In the great big world of sales books there are two types of books—those that purport to take the “big picture” perspective of selling and those that are designed to have actual value in the real world by providing real, workable, effective strategies to help sellers and sales leaders improve their performance.
And within the group intended to deliver usable information there is a further breakdown into those that are simply fluff and filler and those that really deliver on their promise to help sellers become better sellers.
If you have spent any time scanning the sales books in Amazon or Barnes and Noble you know there’s no dearth of “big picture” books (books that although fun to read leave one wondering why they wasted their time reading it because ultimately it really didn’t have anything applicable in it). You also know there are thousands of the “this is your key to sales success” strategy books that for the most part simply lay out a couple of time worn strategies and use stories as filler to put some pages to the book.
Thankfully you will find that there are a few books that deliver real value; that aren’t stuffed with fluff just to make the book thicker; and that provide a broad range of effective strategies all designed and coordinated to accomplish a specific goal.
One of those few books of real value is Mark Hunter’s new book, High-Profit Selling: Win The Sale Without Compromising On Price (AMACOM: 2012).
Hunter comes from the trenches of sales—he spent almost two decades selling for Fortune 100 companies. His experience is that of a seller, not a theorist or seller wanna be.
Those years of real world selling, combined with his years as a sales trainer are at the heart of High-Profit Selling, and all designed to do one thing—help you acquire more business without compromising on price.
In today’s tough economy it is common for sellers and sales leaders to think in terms of capturing business by cutting price. Hunter argues—and presents the tools necessary to do so—that you don’t have to cut price and profit in order to win business even in today’s troubled economy.
Instead of cutting price, learn how to create the value that justifies your price.
High-Profit Selling presents a comprehensive approach to creating value to support your price. Hunter’s concentration is on value building and he thus spends a good deal of time on how to dig down to uncover prospect needs and issues, the fine points of communication, and leveraging knowledge, but he doesn’t neglect the equally critical issues of how to prospect, how to deal with price objections, and how to deal effectively—and profitably—with RFP’s, RFQ’s and professional buyers.
In addition to the standard one-on-one selling situation, Hunter addresses the need for an on-line presence, how to become a thought leader in your industry, and how to get your information out onto the internet in a manner that will inform and attract prospects.
It is common for many readers of sales books to skip around and read the parts that sound interesting and to ignore the rest. In some cases, the reader skips the greater part of the book.
First, I’d advise readers not to approach High-Profit Selling as a magazine with each chapter being an article that can be read or skipped—read the entire book and read it in order.
Second, if you simply cannot control yourself and you must read the book as you would Reader’s Digest; by all means do not skip the “One Percent Continuous Improvement Process” section in the last chapter. I suspect that a great many readers will skip this section and they’ll suffer because of it. In the space of just about three pages Mark presents a very simple concept that can literally change your career in a matter of months. By concentrating on improving a single aspect of your selling each week by just one percent you will improve your sales performance by almost 70% over the course of a year. What would your pipeline—and bank account—look like if your performance was improved by 60 or 70% by the end of the year?
If you’re looking for a well written, high value book to help you increase your sales, High-Profit Selling has just hit the streets and is in stock at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Books-a-Million. I encourage you to pick up a copy and learn how to make your numbers without compromising on profit.
