The New Power Base Selling: Master The Politics, Create Unexpected Value and Higher Margins, and Outsmart the Competition

CHAPTER 2

The MBA of Selling

Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.

—Chinese Proverb

Sellers who are able to identify strategy to achieve relative superiority in their accounts are a powerful source of competitive advantage. However, most companies or business school elites fail to recognize this—even though sellers are a company’s final frontier to customer value and to engage and defeat competition (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1: Sales as the Final Frontier

So, why is there this perception that sellers are not, themselves, a source of competitive advantage? Two factors seem to be at play here.

First, selling is intangible in comparison to products, product development, customer support organizations, and so on. Most sellers work offsite at customer locations, out of sight of company management. Sure, executives see sales results, but they usually attribute these results to the value of whatever it is they’re selling. Since the world tends to discount the intangible in favor of what can be easily seen, felt, and therefore managed, sellers are frequently undervalued.

Second, high-performing sellers and business developers are often not understood. Management looks at what they do as an art, which strangely provides them with an explanation as to why they don’t understand selling for what it truly is: a mix of science, process, and interpersonal ability. This ...