Strategies That Win Sales: Best Practices of the World's Leading Organizations [Hardcover]

Mark Marone (Author), Seleste Lunsford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2005

As senior managers at AchieveGlobal, one of the world's leading sales organizations, the authors know what it takes for companies to position themselves for growth.
Today's complex selling environment has altered the definition of what it takes to be truly successful. Companies need to do more, more, more: grow more revenue, add more customers, and utilize more marketing channels.
Sales performance consultants Mark Marone and Seleste Lunsford, and the team at AchieveGlobal, identified 17 business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations from various industries that have successfully and aggressively pursued and implemented cutting-edge global solutions to these issues. They then conducted in-depth phone and face-to-face research with 150 individuals from the high-performing sales organizations, including Marriott International, HP, Office Depot, Sprint PCS, Yellow Book USA, Ingersol Rand, Fuji-Xerox, and TD Waterhouse. Strategies That Win Sales goes beyond the nuts and bolts of sales process books by identifying higher-level challenges, including how to:
* Segment customers.
* Align a sales force with today's more sophisticated and knowledgeable customers.
* Extend multichannel strategies, including distributors, e-commerce, teleselling, and face-to- face selling.
* Implement e-commerce, customer relationship management, and sales force automation.
* Train salespeople to be competitive and grow revenue in this new business environment. The book's narrative format contains examples, cutting-edge solutions, case studies, and quotations from participating companies, as well as trends and predictions for the future.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mark Marone, Ph.D., and Seleste Lunsford are senior managers for AchieveGlobal. With over 1,600 employees across the U.S. and in 40 different countries, AchieveGlobal is a worldwide leader in sales performance consulting. Marone’s career has been in academic and private sector research and consulting in the areas of economic development, corporate strategy, and business policy. Lunsford’s background is in sales, product management, marketing, and management consulting in the financial services, training, and IT services industries. Both are popular speakers at conferences and other professional events.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Kaplan Publishing (January 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0793188601
• ISBN-13: 978-0793188604
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #981,716 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars ASales Book That Has No Hype!, June 26, 2005

By 

M. L Lamendola (Merriam, KS USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Strategies That Win Sales: Best Practices of the World's Leading Organizations (Hardcover)

Today's selling environment is more complex than ever. This complexity presents problems and opportunities. How to best overcome the problems and take advantage of the opportunities is the message of Strategies That Win Sales.

This book is based on a survey of 150 individuals from 17 top companies. It's an inside look at what customers want and what high-performance sales organizations are doing.

Strategies That Win Sales consists of ten chapters and three appendices. Appendix A, "Five Roles for Successful Sales" is a worthwhile read on its own. The introduction explains the methodology of the survey, and how it relates to the content of the book. The first chapter details the challenges facing today's sales force. These include excessive price pressure, more competition (we're global, now), more sales channels (often competing with each other), and even better-informed customers who make more demands.

The result of the research behind Strategies That Win Sales was the identification of seven strategic areas that leading sales organizations use to win sales. One of the most interesting of these areas is consultative selling (Chapter Five). That kind of selling is not a "one size fits all" solution. If you can identify the customers with whom that approach works, your sales can benefit. But applying it to the wrong customers can hurt sales.

Strategies That Win Sales doesn't provide any "magic bullets" or neat gimmicks an incompetent salesperson can apply to become an overnight success. Nor does it provide any five-step solutions for sales managers needing to turn an underperforming sales team into superstars. This book is low on hyperbole, and heavy on real information. (Actually, it has no hyperbole).

One thing today's successful sales practitioner has in common with the sales champ of yesteryear is hard work. Another is the ability to listen to the customer. That much hasn't changed, and probably never will. But, the devil is in the details, and this book goes over them thoroughly.

On the downside, Strategies That Win Sales is following a recent trend of insufficient editing. The many grammar gaffes in Strategies That Win Sales occasionally hide the meaning the authors had intended. In some cases, I was unable to determine the meaning at all. This book contains valuable information, and a second printing would be good for all concerned--but not until the authors (or publisher) retain a copyeditor to make the text conform to Standard Written English (SWE).

Strategies That Win Sales also contained an odd language convention--I have no idea why. The authors used the word "impact" in odd places, turning some sentences into farsical gibberish. Impact means "to force tightly together." This is why we say teeth are "impacted" and why a doctor prescribes laxatives if your diagnosis is that you are "impacted." I fail to see the value of planning to "impact customers," though the authors talk about this repeatedly. I can't imagine any sales person going around and "impacting customers" without getting arrested rather quickly. Sales has changed, but not THAT much!

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The B2B Business Sales Stories are worth the price alone!, October 20, 2005

By 

Donna L. Cohen "Author: 'GO BIG...or Stay Hom... (Englewood, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Strategies That Win Sales: Best Practices of the World's Leading Organizations (Hardcover)

This book leaves the Sales Training and Selling Tips to sales training companies like Performance Insights, LLC.
It is a book about the Complex Sale. This is about strategy and not how to to break the ice when cold calling.

Not for those new to sales looking for the how to book.

The use of large companies selling in the B2B world was of particular interest.