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

The Direct Strategy Statement

You must be able to clearly and succinctly state your strategy, since this explains how you will leverage both traditional and nontraditional sources of relative superiority to win, while also providing directional guidance throughout the sales campaign. A complex or convoluted strategy will not serve this most important purpose. As such, the key elements to a Direct strategy statement include:

• The class of strategy.
• The critical customer business focus, such as some aspect of unexpected customer value.
• The critical political focus such as on a Fox who has a specific Personal Motivator.
• Unexpected or discounted competitor vulnerability, such as the overconfidence of an installed supplier or a weakness in solution capability, as it relates to providing value higher up on the Sales Value Chain.
• The timing, in terms of when you want the sales situation to peak and close.

Together, these elements not only provide a strategy statement but also convey a theme for the entire sales campaign, against which you can then judge all future activities and developments. An example of such a Direct strategy statement is the following:

Our Direct approach is to meet all customer requirements, while also providing Unexpected Value in the area of manufacturing throughput, advancing the corporation’s growth goal and the Fox’s Personal Motivator of winning the current Power Struggle within Manufacturing, which is time sensitive, thus peaking the sales situation at the ...