October 2022
Intermediate to advanced
256 pages
2h 27m
English
Content preview from Selling in a Crisis
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
36Keep the Faith
Last week, I had to deliver the bad news to a sales rep that we were not moving forward with her proposal. The value of the contract was close to a million dollars. We'd been working on it for several months.
The last thing I wanted to do was tell her that we were not going to sign the contract. She did everything right in the sales process. But the economic winds had shifted and we could not justify locking ourselves into a long-term agreement with so much uncertainty. The risk was too great. There was nothing she could have done differently to change this outcome.
Most sales professionals worth their salt will experience this same disappointment when selling in a crisis. It's unavoidable. When you lose sales like this, it hurts. It can make you feel like you've been burned. You put in all of that work, followed the sales process, built relationships and trust, and still lost the sale.
In this state of mind, it's easy to become cynical and start believing that since “no one is going to buy from you anyway, why put in the effort.” To protect yourself from getting burned again, you begin replacing human-to-human interaction with shortcuts and arm's-length communication.
It's so much easier to quickly run through a handful of self-serving, closed-ended questions, deliver a generic pitch, send a proposal via email, and hope for the best than it is to take the time to truly understand what is important to your stakeholders.
This mindset is deadly to your income. ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.