ProActive Selling: Control the Process -- Win the Sale by William "Skip" Miller

Product Description

Many sales experts focus on a cookie-cutter sales "strategy," encouraging reps to push the customer through a pre-planned sales process -- an approach that can drive customers away. With ProActive Selling, reps have a wide variety of flexible and effective selling tactics to choose from. This enables them to adapt and approach each sales call uniquely and keep the customer at the center of every sales presentation.

By learning to think like the customer, sales professionals will learn to shift their own focus from the selling process to the buying process, and how to use the right tool at the right time. Miller's 15 practical selling tools let sales professionals in any industry:

* double the number of calls returned from prospective customers * call high (where buying decisions are really made) and stay there * increase the effectiveness of in-person and telephone sales interactions * own the process and own the deal

Plus, they'll learn how to speak the right language to buyers at any level, get rid of the "maybes" in the sales funnel, and master the 7 Qualification Questions that keep their efforts focused on only the most worthwhile accounts.
Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #190492 in Books
Published on: 2003-02-10
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
240 pages
Editorial Reviews

Paul Tulenoko, SMALL BUSINESS ADVICE, Syndicated by Scripps Howard News Service
Truly a remarkable book. I have taken many sales courses and this one is a winner.

Review

Paul Tulenko, syndicated columnist: "Truly a remarkable book. I have taken many sales courses and this one is a winner. I suggest you buy the book, read it, practice it."

Review

Paul Tulenko, syndicated columnist: "Truly a remarkable book. I have taken many sales courses and this one is a winner. I suggest you buy the book, read it, practice it."
Customer Reviews

An Amazing Tool for Salespeople
Having reviewed and studied sales materials to include info products with ten thousand dollar price tags, I am astounded that the quality and conciseness of Miller's advice to salespeople can be had for eighteen bucks. The book does a great job of arming the salesperson with the knowledge he needs to have confidence selling right up to the CEO level.

Good but not new stuff
Having read Miller's Proactive Sales Management (which I thought was excellent) I was keen to read his ideas on selling.

I have to admit that I found this book had a lot less impact and many of the ideas have been put forward before by Bosworth, Rackham, Thull, Sandler and others. There's nothing wrong with the notion that you should see things from the prospect or customer point of view and that communication should be in their terms - or indeed that the process of selling should be controlled in an intelligent and proactive sense.

But I did find some of the concepts (such as 'buyers look back, salespeople look forwards') to be a potentially dangerous assumption in some industries, such as technology.

So, if you have not had much sales training or have not read many sales books don't let me spoil it for you. If you have, you may find yourself thinking you have heard the concepts before, but the words sounded different.

Welcome to Success
I gave a copy to everyone in my sales organization and we have discussed it as a team and individually, using Skip's knowledge as our "language"..."Sellers sell forwards, buyers buy backwards".... In the past two years since implementing this, 80% of my regional sales people have made the 'club' trip each year.