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

Seeing the Road Forward to Success

Sales strategy consists of identifying how you will achieve relative superiority—that is, the point at which you have a decisive advantage over your competition.3 In other words, strategy answers the question, “What are you counting on to win?” And winning means improving your customers’ businesses and growing your company’s revenue and profits by defeating a competitor trying to do the same thing. Insight from our seller surveys and deal reviews outlines three specific nontraditional sources of relative superiority that advanced sellers both “see” and “manage,” while others do not, enabling them to lead the change in this market. More specifically, the best sellers:

1. Start with a focus on customer politics by identifying influence and going beyond the tangible authority of organization charts to know who to call on.

2. Provide unexpected customer value that goes beyond the stated and expected value associated with a sales opportunity to significantly advance a customer’s business, while differentiating themselves from the competition.

3. Formulate a sales strategy that leverages the largely invisible elements of influence, unexpected customer value, and sales cycle timing, along with Competitive Differentiation and vulnerability, to build on the more traditional sources of competitive advantage and decisively win business.

This book presents how to see and manage these three invisible intangibles—politics, Unexpected Value, and strategy—and ...