CustomerCentric Selling [Hardcover]

Michael T. Bosworth (Author), John R. Holland (Author), Michael Bosworth (Author), John Holland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 21, 2003

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SOLUTION SELLING

The program that is revolutionizing highend selling, by showing companies how to "clone" their top sales performers

CEOs would pay anything to replicate their best salespeople; CustomerCentric Selling^TM explains instead how to replicate their skills. It details a repeatable, scalable, and transferable sales process that formats the questions that superior salespeople ask, and then uses the results to influence and enhance the words and behaviors of their colleagues.

CustomerCentric Selling^TM shows salespersons how to differentiate themselves and their offerings by appealing to customer needs, steering away from making one-way presentations and toward having meaningful and goal-oriented conversations. Currently offered in workshops and seminars around the world, its program provides step-by-step directions to help sales professionals:

• Transform sales calls into interactive conversations
• Position their offerings in relation to buyer needs
• Facilitate a more consistent customer experience
• Achieve shorter sales cycles
• Integrate sales and marketing into a cooperative, cross-functional team

CustomerCentric Selling^TM details a trademarked sales process that incorporates dozens of elements, skills, and sequences into a coherent and proven methodology. By teaching a specific yet innovative model for selling big ticket, often-intangible products and services, it shows sales professionals and executives how to make the seller-buyer relationship far less adversarial, and take selling to a higher level.

Editorial Reviews

Review

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SOLUTION SELLING

The program that is revolutionizing highend selling, by showing companies how to "clone" their top sales performers

CEOs would pay anything to replicate their best salespeople; CustomerCentric Selling explains instead how to replicate their skills. It details a repeatable, scalable, and transferable sales process that formats the questions that superior salespeople ask, and then uses the results to influence and enhance the words and behaviors of their colleagues.

CustomerCentric Selling shows salespersons how to differentiate themselves and their offerings by appealing to customer needs, steering away from making one-way presentations and toward having meaningful and goal-oriented conversations. Currently offered in workshops and seminars around the world, its program provides step-by-step directions to help sales professionals:

Transform sales calls into interactive conversations
Position their offerings in relation to buyer needs
Facilitate a more consistent customer experience
Achieve shorter sales cycles
Integrate sales and marketing into a cooperative, cross-functional team

CustomerCentric Selling details a trademarked sales process that incorporates dozens of elements, skills, and sequences into a coherent and proven methodology. By teaching a specific yet innovative model for selling big ticket, often-intangible products and services, it shows sales professionals and executives how to make the seller-buyer relationship far less adversarial, and take selling to a higher level.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

From the Back Cover

Strategies for Looking Past Your Products--to Uncover What Your Buyers Want

The most difficult task in selling--and the number one key to success--is to get inside the head of your buyer. CustomerCentric Selling presents a dynamic process for first understanding and shaping your buyers' concerns, then helping those same buyers visualize using your offering to achieve goals, solve problems, or satisfy needs.

Renowned sales leaders Michael Bosworth--author of the blockbuster bestseller Solution Selling--and John Holland outline an easy-to-follow, commonsense, and proven-successful approach to selling, one that is based on:

• Engaging in directed conversations instead of making presentations
• Asking relevant questions instead of offering personal opinions
• Targeting decision makers instead of product users

Bosworth and Holland combine nearly three decades of experience in sales process and training. Hundreds of lessons they learned along the way are incorporated into their CustomerCentric Sales approach--an approach proven to work for sales professionals at every level, regardless of industry or product line. Let CustomerCentric Selling show you how to make this revolutionary process work for you, and start you on the path to achieving long-term sales success by first forming partnerships with your buyers--based not on selling what you have but on providing what they need.

"Customercentric behavior has seven basic tenets. These are explained in sequence in the first chapter. As you read these descriptions, we invite you to imagine a spectrum of selling behavior--ranging from traditional on one end to customercentric on the other--and to locate yourself on that spectrum. Are you where you want to be, to be as successful as you can be?

"If not, what needs to change?"

--From Chapter 1

You're probably a successful salesperson, sales manager, sales executive, or CEO. You may even be one of the best.

CustomerCentric Selling can help you to be even better.

Better in that you will stop thinking in terms of your products and their features, and start thinking in terms of your buyers and their goals, problems, and needs. Better in that you will stop forcing products on buyers, and instead start allowing them to convince themselves of their need for your offerings. Better in that you will stop giving long-winded, opinion-laden speeches to lower-level "buyers", and instead begin to have no-nonsense, results-oriented business conversations with decision makers.

Better at virtually every stage of your approach.

Whether you are new to sales or a CEO, the market-proven methods outlined in CustomerCentric Selling will show you how to:

Move beyond impersonal presentations to engage in situation-specific, one-to-one conversations with key decision makers

• Consistently use sales-ready messaging to ensure your approach is both meaningful and on target
• Move buyers from focusing on what your product can do for them to focusing on what they can do with your product
• Convert your product's features into four-step, targeted usage scenarios that drive right to the heart of your buyer's needs
• Transform the sell cycle from a realm of mystery to a rational, orderly, and cooperative process with individual buyers and even committees

CustomerCentric Selling will show you how to transform each sales call from an annoying, artificial one-way speech into a productive, genuine two-way conversation. It will help you understand and shape your customers' needs, and then--and only then--reveal to your customer how your offering will fulfill those needs in the most cost-effective, meaningful, and customercentric manner possible.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (November 21, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071425454
• ISBN-13: 978-0071425452
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #543,053 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Diagnose Before You Prescribe, June 1, 2004

By 

Craig L. Howe "The Pointed Pundit" (Darien, CT United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: CustomerCentric Selling (Hardcover)

The concepts contained in this book are not new. Their presentation, however, is.

The authors outline why people buy -- and when and from whom. It should be required reading prior to the creation of any business plan. Although the word "selling" in the title, but this book more of a business manual is a really a business book more than it is a sales manual.

There are no clever opening lines, or guaranteed PowerPoint templates. If you spend time with the book you will gain much more-an understanding of what you sell, to whom you should be selling it and where to go to find them.If your managers read it, they will develop a new a concept of how to message and manage their sales process.

Bosworth and Holland believe customer centric selling contains seven basic concepts:
1. Sales are based on conversations, not presentations.
2. Asking relevant questions versus rendering opinions.
3. Solutions rather than relationships earn buyers' respect.
4. Target businesspeople versus users.
5. Sell usage, not reliance.
6. Salespeople manage managers rather than needing to be managed.
7. Enable buyers rather than selling them.

Managers and Salespeople who spent time with this book will add value to their organizations. If you are responsible for moving product, this book is a must read.

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Required reading for execs, January 7, 2004

By 

Bruce Hadley (Oregon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: CustomerCentric Selling (Hardcover)

As reviewed in our January 6, 2004 issue:

Let's cut to the chase: This is the best book on sales we've read in many, many years.

"CustomerCentric Selling" doesn't break new ground with sales tricks and techniques; rather, its strength is in the fact that it ties sales, marketing, and business imperatives together in a way that has the potential to turn conventional selling approaches on their collective ears.

In fact, there's a bit of a paradox here: If you're a dyed-in-the-wool software sales rep with a quota to meet or beat, you may be disappointed in this book, because you won't find any magic bullets you can employ to meet your month-end number.

If you are that beleaguered sales rep, you may even find yourself annoyed with Bosworth and Holland, because their message is that your obsession with quotas is misguided. That's easy for them to say, right? They don't have a sales VP banging them on the head every Monday morning.

But that's exactly the point: If you're that rep, get your sales VP to read "CustomerCentric Selling" Better yet, get the company's CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, VP marketing, investors, and board of directors to read it.

"CustomerCentric Selling" does such a superb job of outlining why people buy -- and when and from whom -- it should be required reading prior to the creation of any business plan.

Yes, it has the word "selling" in the title, but this book is a really a business book more than it is a sales manual.

Bosworth and Holland won't give you 15 clever opening lines for telesales, or 12 terrific PowerPoint templates. But they will help you understand what it is that you're selling, whom you should be selling it to, where you should find them, and how you can refine and manage the messaging as well as the sales process.

In other words: Read this book when you're ready to stop screwing around. Read this book when you've realized that selling to early adopters isn't really selling, it's order-taking. Read this book if you're tired of acting as referee between marketing and sales.

Although "CustomerCentric Selling" isn't written specifically to software people, the fact that the authors have spent most of their lives with technology companies permeates every page. Because it applies a sales perspective to Geof Moore's chasm concepts, the relevance for software companies is very high indeed.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Virtuoso speaks with brilliant clarity and practical detail, December 25, 2003

By 

Ian Goldsmid (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: CustomerCentric Selling (Hardcover)

I've read all the top, 'usual suspect' sales books. Before reading CustomerCentric Selling, I was most impressed with Mastering the Complex Sale, by Jeff Thull. Mr. Thull has summarized current sales challenges in a very compelling and distinctive way. However Mike Bosworth demonstrates that he is the true thought-leader, the virtuoso in this field, and is most generous in providing a wealth of practical how to detail that isn't the case in Mr Thull's book.

I work with a multi-billion dollar revenue vendor serving the bio-tech industry. I will be taking immediate action to bring Mr. Bosworth's CustomerCentric Selling organization in to assist with our sales & marketing processes.