John Jantsch - Duct Tape Selling: Think Like a Marketer-Sell Like a Superstar

O n a cold January morning in 2007, a hidden video camera captured thousands of commuters simply walking past violinist Joshua Bell as he played some of the most complex music ever written, on an extremely valuable Stradivarius violin. Most didnt seem to notice the difference between Bells virtuosity and the skill of an everyday subway musician.

Just days before, and then again after this experiment, Bell performed to sold-out theaters filled with ticket holders willing to pay top dollar and ready to deliver thunderous standing ovations.

In the context of the subway station, ordinary people did not recognize Bells genius.

We dont live in a vacuum. Every idea we have, song we hear, or sales pitch we connect with is filtered through a number of elements, including our mood, the environment, and our unique understanding of the world and our place in it. All of these factors affect the value and importance we place on what we believe in, what we deem worthy of our time, and what we buy.

In the same vein, while salespeoples mastery, skill, or point of view may be important and well thought-out, the context in which their ideas, introductions, and pitches are delivered is equallyor sometimes moreimportant.

In many ways this book is about changing the context of how you, as a salesperson, are received and perceived.

So let me ask you this: Are you ready to hone your virtuosity as a salesperson and put it on display in the places where people willingly pay a premium to engage such work or are you content to hang around in the subway hoping for the scraps of interested passersby?

This book is designed to show you, first, how to reframe your own mind-set about what it means to sell in the world today. From there, well look at how to vastly alter the way prospects, customers, and competitors view your professional brand. To do so, you need to think of yourself as a guide in the customers buying process rather than an information source, research data point, transaction catalyst, or whatever other trendy term people have assigned to the act of selling.

This book will show you how to change the context of selling by teaching you how to:

• Ask what you can give your clients instead of asking what they can give you
• Form and lead an industry group instead of mindlessly joining every one you find
• Make education-rich sales pitches to rooms packed with engaged potential clients instead of cold-calling prospects
• Get yourself invited to speak in front of audiences instead of simply attending events
• Earn the trust to be introduced to referral prospects instead of given leads
• Interview industry luminaries instead of simply downloading their podcasts
• Build a strategic-partner network instead of waiting around to be asked to partner
• Write for respected industry publications instead of just putting them in your RSS reader

When you reframe any relationship, you often change the way you are heard, received, and perceived. In sales, by reframing the selling process as a journey that you and the client are on togetherand that you are guiding him throughyou can become a valuable and necessary part of your clients team.

Duct Tape Selling is divided into three parts. The first two parts are Mind-set of the New Sales Guide and Practices of the New Sales Guide. Part I is aimed squarely at equipping the individual salesperson with the mind-set that will enable you to act as a guide for your prospects and clients in the buying process. You can think of it as laying the foundation for your new sales strategy. The second part offers the very practical new skills and techniques you must master to take full advantage of the new selling environment. Youll find that the mind-sets and processes I write about are often traditionally thought of as belonging to marketers rather than sellers. The new sales world no longer supports those distinctions. To succeed, sellers must understand the marketing mind-set.

If you are an independent salesperson, you can adopt these new strategies and tactics as you work your way through this book. I encourage you to take action on some element of every chapteryoull find a lot of ideas you can begin to implement immediately, ideas that set the groundwork for long-term success while also providing short-term results.

If youre charged with leading a sales department or organization, youll find the third part, The World of the New Sales Coach, particularly valuable. This section is intended for the business owner, VP of sales, or sales manager charged with hiring, training, equipping, and incentivizing the new sales guide model in a team setting. Here, Ill reveal how you, as a sales manager, can adapt a coaching mentality to train others in the new model of selling. The effectiveness, as well as the implementation, of the new selling mind-set and tools is governed to a large extent by the acceptance and practice of this third part by those in leadership positions.

If you work for a sales organization and the ideas in this book resonate with you, but conflict with the way your organization views the sales function, I urge you to share this book with your boss. You can be the key driver in reframing the context of the sales function internally and externally.

Before we go any further, I think its important that I share my inspiration for writing this book.

Ive been a marketing consultant and small-business owner for over twenty-five years, and in that time Ive worked with just about every industry imaginable. Ive worked with solo entrepreneurs charged with every aspect of marketing and sales, and with very large organizations struggling to get sales and marketing departments to think and speak in the same language.

Prior to starting my own marketing firm, I was employed as a sales rep for a national printing company and spent my days knocking on doors and building relationships. It was in that role that I discovered firsthand the power of stepping outside the normal bounds of sales tactics.