How Winners Sell: 21 Proven Strategies to Outsell Your Competition and Win the Big Sale [Hardcover]

Dave Stein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2002

Sales master Dave Stein shows you how, in today's hyper-competitive marketplace, to outsmart your competition and close the big sales. His 21 strategies with lots of targeted tactics provide in the trenches advice on how to do your research, develop and qualify leads, keep your competition from gaining credibility, skillfully work inside politics, and much, much more.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...a master of the art of strategic selling...a practical guide that will be must reading for my team" -- Gary Davies, General Manager of Ariba Canada, Inc.

"...saves busy executives the effort of wading through lengthy management tomes to pick up the tips and strategies they need." -- Melinda Ligos, Editor-in-chief of Sales & Marketing Management magazine

"If you want to master the art of selling, don't read this book. USE this book." -- Anthony Parinello Author, Selling to VITO and Think and Sell like a CEO

"Not having this book may cost you a hundred times its price in the first year." -- Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and Publisher Selling Power magazine

"The tactics in How Winners Sell can be put into action immediately. Great resource for sales reps and their managers." -- Paulette Descoteaux, Sales Vice President (former), Pitney Bowes Supply Chain Solutions

An excellent writer...accessible, compelling and colorful...knows his subject... passionate enough to elicit that same passion from his readers. -- Business Book Review™

From the Publisher

How Winners Sell is a strategic-selling training manual, geared to increase business strategy, customer satisfaction, marketing, and personal growth skills. It provides practical, relevant, and substantive tools that sellers can use to establish themselves as separate and distinct sources of competitive advantage. The strategies, tactics, and tips (there’s not a lot of theory here) are offered with the goal of helping individuals transform themselves from vendors into business partners, who are able to share and manage risk. It is a partnering that goes far beyond peddling offerings toward: gaining knowledge of the customer and knowledge of where value can be added; uncovering needs and diagnosing problems; designing customer-focused solutions that resolve the prospect’s issues and locks out the competition in the process; and planting perennial "seeds" that not only grow the account over the long term, but that also permit the vendor to reap more accounts throughout the industry.

Thus, Stein manages to provide, in one place, simple business lessons that show how to carve out a unique image (differentiation), create competitive advantage by providing world-class value for well-defined customers (building brand identity), winning desired customers and keeping them forever (relationship marketing), and simply working smarter. In addition, the author reveals a very effective way of adapting to changing technology via his detailed guidelines on how to leverage the Internet to win the sell. It is straightforward, nontechnical, and easy to implement information that even Willy Loman, with all his issues about learning and change, could assimilate quickly and painlessly. However, this book not only holds valuable lessons for beleaguered sales personnel, but also provides key insights for any business professional, in any arena, at all levels of the organization...

Depending upon how much of Stein's guidance you intend to follow...we believe that whatever time you spend, it will be well worth the effort and also a pleasure. Although sales manuals tend to be matter of fact and dry, Stein is an excellent writer who is accessible, compelling and colorful. He knows his subject and he is passionate enough about it to elicit that same passion from his readers. Thus we predict that a great deal of your reading time will be spent just savoring how well the information is imparted.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Bard Press; 1st edition (May 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1885167555
• ISBN-13: 978-1885167552
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,921,176 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reading this will exceed any career ROI I will encounter, May 1, 2002

By 

Jim Flanagan (Chatham, New Jersey; USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How Winners Sell: 21 Proven Strategies to Outsell Your Competition and Win the Big Sale (Hardcover)

Reading this book was a great use of my time. I am the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for a software company. I recognize that there is a set of fundamental strategies used by novice and intermediate sales professionals as they compete for business. These include selling to the client's needs, and qualifying hard before electing to spend time and money on an opportunity, etc. Since everyone follows them, they have become ineffective in distinguishing oneself!

Dave Stein has written an easy-to-read 250-page text that develops complete concepts and skills for deployment within chapters that are less than ten pages each! I read this, for the first time, on two round trip flights.

Following these strategies will accelerate the intermediate sale's practitioner into advanced status in their next sales campaign. Dave introduces simple concepts that will overwhelm an organization's competition. These include approaches for individuals in this profession to:

· Evolve from a sale's agent to a "business agent" to avoid being viewed as a commodity provider;
· Employ the highly effective process of continuously applying triage management techniques to one's sales pipeline to ensure that time is not spent on deals that cannot be won in an immediate timeframe;
· Replace the age-old concept of having "a coach" within an account and swapping it with a more effective role of "an ally" so that competitors who subscribe to ten-year-old techniques cannot function successfully.

Twelve years ago, I read Stephan Covey's "Seven Habits" for the first time. I have read it in part or in full another six times since. I have always found it to be a book that motivates me to transpose thoughts into progressive action. "How Winners Sell" just earned a place on my top shelf next to it.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spectacular Sales Insights: Could not put it down!, August 30, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: How Winners Sell: 21 Proven Strategies to Outsell Your Competition and Win the Big Sale (Hardcover)

I have been a Sales Executive in the Corporate Training & Consulting Industry for 13 years,and have a bookshelf crammed with good books on the topic of improving your skills & results.
This book is "a cut above": especially for the seasoned professional who wants to consciously work on incremental gains. You know you win by a margin vs. a mile...the true stories, tips & tools in this "treasure trove" of a book provide a roadmap to winning important pieces of business.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How Winners Sell, April 23, 2002

By 

Mike Clayville (San Jose, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How Winners Sell: 21 Proven Strategies to Outsell Your Competition and Win the Big Sale (Hardcover)

I have read this book and have found it great. It has a number of real examples that can be used to help close significant deals. What I really liked about the book was the "how to's" on using the internet and other technologies to gain advantage in a sales situation. The book has a number of ideas on how I could use these technologies to make sales people more productive. Another thing I found helpful was the structure around how to take stock of where you are in a sales cycle. Finally the ideas around building a virtual sales team to drive a sales cycle faster and make the deals bigger were very effective.