Stacia Skinner - Sell Now!: Adaptive Strategies for Todays Changing Marketplace

How to Use This Book to Beat Your Sales Quota

Manage Your Time; Increase Your Sales by 20 Percent or More

Proactive Management of the Sell Now! Funnel System

The Secret of Top-Down Prospecting

Get Sales with Referral-Based Contacts

The Sales Interview

Enhance Your Value Proposition

Get to Yes in Half the Time

Customer Satisfaction Means Repeat Business

Good Times, Bad TimesAdapting Your Tactics to Any Market Environment

You probably dont need anyone to tell you that selling can be a challenge. Todays market is particularly tough. Sales cycles are taking longer to play out. The deals are both tougher to close and worth less money than was typical a few years back. The reality is that prospects are now downright skittish about releasing money. Many of them have had their budgets shredded beyond recognition; many have been burned in the recent past by bad purchasing experiences, sudden market downturns, or a combination of the two; management changes due to reorganizations makes it more difficult to get answers.

We can add to those economic and institutional jitters a second hard reality for salespeople: prospects, and even current customers, are significantly harder to get a hold of than they used to be. This is due, at least in part, to new communications technologies that give buyers more screens to hide behind. Our contacts at prospective buying organizationsthose who havent been laid off or gone out of business, that isare stretched very thin. Many of them are now doing the jobs of two or three people, and they are doing them under tighter timelines. Theres less time for salespeople to solicit business.

Selling in this or any environment depends on making intelligent, strategic time investments. Todays markets are ruthlessly intolerant of inefficiency, and the only reliable way to survive, and thrive, is to root out those inefficiencies and become truly disciplined in your time investments. Its more important than ever to choose the right activity the first time around and make the very most of the available time window. Many of the selling routines of years pastrelationship building over lunch or golf, for instance, or the standard cold prospecting callare vestiges of a bygone era. Salespeople who attempt to cling to them out of habit, or out of a simple unwillingness to adapt to new circumstances, will waste their own and their prospects most precious resource: time.

Most selling systems usually havent been fine-tuned in a way that encouragesor requiressalespeople to get obsessive about making smarter decisions that return bigger and better payoffs on the time. In this book, you will learn a set of dynamic sales methods that build on what actually works, updated to reflect todays market realities about attention spans, value, and return on (financial and time) investments.

Sell Now! offers these proven methods on:

• How to prioritize your daily, weekly, and quarterly selling routine. You learn what to do first, what not to do at all, and how to identify the activities that generate the most value for yourself and your clients.
• How to identify your own and your organizations areas of greatest added value to your current customers, and you learn how to talk about that value in a compelling way. This is the Instant Sell method of communicating with and qualifying prospects and customers.
• How to save your own time, and everyone elses, by mastering a tactic called top-down prospecting.
• How to speed up your sales cycle by leveraging different kinds of referrals.
• How to identify the hot buttons that turn prospects into allies who are willing to go to bat for you, defend your value, and get decisions made more quickly on your behalf.
• How to deliver a presentation to an individual or a group customized for their specific needs and concerns
• How to get to yes in roughly half the time it takes your competitors to get there in comparable accounts. You also learn how to defend or enhance your value proposition during the final stages of the sale.
• How to promote your organizations service capability to ensure repeat business that grows larger over time.

This book is all about making the most effective use of your time so lets get started! Move on to the first chapter so you can begin to Sell Now!

Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.

Alan Lakein