Beyond the Sales Process

Steve Andersen, Dave Stein

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780814437162
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Kundenbeziehungen

If you want to gain the winning edge for your sales performance, it's time to embrace the entire customer life cycle.

Your job may be all about sales, but not your customers. Did you know that the average executive spends less than 5 percent of their time engaged in the buying of products and services? Therefore, sales professionals who focus solely on the moment of the sale have made a fatal miscalculation in understanding their customers.

Beyond the Sales Process provides you with a proven methodology for driving success before, during, and after every sale. Featuring instructional case studies from companies such as Hilton Worldwide, Merck, and Siemens, this resource reveals 12 essential strategies for salespeople wanting to take their performance to a whole new level, including:

• Research your customer
• Build a vision with them for their own success
• Understand your customer's drivers, objectives, and challenges
• Create and realize value together
• Leverage your results to forge lasting--and mutually beneficial—relationships

If you want to successfully sell to your customers, you need to know your customers…beyond the sales process!

Index

A

Aberdeen Group, 43

Account management

best practices in, 213

strategic, 80, 202

Account teams

alignment with customer’s decision teams, 115–116, 120

as customer information source, 11–12

Actionable awareness, 94

as basis for past proven value development, 188

as basis for value differentiation, 142–143, 148, 155–156

definition of, 91

development of, 91–93

Adaptation, in approach to customer, 206–222

to customer’s changing needs, 211–214

evaluation of effectiveness of, 221–222

Adecco Staffing U.S., 159–164

Advice, from sponsors, 146–147

Advisors, trusted, 117, 119–120

Advocates/advocacy, 38, 44, 62, 146

After the sale strategies, 175–252

case studies of, 237–252

strategy 9: meeting and exceeding customer expectations, 177–191

strategy 10: validation of success with customer, 192–205

strategy 11: adaptation in approach to customer, 206–222

strategy 12: expansion of customer relationship, 223–236

Alignment, 38, 40–41, 59–60, 105–121.

See also Sponsors; Supporters

adaptation in approach to, 213

as basis for competitive advantage, 107

of business objectives, 108

cultural, 108

customer’s evaluation of, 200–201

decision making and, 100–101

definition of, 105–106

dimensions of, 107–114

evaluation of effectiveness of, 120–121

external, 111–112

internal, 79–83, 108–111

at multiple levels, 112–114

of organizational footprints, 107–108

as performance impact zone, 194, 195–196, 198, 200–201, 211, 213, 217, 218–219

political, 95

potential p...