Peter Duncan reviews: The Secret to Selling More
by Mitch Goozé
In simple, plain language and in less than 150 pages, Goozé looks at two approaches to improving sales: The Efficiency Solution and the Effectiveness Solution. In the Efficiency Solution, he debunks the commonly held myth that the only real way to add value and sell is in a face-to-face setting. With survey results and examples he challenges companies to think of the selling process as one of trying to "manufacture loyal, profitable customers." To become efficient, you have to understand the process by which customers in your industry want to purchase and then use modern process design techniques (the same you would use to improve a manufacturing process) to lower costs and increase the efficiency of your customer communication and acquisition process. With a well-defined process, you can then apply modern tools such as the Internet and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to further efficiency gains. Goozé points out, however, that both of these are merely tools for more efficient communication, and he offers some specific advice for small to mid-sized organizations when selecting software to implement CRM. While greater efficiency is nice, Goozé argues in the second half of the book that the real secret to selling more lies with the Effectiveness Solution. "The real breakthrough comes from understanding what the right thing to do really is," and according to Goozé, that begins by recognizing that selling is only the final step of a complex process that is often called the "marketing process". He argues that if the upstream activities such as identifying "Who is your customer?", "What they want to buy?" and "How they want to buy it?" are not clearly resolved, then sales hardly has a chance of success. "The real reason more sales people aren't great is because most of them don't know What and / or Who and they don't get it figured out." Students of Simplified Strategic Planning (SSP) will find these questions remarkably similar to the key focus questions required to develop a sound strategy: "What are you going to sell?" and "To whom are you going to sell it?". In the second half of the book Goozé lays out a series of questions, challenges and examples to help companies resolve these questions and communicate them to their sales force to grow the business. He tackles selling commodities, selling services, branding, and selling specialties in a way that is highly compatible with SSP. Whether or not you are a practitioner of SSP, you will find Mitch Goozé offers a simple, no-nonsense approach to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales team and fuel more profitable sales growth for your business. Peter Duncan is a Vice President of Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, Inc. He can be reached via e-mail at duncan@cssp.com. For more, click here © Copyright 2007 Center for Simplified Strategic Planning Return to Course and Direction home page | Return to archive page |
|||||
While there may be a few companies that have more than enough sales to support their strategic growth aspirations, it is more common to find companies struggling, sometimes for several years, to improve their sales performance. As Mitch Goozé points out in his new book, The Secret to Selling More; the secret is "not where you've been looking. If it were, you'd have already found it".