Selling Against the Goal: How Corporate Sales Professionals Generate the Leads They Need [Paperback]

Kendra Lee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2005

In a perfect world, sales professionals would have prime territories, unlimited budgets, and a high-powered marketing department generating qualified leads. In reality, most corporations expect sales reps to generate their own leads, find new business, and meet stiff quotas in a tight marketplace. Selling Against the Goal is the ultimate survival guide for sales executives, managers, and reps. Unlike other books on the subject, Selling Against the Goal places lead generation within a strategic context and goes far beyond traditional techniques such as cold calling.

 

Author Kendra Lee shows sales professionals in the business-to-business market how in just four hours they can create a customized, repeatable process for delivering the best leads with the highest rate of return. Specific chapters detail Lee’s easy-to-use approach: formulating a strategy, creating a lead generation plan, and pulling it all together with actionable activities. Designed for busy sales professionals, the book enables the reader to skip to the right actions for a particular situation. Selling Against the Goal asserts that 70 percent of leads are never used because they fail to reach the right people or organizations. With this book as a guide, sales reps will learn how to reach untapped leads and gain control of their prospecting activity; sales managers will help employees take personal responsibility for their successes.

 

Highlights

 

•Essential tools that increase response rates and create name recognition

•Formulas for calculating a closing ratio and numbers of leads needed to meet quota

•Tips for targeting multiple levels of decision makers

•Ideas for hitting a prospect’s “sweet spot” with direct mail, events, public relations, and referrals

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Kaplan Publishing (October 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1419508253
• ISBN-13: 978-1419508257
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #755,246 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Selling starts with prospects!!! Not another worn out system., June 1, 2007

By 

Russ Emrick (Monument, CO) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Selling Against the Goal: How Corporate Sales Professionals Generate the Leads They Need (Paperback)

This book cannot be praised enough. There are thousands of books and systems for sales. Almost all of them ignore or minimize the realities of how hard it is today to get into accounts to even begin `selling.' Most sales books have little useful information on prospecting or lead generation. No matter how good you are if you can't get in the door you can't be a solution, strategic, customer-focused, closed sub (Sandler), or ad nauseam `flavor of the day' seller. This book, coupled with "Selling to Big Companies" has replaced 90% of my selling library and is an indispensable read.

"Job Title: Sales Rep. Job Responsibilities: Generate Leads. Close Sales. How to Get the Job Done: It's up to you, my friend." This is how the book starts and isn't it TRUE. No-one tells us how and the real help we get as out-in-the-field salespeople is minimal. Few companies are good at generating leads! Most books written on the topic are for management (Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, for example, is a great book, but not for the grunt on-the-ground like me). Other books just rehash cold calling techniques that simply don't work in this overworked, too busy, voice mail and email business environment.

Most importantly this book is a practical workbook: not simply a theoretical system of selling that does you no good in the day to day selling world where we all live. This book tells you how to make a territory plan and then develop leads and prospects within your territory. The book works from your goals, even targets the amount of prospects based on your averages and financial plans. The book have very explicit instructions that show you how to work an area, develop business, and close sales. This book goes far beyond the worn out and doesn't work advice of `just cold call more.' This book may have saved my career. It will definitely improve anyone's sales efforts if they apply it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best lead generation reads ever!, April 20, 2009

By 

Deborah S. Kennedy "Deb" (Oyster Bay, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Selling Against the Goal: How Corporate Sales Professionals Generate the Leads They Need (Paperback)

I just finished reading Kendra's book "Selling Against the Goal" and I liked many things, but at the top of the list was her narrative. She included great charts and mock situations that helped put everything in perspective. Kendra helped me realize that I could do everything in the book if I took all of my skills and structured them to fit the flow she outlined. As I was reading I kept saying to myself "oh.. that's cool, I can do that". While I know all aspects of direct marketing, my most passionate contribution is in helping clients develop marketing strategies that are unbiased and focused on their bottom line. Kendra showed me how to apply my marketing expertise to sales and attract those clients.

It seems everyone just wants to state their opinion today but offer no sound advice on how to get from point A to Point Z but Kendra's book was different. Honestly... I felt welcomed into Kendra's book and I felt that she understood what it was I wanted to learn. I enjoyed the book very much and would highly recommend it to anyone.
Deb Kennedy, President
Channel Neutral Marketing

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a must buy book for sales people, April 19, 2008

By 

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

This review is from: Selling Against the Goal: How Corporate Sales Professionals Generate the Leads They Need (Paperback)

Take this book and Brian Carroll's and you pretty well have the complete package of lead generation activities. Lee goes into detail and depth to give the sales professional a high value resource. If you just started with medium to large sized firm in sales, this book is a road map to high performance sales. It does assume two things, that you know how to sell and marketing is doing its job. These two assumptions apply so rarely to the small to medium business.

Another place where sales will run into an issue is that sales people are not good at creating good content and copy for lead gen programs. Its not in their genes. Of course they think they do. (I certainly did until it was proven over and over to me) Most of Lee's copy examples are quite good, but some illustrate that fatal flaw about salesmen, they can forget that to get customer interest you do not start out talking about your Co. or yourself.

So although this is a must buy book for sales people, it does not address what you need in regards to great copy. You should combine your work laid out in this book with that of a marketing peer who understands compelling copy. Of course as a good sales person , you could not at first tell the difference `tween compelling copy and just copy. But, you will think you do.