Elite Sales Strategies (Book Summary)

Elite Sales Strategies by Anthony Iannarino

Reviewer’s Small Pet Peeve:  I wish the author had simply used the phrase “a trusted advisor” instead of “One Up.”

Introduction

• Being One-Up means seeking to solve the client’s problems, especially those beyond the scope of your prepackaged solution.

1 The Modern Sales Approach

• No client finds value in a conversation that doesn’t help them improve their decisions and their results.
• The focus of the sales conversation is no longer “why us” or “why our solution.” Instead, it’s now about “why change” and “why now.”
• When you open a conversation by sharing information about your company, for example, you have already demonstrated that you have nothing more valuable to share.
• The desperate attempt to build rapport at the beginning of a conversation with your prospective client also broadcasts your One-Down desperation. The new rapport in sales is a business conversation.
• When you ask your client questions about the problems they are having, you prove you are an amateur.
• Here is a simple test to determine if you are One-Down: Does the client benefit from the conversation more than you do?
• One of the ways to soften your approach is to ask for permission to share ideas with your clients.
• In these three areas, you need your client to help you understand what you need to know and how to use that knowledge to help them succeed.
  • Their Industry
  • What Your Contacts Believe
  • Navigating Their Company

2 The One-Up Sales Conversation: Your Only Vehicle for Value Creation

• Spending time talking about your company, your solutions, the results you have produced for others, or even the recent heroics of the local sports team — especially early in the conversation — identifies you as a time waster instead of a value creator.
• Simply open the conversation by saying, “Would it be okay if I shared this briefing with you? I am certain you are tracking these same trends, and it would help me to get your perspective on how much these things are showing up in your world.”
• Your opening should position you as an expert with the ability to compel change and a preference to buy from you.
• Your conversation is the only way to provide real differentiation.

3 Insights and Information Disparity

• The best way to compel change is to show how the outside world drives those root causes.
• The most valuable recommendation is not “buy our solution,” but “here’s how you should approach this decision.”
• The reason salespeople lose deals or watch them stall is often because they don’t understand how to help their clients change.
• There are several areas you can explore to keep your insights fresh and relevant to your clients’ decisions and results, so you always have something new and useful to share.
  • Inside Your Four Walls.
  • The Value of Your Client’s Experiences and Challenges.
  • What’s Working, What’s Not, and Why.
  • Your Experience of What Is Necessary to Produce Results.
  • How to Make Change.

4 Supporting Client Discovery

• The first level of value is your product or service, both of which are already commodities.
• The second level of value is your company’s experience, shaping the service and support you provide your clients — useful, but ultimately just table stakes, creating nothing powerful enough to compel decision-makers to change.
• The third level of value is solving the client’s problem, something that the legacy solution approaches sought to address.
• The fourth level of value is enabling the strategic outcomes the client needs, going well beyond their presenting problem.
• The new discovery process is about analyzing a complex situation so your clients can learn something about themselves.
• The more you behave like a commodity, the more you’ll be treated like one.
• Your client isn’t able to go to other companies and ask them to tell them how to improve their results. You, however, can be a deep well of insights about what is working for other companies.
• “Have you started the process of building consensus or building the guiding team who can help you bring their teams with them?”

5 Your Role as a Sense Maker

• The sales conversation is your only vehicle for creating value for your clients.
• You must offer a better view of their reality and the decisions before them, positioning yourself as a sense maker and a potential trusted advisor.

6 The Advantage of Your Vantage Point

• Don’t forget that your language and your attitude matter just as much as your insights.
• Trying to sell like buyers want to buy leaves you in the One-Down position, taking orders — and failing your client by allowing them to fail.
• Ten Commitments That Drive Sales:
  • Time: Help them better understand their changing world
  • Explore: Explore the better results available to them, and what gaining those results might require of them.
  • Change.
  • Collaborate.
  • Build consensus.
  • Invest: The investment you’re asking them to make in the better results they need.
  • Review: The proposal
  • Resolve Concerns.
  • Decide. Asking the client to buy from you
• The One-Up strategy for disrupting the RFP process is to read the RFP from the end, searching for something you can use to complain about the way the questions and prompts are written.
• The Year Zero strategy starts the day your target client signs a three-year contract with your competitor. That very day, you start a campaign to create relationships with the people who made that decision.

7 Building Your One-Upness

• If you have to convince your client directly that they should buy from your company, it’s a safe bet that you didn’t create enough value to earn their business.
• Being One-Up means guiding clients to recognize and understand the implications of their assumptions and their decisions.

8 One-Up Guide to Offering Advice and Recommendations

• It is always a mistake to provide advice in areas where you lack expertise.
• The reason I don’t believe that you should prospect through email, especially not using fully automated sequences, is that it trains your prospect to ignore your emails.
• You must eliminate your strong inclination to push your product or solution early in the sales conversation.
• Here’s a good accountability test: “Would my advice still be true if my competitor gave it?” If your advice is sound regardless of its source, then you can be certain it’s valuable.
• you need to provide good counsel outside of what you sell.
• Soft approach: “Can I share with you something you might consider as a first step?”
• Train sales managers before training the entire sales force, since the managers will have to execute the necessary changes in beliefs and behaviors.

9 The One-Up Obligation to Proactively Compel Change

• In reality, many markets are dominated by competitive displacement sales, where each salesperson must remove their competition to win a client. The primary challenge in this type of sale is not that your client already has a provider. It’s the fact that they are not compelled to change.
• A more modern and robust version of discovery has you help your client identify what they need to learn to move forward.
• While it’s true your client needs certainty to move forward, the certainty they need isn’t about you, your company, or your solution; it’s about the inevitable negative consequences of maintaining the status quo for so long that their results suffer and threaten their business.
• A person who is risk averse will always have unresolved concerns, not because you didn’t do enough to resolve them, but because it is their nature, and perhaps their role in their company.
• “What has prevented you from making this change in the past, and what will we need to do to prepare your team to tackle this before it becomes a bigger problem?”

10 Triangulation Strategy: Helping Clients Decide While Avoiding Competition

• Attacking a competitor will torpedo your own credibility, but you can easily attack the different models they operate and score points for your understanding and advice.
• Every delivery model serves a certain customer with a certain type of need, based on the context of the decision they are making.
• Four Models of Value
  • Level One: Commodities
  • Level Two: Scalable Commodities
  • Level Three: Solutions
  • Level Four: Strategic Partners
• Walk away from a client with expectations larger than their checkbook.
• Two companies with similar offerings can produce wildly different results, due to the nature of the value they create, how they deliver it, and how they compete in their space.
• The person who provides the client with an education on the different models, their advantages, their challenges, and the concessions they are agreeing to is the person who is best positioned to win the client’s business.

11 Being One-Up Helps Your Clients Change

• The reason that companies and their leaders don’t change is because they don’t recognize how close those negative consequences are.
• “Tell the truth at any price, even the price of your deal.”
• Being One-Up means helping your clients recognize everything they need to change to improve their results — not just their supplier and their solution.
• When you speak about your company, instead of talking about how long you have been in business, talk about how you have gained the experience to create the better results your client needs.
• Instead of talking about your senior leadership team, talk about the resources to be assigned or available to ensure your contacts succeed.

12 Advice for Those Who Are Presently One-Down

• While it’s impressive to walk your client through a slide deck with your insights and supporting data, it’s even more powerful when you can do it from memory,

13 The Secret Chapter

• When you begin the sales conversation with a set of insights that explain your client’s world, you prove that you have a better and more complete view than they do.
• The best way to expose a client’s lack of knowledge and experience is by asking questions you are certain they cannot answer without causing offense or creating any resistance to the knowledge or experience you are trying to impart to them.
• Do you know how your results measure up against the industry benchmarks, and if not, would you want to see an analysis?
• It’s not uncommon to hear a salesperson complain that their prospect ghosted them after they presented their proposal and pricing.
• The “infinite drip campaign” is a never-ending update about what is going in your client’s world, featuring messages every week or two that keep beating the drum for change.