Interactive Selling Blog

Most B2B salespeople are either bulldozers or gofers. I’m not talking about style. So when I say bulldozer, don’t be thinking of some guy who’s obnoxiously aggressive, in-your-face, never taking no for an answer. Yes, some are like that, but more are not. I’ve known plenty of sales bulldozers who are immensely charming and lots of fun to be with. And they would be shocked and disappointed to learn that their approach puts them solidly into the bulldozer category. Worse yet, they’d be really unnerved to learn how much business they leave on the table because of their bulldozer ways.

Similarly, not all gofers are meek, or shy, or fawning. Gofers I’ve known include many who are the life of the party, or are stars on the company softball team, or are relentless in ensuring that their clients get near-perfect service. These gofers would be no more pleased to learn the sales relationship category they fall into than would the ’dozers. And they too leave a lot of money on the table, a lot of client relationships not fully developed, not maximized.

As you might be expecting, there’s a third sales relationship type. It’s called the partner. The pros who close the biggest deals… the people who create business relationships that endure the longest… nearly all of them are partners. These three sales relationship types are a totally new way of thinking about and categorizing sales relationships and approaches. Again, it’s not a matter of style. The difference here are in the salesperson’s fundamental approach to the sales process and the business relationship.

Would you like to know what group you fall into? I’ll tell you—for free! That’s right, while I’d love for you to buy my new book, Close Like the Pros, you don’t have to buy it just to learn if you’re a bulldozer, a gofer, or a partner. I’ve put a Self-Assessment Survey online, and I’m offering it free of charge to any and all. Click here to take the Survey now. Most people complete it in 3 to 5 minutes. And our speedy servers crunch the numbers and send the results back to you in 3 to 5 seconds, Web traffic permitting. It’s fun, it’s educational, and it’s probably going to make you want to read the book!

Unethical salespeople drive me up the wall. I cut them no slack, just because they’re a fellow salesperson.

There are so many ways to be unethical. By what you say… and what you conveniently forget to say. By what you do… and what you conveniently forget to do. By misrepresenting the problems your product can solve or the tasks it can handle. By making banner headlines out of the good news, and hiding the bad news in the mouse-type disclosure or disclaimer you hope they never read. By leading the prospect to believe that your staff has the capability to deliver a service, and waiting until the ink is dry to even bother figuring whether they do. The list goes on and on.

There’s another way in which millions of salespeople are unethical, but it’s rarely spoken of. I believe it’s unethical to put a prospect through a sales process without letting them know what’s going on, without disclosing just what you’re doing. If you’ve ever been on the butt-end of that sort of sales approach, I’ll bet you felt taken advantage of—and what better definition of “unethical” is there?

What’s scary is how common, how pervasive, such selling approaches are. It’s not just the proverbial used car salesmen and time-share resort-condo salespeople. Leaf through a few sales books on the shelf at your local bookstore. Would you proudly present a copy of any of them to your clients and prospects and say, “This is how I do business”? Probably not, because mixed in with a lot of good advice you’ll find too much that’s manipulative, shady, or downright unethical. Even one or two pages in a 200-page book would be enough for you to hide that book from your prospects.

You would be embarrassed to have a prospect see the way customers are described, and how those selling systems encourage their disciples to trick or trap the prospect into the sale. Worse yet, if a prospect read about those tactics, he’d be in on the joke and easily able to neutralize every gambit, outwit every ploy.

Close Like the Pros is different. This may be the first sales book you don’t have to hide… not from your prospects, not from your family, not from your pastor. There’s nothing between the covers here that any client or prospect shouldn’t see—you might even want to buy them a copy! Sales pros don’t abuse their clients, so there’s nothing abusive in Close Like the Pros.

That’s one reason why Marty Schaffel, CEO of Audio-Visual Innovations, Inc., told me,

Unlike most other books on the sales shelf, Close Like the Pros does not present a total sales solution. Between its covers you won’t find an answer to every question you’ve ever had. This book is not an A-to-Z comprehensive selling system with forms, checklists, and templates. (Just one of many things to smile about, by the way!) The problem with those books is that they’re telling you all kinds of stuff you already know, stuff you figured out for yourself or stuff you picked up in seminars and books. Worse yet, those soup-to-nuts books are asking you to dump everything you’re doing now, everything that’s brought you the success you’re having today.

You don’t need another book like that. Which is why I didn’t write another book like that. You don’t have to trash most of what you’re doing today in order to adopt the strategy of Interactive Selling—you can simply stir it into the successful systems and practices you’ve got going now.

My company, The Center for Sales Strategy, has been perfecting, teaching, implementing, practicing, and consulting on sophisticated and comprehensive needs-based and solution-oriented selling systems since 1983. But I’ve written this book for all of you who already understand why and how you should focus on customer needs and let those needs provide the focus, power, and direction for your sale—those of you who have mastered the basics, but still want to grow, those of you who see the super-pros create powerfully strong client relationships and who want to deliver the kind of numbers they do.

If that’s not you, then don’t purchase Close Like the Pros quite yet! First, pick up any of the hundreds of books out there that delve deeply into assessing and responding to customer needs. The shelves are filled with them. But if you’ve got those basics down, then you’re ready for Close Like the Pros. This book moves beyond the basics, takes you to the next level, and focuses only on how to make your sales process interactive.

Interactive Selling means making the buying process as important as the selling process. It means the salesperson is taking responsibility for the buying as well as the selling, and yes, is giving responsibility to the prospect for the selling process in addition to the buying. Interactive Selling is the full sharing of control, decision-making, and accountability between seller and buyer. As the pros know, magic happens when you work that way! The prospect helps improve the proposal in ways that would otherwise have been unimaginable. And at the same time, the proposal—technically, the proposal-development process—helps improve the prospect, in other words creates a prospect who is more likely to say Yes.

No book is for everybody. At least, no sales book is right for all salespeople of every stripe. And any book that claims it is, well, it’s probably of little value to anyone.

Millions of people, in the United States alone, are employed in sales. They range from retail sales clerks and telemarketing representatives to sales executives whose smallest order runs well over a million dollars. Interactive selling is the strategy used by the most accomplished professionals in sales organizations that:

1. Sell to other businesses;

2. Expect to maintain an ongoing relationship with and to make future sales to its clients; and

3. Sell tailored solutions developed from the company’s portfolio of products, services, capabilities, and resources.

If those three characteristics describe the kind of selling you do, you’ll devour Close Like the Pros because it zeroes in on your world, it addresses your challenges, and it gives you the tools to be the highly ethical and outrageously successful salesperson you’ve always wanted to be.

If you’re in sales management, you’ll discover in this book a system that’s easily integrated into your existing sales processes, without altering most of your existing structures and systems. You’ll find insights that elude most salespeople, practices rarely spoken of by sales trainers, a strategy that integrates your firm’s selling and your customers’ buying to achieve the kind of enduring client partnerships that have heretofore been the exception and can now become commonplace.

The time pressures today on salespeople and their prospects are out of control. Sellers react in two ways that undermine their effectiveness: First, in a misguided effort to save the prospects’ time, they take on more of the work and shoulder more of the burden themselves. And second, they turn proposals around with lightning speed, delivering the complete package, ready-for-a-signature, on the second call. That’s what I call handoff selling—where the salesperson does all of her work first, hands off the proposal to the buyer as if it were a baton in a relay race, and then the buyer begins his work, the detailed consideration of this and other proposals.

The seller believes in her heart that she’s doing the right thing, responding to urgency—hers or her prospect’s—and the time poverty we all suffer from these days, by delivering the proposal lickety-split. Little does she know: She’s her own worst enemy, every time she does that.

In that scenario, the seller stays on the selling track, the buyer stays on the buying track, and they rarely intersect. Yes, these are their respective job descriptions, but it’s time to update those job descriptions, as I make clear in my new book, Close Like the Pros. Selling and buying both can be made more efficient, more productive, and more successful when they’re merged into a single process—Interactive Selling.

Today’s complex sales invariably involve lots of back and forth, lots of give and take, lots of questions and answers, lots of modifying and tweaking. The pros out there, the ones who do the biggest deals and take home the biggest paychecks, get in sync with this reality and structure their selling-and-buying process to take advantage of all that interactivity, not to try and truncate it. Interactive selling is how the pros close big deals, and it’s a process anyone can learn.

Close Like the Pros does nothing less than redefine closing for the 21st century! In the book, I introduce you to a new way of thinking about closing—as a process rather than an event—and to the new language of selling: Contracting, Partnering, Ground Rules, Clear Paths, Genuine Agendas, Mini-Closes, Homework Assignments, Half-Baked Ideas, Trial Balloons, Progress Reports, the No-Surprise Proposal, the Critical Path, Molehill Decisions, and the Post-Sale Partner.

I guarantee you that Close Like the Pros is not a re-hash of what you’ve read elsewhere. This is the first time Interactive Selling has ever been revealed, explained, and turned into a system anyone can learn and use. You might consider the practices in this book to be sales basics—and I would agree!—but they’re the basics that are missing from every other book on the shelf.

When I hear about a new book… or see it on the shelf at a bookstore… one of the first questions I ask is, Who’s the author and what are his credentials? So it’s only fair I answer that question for you, potential buyers of Close Like the Pros.

I’ve been selling, helping salespeople, and consulting on the development of sales organizations for nearly my entire career. I conceived and established The Center for Sales Strategy (CSS) in 1983 and have led its growth to today’s roster of nearly 30 full-time career staff. I’m the guy behind much of the company’s original sales and management systems and training programs, but I’m proud today to be surrounded by a very creative staff whose output now exceeds my own. I have seen the company spread its influence throughout the US and around the world, with clients in Canada, Australia, Malaysia, and Greece.

In 2000, CSS entered the realm of Web-based training through its wholly-owned subsidiary, The Center for Online Learning (coLearn). Today, I serve as CEO of CSS and coLearn and I manage day-to-day operations together with Jim Hopes, our president, and John Henley, our executive VP.

CSS and coLearn currently provide sales and management consulting and training services to clients worldwide, including benchmark companies such as Manheim, Time Warner, Comcast, Cox, Media General, Hearst-Argyle, AutoTrader.com, Bonneville International, Corus (Canada), Austereo (Australia, Malaysia, Greece), and more.

Sales and management practices we’ve developed here at CSS have enabled our clients to achieve business reputations and revenue market shares that make them the envy of their competitors. Proof of our impact is that CSS continues year after year to have a client renewal rate that’s unparalleled in media sales consulting. I’m equally proud of our record of attracting extraordinarily talented professionals to make their career at CSS over the years, and of the company’s very low personnel turnover.

Before founding CSS, I was VP/general manager of WAAF/WFTQ in Worcester, MA, for seven years, where we multiplied revenues nearly tenfold and moved from red ink to cash cow. I was a director of the $1.6 billion BankWorcester Corporation and its subsidiary, Worcester County Institution for Savings.