Selling is Dead: Moving Beyond Traditional Sales Roles and Practices to Revitalize Growth
Is selling dead? Are salespeople, the traditional champions of growth, adding increasingly less value to both their employers and the buyers on whom they call? Has the faster cadence of business, change, and innovation made sellers less relevant at a time when their performance is most needed?Whether you're a senior executive, a sales or marketing manager, or a salesperson, your personal and organizational success is tied to the answers to these questions. In this groundbreaking book, the authors examine why salespeople and selling teams must redefine their roles and adopt new selling frameworks—or risk obsolescence.For major account sellers, traditional growth strategies have become increasingly ineffective in the New Economy. Innovation, the province of future profit, growth, and survival for many firms, is especially challenging to sell. New customers, the lifeblood of most organizations and the driving force behind real and significant growth, have also become more and more difficult for sellers to create. The paths to new customers have become more complex and less forgiving. In Selling Is Dead, two world-class sales consultants reveal that customer scarcity and the delayed and diminished returns from innovation are self-inflicted epidemics.The key, argue major account sales experts Marc Miller and Jason Sinkovitz, is to transform your transactional sales team into a disciplined unit of "businesspeople who sell." The authors also identify multiple categories of large account selling, each with its own best practices, sales skills, and strategies. To sell successfully in this diverse environment requires a focused framework powerful enough to deliver significantly higher value to buyers—beyond the products and services being sold—yet flexible enough to adapt quickly to radically different types of buyer demands.Drawing on their experiences with hundreds of companies, the authors present scores of case studies along with proven, research-based approaches that have enabled their clients to fuse their sales, marketing, customer service, and new product departments into sustainable, market-optimizing growth engines. You'll learn how to:Understand and identify the multiple types of major account salesCreate a disciplined and strategic sales framework that mirrors the buyer's "demand type"Master the sales process steps and skills that will advance your buyers to "yes"Build management systems to maintain a cohesive selling effort across the organizationThe old methods of large account selling may be dead, but you can still win the new customers that generate real growth, boost revenues, and send profits soaring. Take an eye-opening business journey in Selling Is Dead and learn how to accelerate revenue growth and sustain a higher level of sales productivity.