Together We Win

A deal dies. No competitor won it. The buyer never said no. They just stopped moving, and eventually stopped answering.

The JOLT Effect told sellers what to do about buyer indecision. Together We Win is about who to be, and what leadership has to change so they can.

As Ted McKenna, co-author of The JOLT Effect, observes:

"Levitt's work in Together We Win further advances our understanding of how mindsets at the frontline matter now more than ever as buying continues to evolve, and, critically, how our old systems and processes often hold us back."

The problem isn't simply what sellers do. It's the systems, processes, and mindsets that shape how they sell.

Dixon and McKenna found that 40 to 60 percent of qualified, forecasted deals never move forward. Roughly half of those buyers aren't gone. They are stuck, and they could still move. The rest should have been disqualified months ago. Your forecast can't tell the difference, and neither can your reps, because nobody ever taught them to look.

So the answer is more. More activity, more pipeline, another platform, another certification. And when the quarter is closing, a discount. None of it works, because none of it touches the reason the buyer stopped.

The rep in that meeting did everything right by the standards they were trained on. They led with the company. They ran the demo. They logged the activity and moved the deal to the next stage. And the buyer, who came hoping this one would be different, learned that it wasn't.

Most of the time, selling is something a rep does to a buyer. That's the problem. Selling is a closed system, and the buyer is inside it, along with the manager, the CRM, the comp plan, and everything you have decided to measure. Change one part and the rest shifts. That system was built to produce sales. That's exactly why it doesn't. The purpose of selling isn't the sale. It's helping the buyer achieve strategic business results, which the buyer often can't name yet. That's the work: co-creating the outcome, not waiting for a requirement.

Together We Win names the doctrine behind the training and traces what it costs. Drawing on thirty years in enterprise sales, including the IDC research that helped define the practice of sales enablement, Lee Levitt gives sales leadership, RevOps, and enablement each a specific job.

Inside

• STUCK™: the five reasons buyers stall, and why none of them is your business case
• PATH™: perspective, authenticity, trust, and helm, and why two of the four are not the rep's to declare
• What to inspect instead of activity
• The CRM fields, comp plans, and pipeline reviews that quietly work against you
• A specific charter for enablement, and the conversation to have with your VP of Sales

Build the organization that lets your reps succeed.

With a foreword by Gerhard Gschwandtner, founder of Selling Power.

Praise

"Lee Levitt makes a point I've rarely seen made this clearly: sell means to give, not persuade, not close. This isn't a book about technique. It's a book about who you are when you walk into the room. Read it. Then look in the mirror."
Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO, Selling Power

“The Buyer First mindset isn’t just for salespeople. Lee tells the stories of what happens when a leadership team hires, operates, and strategizes from a Buyer First mentality, and what happens when it doesn’t. Without it, the organization makes it virtually impossible for a rep to earn the trust a buyer needs to decide with confidence. Stop the madness!”
Carole Mahoney, Author, Buyer First

Lee Levitt has held senior roles at Oracle, Google, and multiple emerging technology and services firms, co-founded the Sales Enablement Society and leads the Acelera Group. He also wrote The Second Meeting.

Lee Levitt has spent thirty years inside sales organizations, leading teams, enabling and coaching salespeople, and advising the executives who lead them. He has sold everything from seed packets door to door and the traditional boot at L.L. Bean to predictive analytics software and business and professional services. He spent a decade as an analyst at IDC, where he helped define the practice of sales enablement, ran sales operations at Phase Forward, held senior roles at Oracle and Google, and in 2016 co-founded the Sales Enablement Society.He is the Principal of the Acelera Group, where he advises sales leaders at emerging technology and services companies, and holds a coaching certification from The Inner Game Institute. He is the author of The Second Meeting, the first of the Acelera Sales Fables.He lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Amy.

Gerhard Gschwandtner is the founder and CEO of Selling Power, the sales leadership magazine and media company he launched in 1981.