Items related to Stop Selling & Do Something Valuable
With the rise of more complex products and services, selling too has become more complex. No longer does the market rely on selling encyclopedias and simple services: the trend is to selling multifaceted, intricate products and services with longer sales cycles and resulting longer term relationships with clients.
The problem for those selling more complex products and services is that their actual goal is to have a long term relationship with their clients. However, our traditional model for selling focuses on pinning targets on the backs of potential clients and going for the kill .
The object is not to kill our clients but instead to become valuable and essential members of their trusted inner circle.
So how do you do that?
By using some of the key principles from Stop Selling and Do Something Valuable .
1. Know Your Client Warm Knowing your client warm is what will differentiate you from every other salesperson. Knowing your client warm means knowing more than their golf score, or how many sugars they take in their coffee or where their children go to school; it s understanding what drives them in their role and how they are measuring their performance.
2. Forget your message . Share the power. Make it theirs. Forget your message; forget the need to control the room through charisma and razzle-dazzle. Sharing the power means share the power of the meeting with the client give them the chance to dictate what s important to them and to talk about it. Ask them what s important and then put it front and center. Make their needs more important than yours.
3. Create value at every step until you become invaluable. This book asks you to be valuable from the get go. Sometimes salespeople get into diagnosing the problem endlessly before feeling like they can provide answers. Sometimes they get scared and think they might be giving too much away. Sometimes they get stuck trying to have all the answers instead of asking great questions. Sometimes salespeople don t know enough to know what will create value.
4. ABO - Always be opening. You don t have to close everyone. People tend to approach sales like they ve always got to create activity, activity, activity. It s exhausting and unnecessary. Bury the phrase always be closing deep in the ground and use ABO instead Always Be Opening. Learn how to dialogue with clients, on what they want to achieve and how you can help them achieve it or not. We want to keep opening the possibilities, not trying to close them off and toss them away if they don t immediately yield to our prospecting.
5. Make any selling true to your style so it feels authentic and true. Selling can t come from a one size fits all Acme Sales kit. People can t squeeze into someone else s process and hope to duplicate their success. In order for a process to work, it has to feel comfortable and natural. That s why the tools are designed so that they can work with how each individual reader works, and can be adapted to their particular style. But ultimately readers can take each of these tools and do it their way, not the Steve Walmsley way.
This Book Is Valuable To Anyone Who Sells For A Living Most of all, these are tools that let people be more of who they are, to provide more value for their clients. The goal is to stop selling, and instead, do something experientially valuable for the client from before the first face-to-face interaction.
The tools presented in Stop Selling and Do Something Valuable are simple to execute and yield powerful results. They can be used by diverse types of people; buttoned-down silver foxes and technical logically-minded professionals to results-focused business managers and client-focused independent consultants.
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About the Author:
Steve Walmsley makes sales effectiveness and high performance leadership look easy. His life s work has been to help others make it look easy too, by creating methodologies that are simple, effective and adaptable across organizations to help employees over-perform with heart . Whether for privately held organizations, Fortune 100 companies and entrepreneurial firms, Steve has helped his clients achieve quick wins, higher profitability and long-term success, which he can now share with a larger audience through the publication of Stop Selling and Do Something Valuable .
Review:
Steve s extensive background being a top performer and coaching the best of the best, demonstrates he can walk the talk. He has worked up close and personal with some of the biggest top performers of the biggest Top 100 companies, and used his observations to fine tune his approach in his own practice, as well as distilling it for major coaching clients.
In 1994 Steve saw a gap in how organizations were doing business, and envisioned a consulting company that would support both organizations and leaders in the areas of growth and change management. He also began creating, developing and testing sales tools that would be valuable and accelerate growth, but not arduous to implement or maintain. Tools that would slip quietly and easily into someone s existing sales process and advance it build momentum and positive interaction with clients. With the formal launch of Walmsley and Co., these tools have helped countless organizations, executives and sales professionals reach extraordinary levels of growth.
With more than 20 years of leadership and coaching expertise under his belt, Steve understands the key areas that make the most difference to a company s growth. He has been called the expert s expert and the consultant s consultant . His consultative approach and finely honed business insight allows him to quickly get to the core issues in management and sales effectiveness, giving immediate value to the business leaders that meet with him. His goal is to provide this knowledge to anyone who wants to improve their own performance and make client relationships that last.
Steve challenges the status quo with intelligent, powerful inquiry and swift directness tempered by a sense of humor, a strong, directive and punchy approach that is articulated clearly in Stop Selling and Do Something Valuable . He goes straight to the heart of the self-limiting or outdated beliefs that get in the way of effective leadership and strong client relationships. There are many CEOs who acknowledge that Steve turned their businesses around and sales professionals and senior practioners who have achieved results that didn t seem possible a few months before.
Though many clients and professional friends admonished him to publish and product-ize his work, Steve was not prepared to bring something to market until he felt that it was unique, valuable and relevant and that it reflected his commitment to engineering excellence that is a set of tools that had a minimal footprint and design but maximum output and results. Most of all, he wanted something that hung together and helped people and businesses build a momentum and adapt to rapid changes in their environment. Confident that his sales methodology was ready for a wider market Stop Selling and Do Something Valuable , the first book in his Sales Mastery series, was born.
Steve's preface for his approach in the book is, "Most books give the theory"... "What to think", "what to do" in the expectation that they create demand for you to seek their further expertise in the "how to do it ". We have sought to strike a balance of the abstract with "the fewest things that make the most difference" in your everyday interaction with clients. I've spent the past two years helping to develop the skills of financial advisors. I can tell you, most know what to think and what to do. The gap lies in how to do it .
The "how" is set in the context of some key principles - ones that I could really get behind as a financial planner - for instance "Create value at every step" and "Don t push the pitch, share the power". My favorite principle is the first: "Know your client warm". That is, know what matters to your client, in the short term and the long. Don't be afraid to ask about what really matters, because knowing this is what makes a difference.
Steve's language fits beautifully with the planning profession's shift from "data gathering" to "discovery", from "product-based" to "client-centered". The main tools are the Know Your Client tool, which is a very simple way of asking people what matters to them over the next year and an Agenda tool that creates relationship, connection and gives the client or potential client a sense of your value to them, before they meet with you.
While an Agenda may sound overly formal, Steve's version is a marvelous way to create an instant connection with the client and get across the nature of our work as advisors. He digs down on each section of the agenda so you understand its purpose and intent. I have coached some advisors in using this tool, and in one case, the resistant potential client quickly called the advisor to schedule the meeting. That's because the agenda deftly communicated the purpose of the work and the nature of the advisor in such a way that the reluctant client "got it" immediately.
Some of Steve's best thinking is in short paragraphs near the very end of the book. My favorite such treasure is a small section called, "Stop Time Traveling and Get Present with Your Client". For those who take the time to read it and really think about it, this tiny section could transform your client meetings.
In short, I see Steve's book as a beginning of a new conversation in our community about selling in the context of what we do and how we aspire to do it. If you take the time to digest and adapt its resources, you could find your work becoming more valuable for clients and for yourself. --Elizabeth Jetton, Past President, Financial Planning Association
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherMastery Press
- Publication date2007
- ISBN 10 0978454901
- ISBN 13 9780978454906
- BindingPaperback
- Edition number1
- Number of pages191
(No Available Copies)
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