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

The Indirect Strategy Statement

The key elements to the Indirect strategy statement include:

• The class of strategy
• The critical customer business focus of the strategy, such as unexpected customer value
• The critical political focus of the strategy, for example, on a Fox’s specific Personal Motivator
• Unexpected or discounted competitor vulnerability, such as an installed supplier’s overconfidence or a weakness in solution capability as it relates to providing value higher up on the Sales Value Chain
• Early achievement of the Prime Objective by using Milestone Stacking
• Timing that ensures the element of surprise and the competition’s inability to respond effectively

When these elements are combined, again, you have not only a strategy statement but a theme for the entire sales campaign. All activities and new developments are then judged against that theme. An example of such an Indirect strategy statement, utilizing our ATM sales scenario, is the following.

Our Indirect strategy is to change the ground rules from uptime and price to providing the Unexpected Value of revenue generation to advance the corporation’s growth goal and the retail banking Fox’s Personal Motivator of winning the current Power Struggle with commercial lending, by achieving our Prime Objective by July 9.

A general template to assist you with this consists of the tool in Figure 14.4.

Figure 14.4: Indirect Strategy Statement Template