Today’s Book: Strategic Selling: The Unique Sales System Proven Successful by America’s Best Companies BY Robert B. Miller, Stephen E. Heiman, Tad Tuleja

Is sales about “positive mental attitude”, “persuasion skills”, “negotiation skills”, “hustling”, “hard working”, etc? Perhaps not! Especially, if you need to sell to a “Large Account “.

The foreword to this book is written by John A. Young who took over as CEO of Hewlett Packard in 1978. By 1985, HP sales had reached $6.5 billion with 85,000 employees.

When the concept of “Strategic Selling” was introduced to John Young and his team, it immediately made sense to them. HP needed a solid game plan to help its thousands of salesmen to not only capture big accounts but also retain the customers for a long-time with continued repeat and new sales.

One could say that, at the core of “Strategic Selling”, the idea is to stop being a Salesman, and start being a Strategy Consultant / Coach. If you were a coach to your prospective customer, then, obviously, you would first thoroughly understand the customer’s requirements and then provide the best solution possible.

Now, this becomes challenging when you have to a make a large sale to large organizations having many stakeholders (buying influencers). How do you maneuver your way through multiple influencers (some even unknown to you)?

This book offers a methodology to do so from the author’s practical experiences of selling for big companies like Hewlett-Packard, Coca-Cola, Hertz Corporation, and Marriott International.

Excerpt:

Strategy and tactics are both essential to long-term sales success, but strategy must come first. No matter which model you decide is appropriate for a given sales objective and a given account, you will still profit from Strategic Selling only if you do your strategic analysis before the selling event.