Accelerants: Twelve Strategies to Sell Faster, Close Deals Faster, and Grow Your Business Faster [Hardcover]

Michael A. Boylan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 28, 2006

“Many sales processes don’t work anymore––period. But companies don’t know exactly what’s not working, or why, or what needs fixing. What’s worse, many companies are in denial that their processes are broken and will not support what they need to do going forward.”
Today it's tougher than ever for sales, marketing, and business development organizations to keep improving their revenue and profits. Potential clients want to see salespeople less and less, real decision makers hide behind skilled gatekeepers, and even when you actually reach them, they have impossibly short attention spans. Sales and closing cycles get longer, margins get thinner, and customers keep raising the bar – demanding more value, cheaper prices, and better service.

Michael Boylan's Accelerants offers a powerful solution to these impediments to growth. Giving business leaders the tools to diagnose what is hindering revenue growth, Boylan first identifies twelve constraints that apply consistent downward pressure on companies, making them less efficient, effective, and profitable. He then prescribes the Accelerant Principles—twelve field-proven tools Boylan has perfected over twenty years that can help any organization overcome, minimize, or dissolve the constraints to business growth.

Together, the Accelerant principles offer a cohesive framework that can help any business:
* target new revenue opportunities more effectively
* connect with the real decision makers faster
* craft more persuasive value propositions
* deliver better pitches, in less time
* weed out prospects who are "just kicking the tires"
* shorten closing cycles by up to 25 percent

You’ll read how a magazine start-up used the Accelerant Principles to create such a compelling value proposition that advertisers were competing with each other to participate. And how a large multinational technology firm employed these techniques to meet with top executives from day one and close unprecedented deals faster than they thought possible.

With ideas that are relevant, timely, and applicable, Accelerants provides a program that will foster empowerment, cohesion, and clarity of purpose within any sales, marketing, or business development organization.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At its core, Boylan's message is simple: sales pitches often fail because they're too long, don't contain enough solid information and aren't targeted to the right people. He spins that out into a fancy chart identifying 12 constraints on any sales pitch and the 12 tools he's developed to overcome them, each of which he addresses in detail. After showing readers how to suss out prospective clients' attitudes about their products and their competitors, he delivers the crucial (though inelegantly phrased) advice to "metric the message"—that is, to "grind down the messages and value propositions" into a concise, specific promise about what you can deliver. In presentations, less is more, argues Boylan (The Power to Get In). He recommends cutting your pitch down to a third of its usual length, front-loading it with the most essential information and getting into details only if the customer wants to hear more. On its own, Boylan's advice is useful, but he turns the closing sections into a blatant commercial pitch, urging readers to get fuller training in the Accelerant program through his consulting firm. For most readers, the introduction should provide all the help they need. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Michael A. Boylan is founder and CEO of the management consulting firm Accelerant International, which works with Fortune 1000 clients such as ADP, Microsoft’s Certified Solution Providers, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, PLATO Learning, and Research in Motion (maker of BlackBerry). An entrepreneur since 1986, he lectures widely for corporations and is the author of a previous book entitled The Power to Get In.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover; First edition (December 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159184150X
• ISBN-13: 978-1591841500
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,298,661 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good start- fades in the execution, April 30, 2007

By 

Reg Nordman "(K)nights on the Road" (Vancouver, BC Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Accelerants: Twelve Strategies to Sell Faster, Close Deals Faster, and Grow Your Business Faster (Hardcover)

The abstract for this book promised that it would seem to be a very good complement to Rocket Builders Precision Sales and Marketing Program, as the subhead "sell faster, close deals faster, & grow your business faster" detailed our program results exactly. And yes, the 12 "rules" fit very well within our model. However the author violates one of today's business rules. In order to get more from your target/reader, you need to give more. This is a very frustrating book as it never really gets into the details of how the system works, just that it does work- trust us, preferring to never miss an opportunity to pitch the unique values of the author's company to offer customized solutions to your company. The last four chapters (?) have to be one of the most blatant and repetitive sales pitches I have encountered. Unfortunately if you go to his website, it offers even less information, so you have to get the book to get anything! I could not help but think that the author goes out of his way to sell so often that he ruins what started out as a useful book. Since I already know how these "Rules" do work to maximize the return, I obtained very little new at the end of the day. At $30 I can't recommend it.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Some interesting principles for those wanting a more effective sales process, January 4, 2007

By 

Craig Matteson (Saline, MI) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Accelerants: Twelve Strategies to Sell Faster, Close Deals Faster, and Grow Your Business Faster (Hardcover)

Accelerants are used to start fires or to make them spread more rapidly and burn more fiercely. Michael Boylan offers 12 principles that he learned from his own efforts in sales. He explains how the old sales principles and methods have been competed into impotency. He demonstrates why the sales process needs to be tighter, faster and more, well, aggressive. The author encourages the salesperson to use leverage they may not realize they have and to take charge of the dance.

Boylan believes they will help you focus on a better cut of opportunity, get connected with real decision makers (not just those that say they do, but are merely recommenders), develop a more compelling and persuasive value proposition, make a better and shorter presentation (he teaches a 1/3 - 2/3 principle that seems quite interesting), weed out tire kickers before they drain you of too much time and steal your expertise (making you an unpaid consultant), and shorten your sales cycle by up to 25%.

But this is in Part 2 of the book. Part 1 offers 12 constraints. These are used as part of an internal analysis of where you honestly are, figuring out what isn't going as well as you would like, and where you want to be. As Boylan takes you through the accelerants he often refers you back to the constraints for some helpful thinking. I think it is a very helpful pairing of ideas.

Part 3 offers a few success stories of people using the accelerants successfully (these are in addition the others offered as illustrations of principles in the text). Part 4 offers some ideas on how to move forward with the principles. He notes that the general principles will require some customization and that getting someone who has already used the principles can help you get there faster and with less fumbling. Part 5 talks about Boylan's consulting company, the services he offers, and how to contact him. These last three parts are quite short.

The book is easy to read and you will likely get some very good ideas that can help you in this more fiercely competitive environment.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Solid material, despite a few irritations...., February 1, 2007

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Accelerants: Twelve Strategies to Sell Faster, Close Deals Faster, and Grow Your Business Faster (Hardcover)

The Five Star rating correctly indicates my opinion of the importance of this book's subject and of the quality of its content. However, I wish at least a few reader-friendly "accelerants" had been utilized to facilitate and expedite periodic reviews of key points after the book has been read. It takes too much effort to locate all of Michael Boylan's "12 strategies to sell faster, close deals faster + grow [a] business better," except as they are listed in the Table of Contents. Also, several of the illustrations (e.g. "The Constant Continuum" on page 6 and "The Twelve ACCERANT Principles" on page 7) are almost unreadable. Moreover, I think Boylan overplays his hand when inserting frequent self-serving references to what he and his management consulting firm (Accelerant International) offer. Those who are favorably impressed can certainly track him down him at the Web site address provided. Presumably a number of readers will.

Boylan's previous book, The Power to Get In, was written for those who have serious problems with gaining access to others of special importance to them. In it, he offers a cohesive and comprehensive system to overcome all manner of barriers. This system creates what he calls "The Circle of Leverage." Obviously, the strategies and tactics in this book can be very helpful to those in sales but if we expand our perspective to include other forms of persuasion, his book offers even greater value. For example, consider the potential relevance of the Circle of Leverage System to recruiting and hiring, M&A initiatives, competing with others in the same organization for its resources, use of customers as an extended sales force, use of "alumni" to locate talent, etc.

In his newest book, Boylan explains how to expedite this process of cultivation, penetration, and solicitation. He identifies twelve strategies that he characterizes as "accelerants." I strongly recommend that both books be read, despite some repetition of key points, because it is even more important now than ever before to accelerate the process by which to complete research on prospective buyers of whatever is offered for sale, select those with high-probability purchase potential, initiative cultivation and solicitation of each, and hopefully close on the sale. The information and counsel that Boylan provides in his two books, especially in Accelerants - will be invaluable to that process.