Andy Paul - Amp Up Your Sales

Amp Up
Your Sales

Powerful Strategies That
Move Customers to Make
Fast, Favorable Decisions

ANDY PAUL

AMERICAN MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Paul, Andy.

Amp up your sales : powerful strategies that move customers to make fast, favorable decisions / Andy Paul.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8144-3487-1 (pbk.) ISBN 0-8144-3487-8 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-8144-3488-8 (ebook) 1. Selling. 2. Sales management. I. Title.

HF5438.25.P376 2015

658.85dc23

2014024013

2015 Andy Paul.

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

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Its not what you sell. Its how you sell.

Lets take a quick look at where we are. Three societal and technological changes over the past few decades have totally disrupted business and irrevocably changed selling.

Globalization, a force thats been occurring for thousands of years, has made the world a smaller placeand its brought new, competitive entrants from just about everywhere. Your marketplace is now crowded. You look a lot like your competitors, and they look a lot like you.

The Internet has disintermediated whole industries, like book sales (think Amazon.com), television (think Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube), and newspapers. If a salesperson cant add value to a buying decision, that purchase can be made via a quick and easy transaction over the Web.

The final change affecting the sales force is commoditization. In the 1970s and 1980s, we were able to speak about a sustainable competitive advantagethe ability to do something in a way that was so difficult to duplicate that you could dominate your market for decades. The idea of sustainable is now quaint. What you sell, no matter how good, is going to be copiedand with lightning speed.

But theres good news. Because it matters more how you sell than what you sell, youre empowered to act in a way that provides you with a massive competitive advantageand one not easily duplicated. Theres a way you can Amp Up Your Sales.

By learning what it really means to buy and to sell, youll discover the advantage gained by providing your customers with the help they need to make buying decisions (ones favorable to you). Once you understand the mechanics of selling this way, youre ready for a move that will differentiate and define you in the minds of your prospects and clients.

If you want to compress your sales cycle, win new clients faster, and help them realize the advantages of what you sell sooner, you need to be more than responsive. You need to be super-responsive. In a short, powerful section of this book, youll recognize that helping your clients make a decision means giving them the information they need now. And not a minute later.

Creating a competitive advantage means creating more value than your competitors do. This means more than creating value through your solution. Remember, its how you sell that matters. Your time-starved clients expect you to create the maximum value during every interaction.

Selling is more challenging than its ever been. If youre a salesperson, the book you hold in your hands holds the answers to the challenges you face. If youre a sales manager or sales leader, its a powerful toolkit that can fundamentally change how your sales force engages your prospects in clients. You need a strategic plan to produce better results, and you need the tactics that allow you to execute and win. Youll find both in Amp Up Your Sales.

S. Anthony Iannarino
www.thesalesblog.com
Westerville, Ohio

Sales is one of the few professions where nearly everyone is searching for the edge that will make him or her better. It doesnt matter if youre the top salesperson at your company or are simply working hard to reach the next level of productivity. The desire to constantly improve is the same.

In that sense, salespeople are like professional athletes whose careers and incomes depend on achieving and maintaining a level of uncommon excellence. Athletes incorporate the latest knowledge about diet, fitness, strength, and mental focus into their training regimens in order to achieve even small increments in the improvement in their performance. After all, in most sports, a 1 percent improvement can be the difference between winning and losingbetween being the champion or an also-ran.

So it is in sales. You only have to be 1 percent better than your competitors to win your customers business. However, theres a catch.