell Faster!