Customer Reviews

A Seat at the Table:How Top Salespeople Connect and Drive Decisions at the Executive Level

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A Seat at the Table is a book for the ages: A volume of advice designed for the modern salesperson who wants to distinguish himself/herself and offer potential customers cutting -edge service and competitive advantage. This book takes a different approach to selling- an approach that shifts the emphasis away from trying to offer the most product for the lowest price, over to a strategy that involves creating the most value possible for the customer.

Making connections with the people that matter most is important to any salesperson and this book effectively demonstrates what it takes to get your message across to the executives and other decision makers in any business. The executives are the ones who need to be swayed and this book effectively shows how to talk to them and how to prove to them that your product or service will create value for both your company and theirs, creating a win- win situation. Customers nowadays consider value paramount to any buying decision and this book effectively shows how a salesperson can build a partnership with customers that benefits all parties involved.

A Seat at the Table recommends taking several steps to cement the deal and the book offers many different bits of advice for the determined salesperson to follow. The book includes specific questions to ask and even samples of statements to make to a potential customer in order to improve the odds that you, the salesperson, will seal the deal. The book includes some tables and graphs as well, to illustrate key points, and it is written in an outline format, making it easy to refer back to as a reference guide and training tool for salespersons of all ages. I like the format of this book and I like that it includes examples showing exactly what approaches to take in order to complete a sale. Too often, books about selling talk a great talk, but they don't offer enough examples that explain exactly how to carry out the book's message. A Seat at the Table explains everything quite nicely, with solid organization and clear wording.

Selling has changed over the years and today's salesperson needs to approach the sale from a different perspective. The most important lesson to take from this book is that customers nowadays want more than just the best price. Customers want business assistance from the salesperson and they want to know how a particular product or service they purchase is going to add value. Salespeople can achieve this by becoming businesspeople who sell. Doing all of these things will earn the salesperson the much- coveted seat at the table; building a lasting relationship with the customer that provides benefits to all involved.

Does it make sense to use the same selling strategies with executives that you would use on a manager? Marc Miller (Selling is Dead) makes a compelling argument against it in his new book "A Seat at the Table." The target audience for the book is salespeople who offer complex solutions, which could apply to those who sell consulting, information technology, and other services that may have a long and complex selling cycle. The question is, does the book offer something original? Or is it the same recycled ideas that a billion other authors who happen to own consulting firms put on paper? The answer may surprise you.

There are quite a few key points in "A Seat at the Table" that makes this book genius. Among them are Miller's teachings on how to be viewed as a caring consultant and not just a seller, how he teaches sellers to add value to a prospect's current strategy instead of using tactical selling to sell something the prospect may not even need, and his line of questioning with the acronym FOCAS (Fact, Objective, Concern, Anchor, and Solution questions) that helps you identify pains and connect them to the prospect's strategies and your solutions. A case study includes a look at how Proctor & Gamble became more than just a seller to Wal-Mart and was offered a seat at their executive board meetings to offer real value in regards to other key strategic objectives.

There are a few downsides though. For starters, it takes for granted that buyers are not clever enough to know that salespeople calling themselves consultants are still there to sell, regardless of how well they can align their products or services to the buyers' strategies. The book also instructs readers to stop asking pain questions yet the Concern portion of FOCAS seems to do just that. Finally, it would be nice if the author included sections on how to get a foot in the door and how to deal with price objections once solutions are presented.

The bottom line is this: "A Seat at the Table" distinguishes itself from a lot of the noise and reworded sales books you find on shelves today. Much like he did with "Selling is Dead," Miller has once again proven himself to be a thought leader and strategic thinker in the industry. Sales managers and executives should not only buy this book for their staffs but should seriously consider working with the author's firm if they are searching for a better way to connect to executives when selling complex solutions.

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Emanuel Carpenter
Author of "Dead Guys Don't Buy"

I'm going to keep this short and sweet. I finally finished reading this book and the author really knows his stuff. The book is loaded with great information but to be honest, it was a little boring. Never did I get juiced up or excited to run out and make more sales. Would I recommend this book? Of coarse because the information I received from this book will surely help me improve as a salesman. Like I said, The book is loaded with good info.

My business partner called me from a buying group meeting insisting that we "had to get this book". I ordered the book right then on my iPad Kindle reader. I read about half the book the very next day. I was left scratching my head. In about 100 pages, the author didn't say much of anything that resonated with me. He used a phrase that the book did not use "broad generalities and physical bromides". However, the three-quarters of the book were replete with just that - broad generalities and physical bromides. When I finally hit the last quarter of the book, though, things got interesting. I wish I could have torn off the first three-quarters or recovered the time wasted reading them. The last quarter really hit home. I would recommend skipping right to chapter 7.

By the way, Mr. Miller violates his own rules in the book by trying to sell you on two different things you may or may not need during the book: one time on some digital recording pen (which is probably really cool; but why include a sales pitch for this device in the middle of this book?) and later he tries to sell you on buying another one of his books.

It is possible that the last few chapters are worth the small investment. On the other hand, you may find someone else who bought the book and just read the last chapters - from chapter 7 on.

The act of selling still remains the same from the negative perception of sales people to the exchange of dollars for a solution be it products, services or a combination of both. What has changed is today's business buyers are far more educated and even more tainted than their predecessors. This creates many sales people leaving the decision maker's buying table hungry and pocket poor.

Marc Miller takes a strategic approach in writing this book and brings in other books to create a unified front for those crazy busy sales people who want to meet and successfully earn the business from those crazy busy C-Suite Executives. In the first chapter, he lays out the game plan so that you as the salesperson learn to have discussions not about products, services or even benefits but rather about productivity and differentiation.

Building upon the concepts of Blue Ocean and Red Ocean Strategies as authored by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne , Miller creates a quadrant or what he calls the Master Strategic Plan Matrix. This matrix also uses the urgent and important as originally identified by President Eisenhower through his quote "Most things which are urgent are not important, and most things which are important are not urgent." His words have been incorporated into many time management systems as well as in Stephen Covey's book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

This book is almost like taking a graduate course of psychology, sales and strategic thinking all at the same time. The end result is to sit on the same side of the table with your potential client so that you and he or she are working together toward his or her critical vision. By reading and applying the concepts in this book, you will indeed be The Red Jacket in a sea of gray suits.

This book is very helpful to anyone who needs to get to highest levels. Lots of great examples and strategies.

I read the book and liked it.
The author provides useful tips in approaching customer executives and gaining trust and confidence (a seat at the same side of the table) to offer valuable solutions. The process requires effort, resources and patience on part of sales person and his/her organization. The sales person has to change his / her mindset from being a product / services peddler to a valuable customer adviser.

To gain seat at the table, the author stresses the importance of bringing-in genuine "value". Customer does NOT care about the sales person's products and services. The customer only cares about his/her strategy for survival and success.

In order to explain prospects the value the sales person has to do the following.
1. Understand customer strategy in addition to needs - addressing road maps, pain points etc.
2. Connect your solution offering with customer strategy similar to Velcro approach with customer strategies as loops and your solutions as hooks.
3. Your solutions should offer value to customer in aspects such as differentiation (numerator- increases value in profit equation) and productivity (reduces denominator in profit equation) and roadmaps.
4. By connecting your offerings to strategy you bring the value to customer and gain seat at the same side of table.
5. Now you uncover a plethora of possibilities for successful collaboration.

The author also prescribes detailed procedures and steps such as the following, which may be useful in some instances.
1. Customer strategy matrix - Blue ocean (differentiation) and Red Ocean (productivity) strategies and respective urgency and importance
2. Questions to ask (FOCAS)- Factual, Objective, Concern, Anchor and Solutions related questions
3. ...
The content delivery is in textbook fashion, which I did not appreciate much.
Overall, it's a good book for strategic account managers / global sales directors and business development folks to compare and possibly enhance their approaches.

This is probably the most compeklling book on Selling today. As a long time highly rated sales director , I learned many new ideas from this book . We now will be running workshops with our sales teams to understand the concepts. Other books just talk about Value based selling. Marc Miller shows you how .It will be the salesman's bible

Do you enthusiastically look forward to having someone stop by to sell you something? Probably not. But how do you feel when a trusted adviser comes in to help enhance your strategy? You're grateful for the counselor's time and valuable advice. If you want the welcome mat to be out when you call, heed sales expert Marc Miller, who shows salespeople how to change their image from product hustlers to strategic consultants. Even if some of its strategies seem hard to achieve, getAbstract believes that this book is useful for salespeople who handle big-ticket products and services with extended "sales cycles," those who sell entirely new products or methods, or those selling commodities who need to shift customers' concerns from price to value.

The best strategy to use when approaching anbd speaking with a customer or potential cusatomer. The only thing our customers care about today is VALUE!