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

CHAPTER 7

Gaining Political Advantage

Recognition is the greatest motivator.

—Gerard C. Eakedale

Achieving Political Advantage requires that you motivate both Foxes and Power Base members to support you. It is their power that, when combined with value and strategy, produces a kind of synergy to disproportionately advance you to relative superiority. This means winning more business while also enhancing customer loyalty.

To accomplish this, we introduce two highly effective approaches to providing Power Base members with value. Both of these approaches go a long way toward enabling you to build good relationships with them. We then transition to a process that will allow you to divide those customer relationships into four distinct groups. Once all this in place, you’ll be able to determine who is in the Power Base and distinguish the type of relationship that you have with them. Things become even more exciting when you add a competitor to the mix. In this step, you will create a graphic illustration of your actual competitive position from a political alignment point of view.

Building great Power Base relationships doesn’t happen by accident, and it’s not the outcome of hard work alone. You form these connections by learning the rules of the game. One such rule that resides at the epicenter of politics is what we call the Power Base Principle—and when you learn to leverage this, you can begin to provide Power Base members with value. To understand how this works in an actual ...