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

Selling Skills Are Not Enough

It’s fairly common knowledge that you must master certain skills to succeed in sales. Abilities such as prospecting, asking good questions, structuring a sales call, building a business case for your product, and establishing rapport with a customer, to name just a few, are essential. However, a majority of the techniques that dominate today’s notion of selling help sellers in only one dimension of their efforts: establishing the relationship between seller and buyer. Focusing solely on a prospective buyer assumes that there is only one thing between you and getting the order—the customer. It produces a distorted vision of what selling is all about, and it blinds you to the real threat—the competition.

Think about it this way: as much as you want the customer’s business, so does someone else. But typical sales campaigns don’t make provisions for competitive threats. Amy’s “quote and hope” mentality will not be enough when she’s up against an advanced seller like Sara. She needs a more complete sales approach, one that incorporates a view of the world as it really is—a three-dimensional interplay between you, your customer, and the competition, as shown in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2: Selling Is Multi-Dimensional