Selling to Zebras: How to Close 90% of the Business You Pursue Faster, More Easily, and More Profitably [Hardcover]

Jeff Koser (Author), Chad Koser (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2008

One ofLibrary Journal's Best Business Books of 2008

Even the most competitive companies only close about 15 percent of the deals in their sales pipelines. That means that salespeople spend time with prospects who, 85 percent of the time, aren't going to buy. Wouldn't those salespeople rather spend more time pursuing prospects they knew they could close? Or spend time with their prospects where it matters most at an executive level? Readers who are ready for exceptional results for themselves and their companies need Selling to Zebras.

The Zebra way can help salespeople identify the perfect prospects for their companies--their Zebras--and develop a sales process that will help them close deals 90 percent of the time.

The Zebra method of selling will:

• Increase close rates
• Shorten sales cycles
• Increase average deal size
• Reduce discounting and increase margins
• Make better use of scarce resources
• Make customers happy, creating a stable of great references

Jeff and Chad Koser don't just offer theories and concepts. They give readers specific tools, models, and spreadsheets they can customize to make the Zebra way the best way for their companies to do business.

Editorial Reviews

Review

What started as a focus to improve our sales organization naturally evolved into a philosophy for running our business, so much that we refer to points in time as B.Z. (before Zebra) and A.Z. (after Zebra). --Jim Stollberg "Vice President, Business Development, HK Systems, Inc."

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group LLC (October 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1929774575
• ISBN-13: 978-1929774579
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 1.1 x 5.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #681,654 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars A 3-1 defeat February 25, 2011

By Marian Hanganu

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

The book starts with a very positive notion: selling zebras, hunting your natural prey and one that will feed you. Some sound and very useful tools and analysis are unfolded and the reader feels rewarded by a book that looks like a winner. However, the following chapters describe a methodology that looks like solutions selling, value selling and other sales methodology that push the process through an evaluation of the proposal and capabilities. The method is combined with a sort of ROI Selling, but the quality drops to a very low level: the dialogs depict a sort of teller that walks into the meeting saying "I have researched you home, I know what your problems are and here I am with a solution that will bring you 899,89% ROI over the next 3 years.".
If you have ever been in high value sales, you know that you cannot possibly know what are the most painful issues affecting the prospect.
The ROI is presented using the model built by the salesperson, which only works for children. If you really want to use ROI, you should build the model with the prospect, in the way depicted in "The Dollarization Discipline" of Jeffrey Fox and "ROI Selling" of Michael Nick and Kurt Koenig.
My advice - read just the first part of the book and skip the rest!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is a must if you have a complex sales cycle...! June 1, 2009

By Gary Dale Cearley

Format:Hardcover

With their book Selling to Zebras: How to Close 90% of the Business You Pursue Faster, More Easily, and More Profitably Jeff and Chad Koser have found themselves a very interesting niche in sales consulting and training. Most of the sales technique books that I have seen in my lifetime on how to sell often have focused on relationship sales, closing or other "me" type sales. In all honesty, much of this might get you into the door but it won't get you a contract when it comes to complex sales that involve corporate or bureaucratic structures. Selling to Zebras on the other hand wipes the slate cleans and starts from square one.

Actually, I found lots to agree with in this book. Especially the authors' starting point: Properly identifying the target. The Kosers use the analogy of a hunt on the African savannah as their key to your success. Lions need to look for zebras to survive and the authors tell us pretty much that salesmen nowadays (the lions) tend not to have the faintest ideas of how to (pardon the pun) "spot" the zebra. They take the reader by the hand and show the way to become a zebra spotting expert. First, know thyself! Once you know exactly who your company is and what you can offer then you can know who your target zebras are. Then you put them in your pipeline and drop any prospects who are obviously not zebras - companies that are ill fitting to your products and services for a variety of reasons. In my own business I find that this is actually very important to the success of sales. It really narrows the amount of cold calling and chasing up dead ends, which kills everyone's quotas.

Once you have identified your zebra there is a process of finding "Power" (the main decision maker), finding Power's pressure points, doing studies of the prospects firms and partnering with them so that the sale is not only assured but will have better chances for the long-term surviving and flourishing of the client-customer relationship. Jeff and Chad Koser have made their book very interactive with their working website and have supplied the readers with easy to use and easy to understand tools that they can download. It was a great extra effort by the authors to give us these tools - they were worth the price of the book alone!

This has to be one of the best books I have read on how to sell to complex accounts. If you are a salesman who needs to have some tweaking of your methods and would like a fresh new look at your sales process or if you are a sales manager or other executive who thinks your sales staff could, and should, have better results, then I recommend that you grab a copy of Selling to Zebras. The only ones who might disagree would be your competition.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Sales Excellence August 25, 2008

By Kevin G. Finlay

Format:Hardcover

I am a career sales professional who has been through a number of selling techniques, methodologies and training systems and can say without hesitation that Jeff's Selling to Zebras and associated Waterfall is absolutely top notch.

Effectively, Selling To Zebras, simplifies the process of identifying and quantifying your company's value to a prospect into an easily articulated and measurable value proposition. This not only elevates your dialogue to business terms (versus features/benefits of the solution), it also forces you to be brutally honest with yourself on whether or not you are chasing business you can really win. The tools are second-to-none.