I absolutely LOVE to read – sometimes I’ll even read the same book multiple times. The New Solution Selling by Keith M. Eades is one of those books. It’s a required reading for the Enfusen sales staff, and a must-read for anyone in the tech, big ticket, coaching, consulting, or services spaces. Check out this video to get tips that will help you close more sales through the solution selling process.
Highlights
0:43 The two types of sales people 1:24 What is solution selling 2:11 The 9 block vision model 4:09 Using KPIs to measure success 5:44 Getting a copy of our “cheat sheet” 6:40 Who should read this book
Transcription
Hi this is Roger Bryan and today we’re going to be doing a book review on The New Solution Selling. I just read this book for the third time. Now why the hell would I read it for a third time? Well, it’s an amazing book.
This time really, my goal was to create this: it’s a 12 page guide to the new solution selling process for our sales team as well as for a couple clients that had asked for this.
Main ideas of The New Solution Selling
On this video I’m going to review the main ideas from the solution selling book and I’m also going to give you an opportunity. If you share this post, we’ll send you a copy of this. This is an internal-only because there’s a lot of writing on what’s in the book, so if you want a copy of this, go ahead and share this video and we’ll send this over to you.
I. Two Types of Sales People
There are really two types of sales people as referenced in this book.
- “Eagles”: There are the “Eagles”, which are those top performers. That’s about 20% of the market, and really what those people are is they’re the intuitive people that have the ability to ask questions and kind of guide a sales conversation naturally. That 20% is inherent skills related to solution or consultative selling.
- “Journey People”: Now for the rest of us, the other 80%, which they call “Journey People”, which I just call regular sales people. They make presentations, they make statements – the one thing they don’t make usually is sales. In today’s world, especially if you’re in the technology space, you’ve got to be doing solution selling.
II. Solution Selling
So what is solution selling? Solution selling is the concept of understanding your potential clients’ goals and pains, and then properly positioning your solution through a consultative process to show them what life will look like once they solve the pains that they’re feeling. It involves getting deep into their business and getting an intrinsic understanding of what’s stopping them from reaching their goals, and then figuring out what the right solution to their problem is.
Now that doesn’t mean that you ask 1 or 2 questions and then you as the genius or the savior come in and say, “We can fix this!” It’s about a really in-depth analysis of where your potential customer is, what their needs are, and how you’re going to provide that to them.
III. The 9 Block Vision Model
One of the things that I really like about this is the 9 Block Vision Model. And you’re probably not going to be able to see this from here but we’ve got a diagram from the book in this and it talks about:
- Opening up a conversation
- Controlling a conversation
- Confirming what’s been discussed
Opening up and controlling a conversation
A good example of this is using open-ended questions to start a conversation. Then, making sure that as they answer, you start to control the conversation by saying “Does this happen because…” so that you can get them to acknowledge that they understand the pain, but now what’s causing the pain/what’s stopping them to reach the goal.
Confirming what’s been discussed
In the confirm stage, what you’re doing is you’re reiterating what they said and getting confirmation back. This is really important. This serves 2 primary purposes:
- Acknowledgement: The first one is that when you get them to confirm back to you, you’re getting that acknowledgement that they agree and accept that this is a true pain and you’re getting them to confirm and agree that you understand it.
- Ownership: The second part of that is that you’re getting them to take ownership in this. As you’re walking them through this solution selling – your discovery of their pain, and getting them to outline the correlated relationship between their pain and their inability to reach their goal – they start to take ownership of the conversation, which means they also start to take ownership of the solution. And when they take ownership of the solution, they’re bought in to everything that you’re saying and now you have a partner – you have somebody that’s ready and willing to be successful.
Avoiding high-pressure tactics
The worst thing that you can do is sell someone who’s not ready to implement. There are a lot of people out there that teach high-pressure sales tactics.
That might work on some instances, but when you’re in the technology or the services space, the coaching, the consulting space, high-pressure selling does you no good because you end up with a client that has absolutely no interest in doing business with you or implementing the things that you’re going to teach them. Don’t do that!
IV. KPIs: the statistics of success
Another main point that I like to bring up in this is really talking about KPIs. This is something where, even in our organization as new sales reps come in, this is one of the things that they struggle with. It’s not too hard to understand the pain – I mean we work with sales and marketing automation. We know exactly needs to be done from a CRM and a marketing automation platform, nurture campaigns – we’re just, we’re geniuses at that. We’re been doing it for years, we’ve been funded by big companies to do it.
When it comes to selling, and then it comes to implementing, it’s important to understand what your KPIs are going to be, which are key performance indicators. Those are what I call the statistics of success. Outlining those in the sales process really helps you to have a benchmarking system for implementation.
Some of these things are like:
- Profits
- Revenue
- Costs
- Displaced and avoided costs
- Intangible benefits
Now if you’re a marketer like we are, you might be looking at things like traffic and conversion. You might be looking at overall sales numbers. If you really get deep into sales automation, you might be looking at the amount of contacts in each lead stage: contacts, prospects, qualified leads, opportunities, and then customers.
As you start to outline those things statistically during the sales process, you’re showing that you have an understanding of their business. You’re helping them to outline where they are, and you’re helping them to define a goal of where they want to be. When you have a statistically-based goal, all you need to do is implement in order to reach it.
Get a copy of our “cheat sheet”
Like I said at the beginning of the video, you can either read all 280 pages of this book – which is highly recommended – or share this video and say “Hey Roger, send me a copy of your cheat sheet” and I’ve really broken down the important elements to selling big-ticket coaching, consulting, and services packages.
There’s a lot of great stuff in here about follow-up, follow-through, the different individual strategies that you can use from a sales perspective – those are all great and you can dive in and learn them. But if you want to get the ability to master the primary, main ideas, like,
- Strengthen your process orientation
- Improve scalability
- Linking sales to implementation
- Discovering and solving the pain for a potential customer
go ahead and grab a copy of this from us, and we’ll be happy to share it with you.
Who should read this book?
I love to do book reviews – I’m just a huge book nerd. I love to read – I read a lot of books multiple times.
I would highly recommend this one to anyone that:
- Is in a sales position
- Owns a business that has their own sales staff
- Implement sales strategies for other customers where they have to do the selling
If you can guide them how to implement this in their business, your marketing efforts will lead to greater return on investment for your clients when they understand how to do solution selling.
I appreciate you taking the time to watch this video and we look forward to talking with you in the future.
