Insight Selling

Surprising Research on What Sales Winners Do Differently

Mike Schultz, John E. Doerr

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118875063
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

What do winners of major sales do differently than the sellers who almost won, but ultimately came in second place?

Mike Schultz and John Doerr, bestselling authors and world-renowned sales experts, set out to find the answer. They studied more than 700 business-to-business purchases made by buyers who represented a total of $3.1 billion in annual purchasing power. When they compared the winners to the second-place finishers, they found surprising results.

Not only do sales winners sell differently, they sell radically differently, than the second-place finishers.

In recent years, buyers have increasingly seen products and services as replaceable. You might think this would mean that the sale goes to the lowest bidder. Not true! A new breed of seller—the insight seller—is winning the sale with strong prices and margins even in the face of increasing competition and commoditization.

In Insight Selling, Schultz and Doerr share the surprising results of their research on what sales winners do differently, and outline exactly what you need to do to transform yourself and your team into insight sellers. They introduce a simple three-level model based on what buyers say tip the scales in favor of the winners:

Level 1 "Connect." Winners connect the dots between customer needs and company solutions, while also connecting with buyers as people.

Level 2 "Convince." Winners convince buyers that they can achieve maximum return, that the risks are acceptable, and that the seller is the best choice among all options.

Level 3 "Collaborate." Winners collaborate with buyers by bringing new ideas to the table, delivering new ideas and insights, and working with buyers as a team.

They also found that much of the popular and current advice given to sellers can damage sales results. Insight Selling is both a strategic and tactical guide that will separate the good advice from the bad, and teach you how to put the three levels of selling to work to inspire buyers, influence their agendas, and maximize value. If you want to find yourself and your team in the winner's circle more often, this book is a must-read.

Chapter 1
Sales Winners Sell Differently

The New World of Selling

It’s old news that buyers have a lot more information about everything than in decades past. Primarily through the Internet—but also through increased availability of research and use of consultants—buyers know more about your offerings, market, and competitors, and their issues and problems, industry, and options for action, than ever before.

Also fairly well established is that today’s buyers are harder to reach, buying cycles are longer, and more decision makers are involved in every sale. Buyers are also more skeptical. Although the great recession is largely in the rearview mirror, the psychological scars will remain for years to come.

Yes, buying has changed a lot, yet from the 1970s until recently, not much changed in the world of sales methodologies. The prevailing thinking in recent decades has been sellers could study and learn traditional solution or consultative selling approaches, apply them well, and produce excellent results consistently.

Not anymore.

Given the changes in buying, the commoditization of many products and services, and the radical intensification of competition in many industries, it’s no surprise that solution sales concepts aren’t working as they once did. We at RAIN Group are not the only ones seeing this trend either. Articles in the mainstream business press, including the Harvard Business Review,¹ routinely raise the specter of the death of solutions sales.

In any case, it’s a new world in selling. As is the way of things, with the sunset of one paradigm comes the sunrise of another. Those sellers still living in the old paradigm, however, are losing sales. It’s not surprising, then, that the pace of companies calling us saying, “How we used to sell isn’t working anymore” has been accelerating for years and seems to have reached a tipping point.

Yet as these sellers report more losses, buying is still happening! This means someone is winning. This raises a fairly obvious question: What are they doing to win?

Analyzing What Sales Winners Do Differently

What’s Actually Happening

An obvious question, perhaps, but it seemed like a good one to ask, so we did. We wrote this on our whiteboard in big red letters:

What are the winners of actual sales opportunities doing differently than the sellers who come in second place?

To find the answer, in late 2012 and into early 2013 we began studying actual purchases in industries with complex sales, such as technology, consulting and professional services, financial services, industrial products, and a variety of other business-to-business (B2B) industries. The results of this study focus on more than 700 B2B purchases made by a broad sample of buyers. In aggregate, these buyers were responsible for $3.1 billion in annual purchases. Along with our survey research, we’ve now spoken to more than 150 corporate buyers about their recent purchasing experiences.

Here’s what we found:

1. Winners sell radically differently than the second-place finishers. In many ways, what sales winners do differently is both surprising and fascinating.
2. There’s a specific combination of behaviors that sales winners exhibit and outcomes they achieve that the second-place finishers don’t.
3. Several key factors that set apart the winners are rarely discussed in the world of selling. These now demand attention.
4. With all due respect to the Harvard Business Review, solution sales is definitely not dead. However, although solution sales concepts are still necessary, they’re no longer sufficient to win sales. Also, fundamental solution sales concepts need reimagination and relabeling. They need to evolve.

Before we share the specifics of what we found, it’s important to note we did not have preferences for what the results would show. Our intent was to find out what’s really going on and proceed from there. We expected the results would influence our thinking, our sales consulting, and our RAIN Selling training process and programs, requiring us to make updates and changes. Indeed, this has been the case.

Research from the Buyer’s Perspective

One of the interesting things about reading sales books and articles is that much advice seems to make sense on its face, even to us after 50 collective years living in the sales training and enablement world. Although, with a few exceptions, most selling methods sound fine, the reality is that some of them are wrong, or at least wrong for certain businesses and people. It’s not, however, easy to suss out the good advice from the bad.

There are a lot of ways to do the sussing, too. Not all of them are helpful. Sales research methods often focus on asking sellers, sales managers, and company leaders what the top performers do versus average performers. Unfortunately, people’s perceptions of what they do—and what they actually do—don’t tend to match up.

For example, Hinge Research Institute recently studied buyers and sellers across several B2B industries about the buyers’ perceptions of seller companies’ selling and marketing practices. Dr. Lee W. Frederiksen, managing partner of Hinge, told us, “Across the board, sellers and buyers think tremendously differently about what’s important. For example, sellers vastly overestimate the role of price in closing the sale. They see it as more than twice as important as the buyers view it.”^a We see the same incongruity in buyer and seller perceptions. We recently polled several hundred sellers on some of the same questions we asked the buyers in our study. What the buyers perceived about what sellers did, and what the sellers perceived what they, themselves, did, were markedly different.

The primary research on which Insight Selling is based looked at sales from the buyers’ perspective. As mentioned, our objective was to find the answer to the question, What are the winners of actual sales opportunities doing differently than the sellers who come in second place? We looked at it, however, through the eyes of the buyers. This approach allowed us to get past sellers’ perceptions of themselves and their colleagues and concentrate on the buyers’ perspective and what actually happ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Sales Winners Sell Differently
• Chapter 2: What Is Insight Selling?
• Chapter 3: Insight Selling and Value
• Chapter 4: Insight and Level 1: Connect
• Chapter 5: Insight and Level 2: Convince
• Chapter 6: Insight and Level 3: Collaborate
• Chapter 7: On Trust
• Chapter 8: Profile of the Insight Seller
• Chapter 9: Insight Selling Mistakes
• Chapter 10: Buyers Who Buy Insights
• Chapter 11: Getting the Most from Sales Training
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• About RAIN Group
• About the Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement