Customer Reviews

Think Like Your Customer: A Winning Strategy to Maximize Sales by Understanding and Influencing How and Why Your Customers Buy

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As a sales and marketing executive with 20 years experience selling high-end products and services to Fortune 500 customers all over the world, I thought I already knew how customers think. How wrong I was. Bill Stinnett's terrific "Think Like Your Customer" is chock full of practical and easy-to-use techniques to connect with prospects and to sell effectively. The book provided tons of ideas I had never even considered. What an eye-opener!

This isn't gobbledygook from some sheltered MBA professor. Bill presents his essential advice based on decades of practical experience as a highly successful sales rep as well as a consultant and speaker to the world's greatest sales teams. I was particularly drawn to the hundreds of personal anecdotes and stories Bill tells about winning (and losing too) that help to illustrate the points in the book. The book reads like the sales VP you admire most in the world taking you to lunch every day for a month and spilling all his secrets and stories!

This is a book you will turn to again and again. In fact, maybe you should buy three copies: one for the office, one for the briefcase, and one for home.

I came across this book while browsing my local bookstore and was immediately blown away with the endorsements. I must own 200 books on business and selling, and I have never seen this quantity and quality of testimonials for any book. The first nine pages are packed with quotes from senior executives of companies like SAP, IBM, Microsoft, EMC, Lucent, Accenture and business professors from almost every major B-School in the country including Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford, Columbia, and Duke.

Once I "dug in" I began to see why so many people were willing to put their name on it. This book is fantastic!! The author has taken every aspect of a complex B2B sales process and presented it from the customer's perspective. I was particularly impressed with Chapter 4, which contains a very powerful but useful construct for understanding how customers see value, and Chapter 6, which redefines the role of the professional sales person as one who leads his or her customer through their own buying process . . . a powerful revelation. If you want to understand what's going on in your customer's head, this book is for you.

The author breaks the material down in two sections: Why Customers Buy, and How Customers Buy. The table of contents says it all:

Chapter 1 - What customers think about
Chapter 2 - What customers really want.
Chapter 3 - How customers perceive value and risk.
Chapter 4 - The cause and effect of business value
Chapter 5 - The value of customer relationships
Chapter 6 - The sales process - redefined.
Chapter 7 - Anatomy of a buying decision.
Chapter 8 - Reverse-engineering the buying process.
Chapter 9 - Elevating the buying process.
Chapter 10 - Accelerating the buying process.

The entire book is very well illustrated with at least two dozen "figures" depicting what the author is trying to convey, and dozens of key take-aways emboldened for emphasis and review. I have already recommended this book to several colleagues and would highly recommend it to anyone involved in acquiring or serving customers. I'm sure you'll love it as much as do.

Whether you are rookie sales person trying to get ahead, or a veteran sales person looking for some fresh ideas on how to grow your business, this is the book for you. Bill Stinnett has really raised the bar on sales books in my opinion and provides easy to understand strategies and techniques for becoming a valuable partner with your customers.

Think Like Your Customer gives easy to understand processes and strategies for outselling your competition and becoming an invaluable asset to your customers. Unlike most books which share only cute strategies on getting a customer to say "yes," Think Like Your Customer spells out specific strategies on developing value and goodwill towards your prospects and customers. Each transaction must be mutually beneficial for both the customer and your company and often times many sales people forget this. Bill points out the extreme long-term value of developing this kind of approach and ultimately this kind of relationship with the customer and how it pays off in real dollar opportunity for you and your company.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone that is looking for that edge over competition and wants to truly develop a long lasting relationship with their customers. It is a book that is jam packed full of excellent information that will have the mind racing and your heart pounding to get out there and get to work. It is a book that I know I will be returning to over and over again for both inspiration and motivation.

I would say without a doubt this is a must read for anyone in the selling profession!

Sub-Title: A Winning Strategy to Maximize Sales by Understanding and Influencing How and Why Your Customers Buy --This is one of those little books that you simply need to buy and read about once a year. Throughout the book there are little hints and tips that turn into wisdom when you think about them. You need to review it every so often because in the pressures of day to day work you find that you forget things. You read it again and all of a sudden you come up with an idea that perfectly fits that sales situation you find yourself in at the moment.

It's important to remember that your customer (or prospect) and you are there to work out a mutually beneficial business relationship. If both of you don't make out well on the deal, you won't have a deal for long. The customer is buying, not to help you out, but to help himself meet his own goals, whatever they may be.

I particularly liked his chapter on the Anatomy of a Buying Decision. For instance, price is important, but price is rarely the most important thing in a decision. It doesn't matter what the price is if you are selling fertilizer and the customer is looking for week killer. But if you find out that he had a weed problem, perhaps you can reach into another part of your sales bag and solve that problem. Then next week, when the weeds are dead....

Another important part is that you really are selling yourself, not the product. He has to believe you when you say that your week killer will solve his problems, otherwise you're doomed.

This book seems likely to become one of those classics that remain around forever. It's simply too good to go away.

I am delighted to find a book and an author who can translate modern day methodologies into real world practical use. Unlike many books on selling, this book kept my attention and not only validated what I thought to be true in some cases, but also connected the dots in a way that really made sense. "Think Like Your Customer," by Bill Stinnett, is by far the most valuable and useful book on selling I have read.
"SPIN Selling," by Neil Rackham, provided me with some background on what I would define as methodology and some factual data as to the psychology of buying. It did, however, fall short on sales process and the relationship between client needs and their desired business results. The SPIN approach tended to focus on scaring the customer into doing something as opposed to leveraging their perception of value to get excited and use the solution as a means to achieve their desired results.
"The New Solution Selling," by Keith Eades, was much more thorough on process and positioning solutions against the clients needs. It did a better job than "SPIN Selling" in that it did start to provide a roadmap for process and a way to collect data as well as lead your client down the road to the seller's solution. However, it fell short on understanding the customer's buying process, and the variables that really drive customer buying behavior.
"Think Like Your Customer" fills in the gaps and helps you to turn your knowledge into a practical game plan. I recommend it very highly. Whether or not you have read some of the other popular books on selling, this book will become an incredibly valuable resource in helping you take your game to the next level.

This is one of the best books on selling I'd read in years. In the software world, hard-sell is dead. Try consultative selling the Bill Stinnet way. I used some of the ideas in the book eg., mapping out the buying process and offering it as as part of an important visual information to the gatekeeper to reach the decision maker - and it works! I have used the concept of getting the buyer to think about destination "C" with us rather than trying to be too focused on the offer in "B". There is also a section on how to qualify a prospect with ideas that are worth committing to memory. A combination of Bill's ideas and my experience has turned many of my well qualified prospects into paying customers today.

If you are a career saleperson then this one is definitely for you.

My company's sales have exploded after Bill Stinnett's 8 training seminars. Based on our experience using several sales trainers in the past, I have never seen our sales team absorb and apply any material, the way they have with the sales techniques contained in "Think Like Your Customer:" Our sales team has never been more confident and motivated. "Think Like Your Customer:" is truly the "best of Bill Stinnett" and serves as the perfect handbook for our sales team to use before (and after) every sales visit.

I have read almost any book about complex sales that exist in the market, but this book add more value that you could expect.

Bill Stinnett concludes the Introduction to this book with a remarkable statement: "Now let me be clear: I don't take credit for any of these truths [culled from a variety of other sources]. I didn't make them up. They have been there all along, waiting to be observed. My life's work has been to recognize them and organize them in an effort to advance my own career and yours." Stinnett refers to popular sales methodologies which include Strategic Selling®, Solution Selling®, and SPIN Selling®. Whatever the given methodology, its ultimate outcome is an increase in revenue which, Stinnett duly acknowledges, can be accomplished in three ways: maximizing sales velocity, increasing average "deal size" or the "wallet" share, and increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Throughout Stinnett's narrative, his emphasis is on presenting and then explaining "a winning strategy" (actually an aggregate of several strategies) to increase his reader's understanding of how and why customers buy. The chapter titles for Part 1, "Why Customers Buy," correctly indicate how practical his approach is: What Customers Think About, What Customers Really Want, How Customers Perceive Value and Risk, The Cause and Effect of Business Value, and The Value of Customer Relationships. It should be noted that, along the way, Stinnett also offers excellent advice with regard to all manner of "how not to's" and "why nots" when formulating and then implementing what should be a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective game plan to increase revenue.

To me, some of the most valuable material in the book is presented in Chapter 8 as Stinnett explains how to reverse-engineer the buying process. That is, in Stephen Covey's words, "begin with the end in mind." This is a process by which to identify what must happen before a given customer is ready to buy. Previously in Chapter 2, Stinnett introduced what he calls his "Customer Results Model" which involves a process that begins with fully understanding the prospective buyer's current situation. I agree with Stinnett that there is no inherent value (as perceived by customers) in the solution offered by a given product or service unless it will achieve the prospective buyer's desired outcomes or results. As the former CEO of Home Depot once observed, people don't buy a quarter-inch drill; they buy quarter-inch holes. In this context, the quarter-inch drill fills a gap between a current, often an urgent need and filling it.

One of this book's several reader-friendly devices is the isolation of key points presented in bold face. This facilitates and accelerates frequent review of those points later. For example:

"It's a lot easier to sell somebody something if it's positioned as a way to help them achieve a goal or an objective that they already want to achieve." (Page 15)

" Far more critical than what is valuable and important to your customer is why it is valuable and important to them." (Page 65)

"A deep, meaningful, high-trust relationship with a client who has no business disparity [i.e. compelling need], no motive to take action, or no means to take action even if they did have a motive, equals no sale. It's just a relationship." (Page 105)

"It's not what we do in our sales process, but what the customer does in their buying process, that really matters." (Page 135)

"We should spend 80 percent of our time and effort on the 20 percent of our opportunities that carry a strong urgency, motive, and consequence, because these are the deals that can close." (Page 179)

None of Stinnett's key points is a head-snappy revelation, nor does he make that claim. However, all of them - preferably reviewed in the sequence in which they are presented - offer valuable reminders of where the proper focus and emphasis should be during a high-probability customer's purchase process.

There are dozens of excellent books on the art and science of sales, and this is one of the best.

Well-done!

Mr. Stinnett offers a revolutionary new approach to sales. This book offers many practical ideas and concepts that breathe new life into the sales process and help you better understand the issues that ultimately drive the customers decision making process. A must read for any serious sales professional.