Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

If you're struggling to win sales or even to get your foot-in-the-door, this book is well worth reading. David Stein clearly points out the major shifts occurring in today's marketplace and their impact on the sales environment. Essentially he states that what you learned about sales in the past isn't enough anymore - and it's time to retool your skills to get business in the new economy.

"How Winners Sell" is full of many useful strategies and tactics you can implement to:
- Differentiate yourself from the competition.
- Gain access to and have credibility at the executive level.
- Align your offering with your customer's critical business issues.
- Prepare high impact sales presentations or meeting.
- Generate significant add-on business.

As a sales consultant, I highly recommend "How Winners Sell" to my clients and anyone else who asks me about the best sales books to read. Stein's recommendations require a major time investment upfront - when you're not with the customer - but that is exactly what it takes to win sales today. If you're committed to being successful, buy this no-nonsense, easy-to-read book.

Jill Konrath
SellingtoBigCompanies.com

Sales executives would all agree with me that it is too expensive to generate qualified leads and seriously engage in sales cycles in today's highly competitive selling environment... and deliver a poor performance in the sales end... ?! I found that How Winners Sell minimizes this risk. Not only is it totally reader-friendly, but it takes you through a step-by-step process to prepare you to sell to the targeted prospect, check out and qualify the business opportunity, explore and add value to your prospects' business processes, watch and strategize against competition, and become your customers' business partner for life! This book lays out the path to win large, competitive deals applying highly ethical and value adding techniques to the sales process prospects will embrace immediately. As a VP & General Manager of Latin America for a successful software company, I was lucky enough to receive an early copy. I have chosen to make this book a required reading for my sales and non-sales related personnel.

Selling skills may be one of those things that come naturally to some people, but if you are like the rest of us you will find Dave Stein's new book well worth your time. Of course there are lots of selling focused books and many of them provide the motivation to get moving but forget about the small practical details that can make the difference between winning and losing the sale. In this book, Stein presents practical strategies spiced with real world examples of what works and what doesn't. Selling is still a relationship game, but after reading this book, you will also learn how to leverage the new technologies and become a more effective seller. In a way the book read like an updated sales version of "Getting to Yes".

While many sales books give you good ideas, this one gives you tools to take into the field. Dave's control panel analogy in chapter 9 will help any sales person gain a clear understanding of their position relative to the customer. Managers can use this same tool to communicate with their field staff in a language that is clear and free of exaggeration.

As a bonus, the financial analysis in appendix 1 is worth the price of the book alone. This is how I will structure my next deal.

I've been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to see Dave Stein work his sales magic in person.

It's fair to say that if you, too, want to be able to sell to anybody, read and study Dave Stein. Last century had its share of sales geniuses to learn from...now there's Mr. Stein!

Find the time to read How Winners Sell or get it for your sales team and watch the effect on your sales. Don't take it from me, I'm just one of the countless Stein fans out there - read it and see for yourself.

"Identifying and placing the top enterprise software sales executives is my business. I loved this book...passed it to two of my staff to absorbe...what strikes me is that so much of what I read the first time through just STUCK right away. Highly recommended."

As the vice president of sales of a software company, I am always looking for ideas to help make our sales organization become better. We have used this book as the foundation of all our sales training meetings this year. The response from the sales organization has been positive and we are looking forward to a record year.

Myron R. Hammes
Vice President of Sales
Physician Micro Systems, Inc.