The New Strategic Selling: The Unique Sales System Proven Successful by the World's Best Companies

by Robert B. Miller, Stephen E. Heiman, Tad Tuleja, J. W. Marriott Jr. (Other), Robert B. Miller (Other)

Overview

The Book That Sparked A Selling Revolution In 1985 one book changed sales and marketing forever. Rejecting manipulative tactics and emphasizing "process," Strategic Selling presented the idea of selling as a joint venture and introduced the decade's most influential concept, Win-Win. The response to Win-Win was immediate and helped turn the small company that created Strategic Selling, Miller Heiman, into a global leader in sales development with the most prestigious client list in the industry. The New Strategic Selling This modern edition of the business classic confronts the rapidly evolving world of business-to-business sales with new real-world examples, new strategies for confronting competition, and a special section featuring the most commonly asked questions from the Miller Heiman workshops. Learn: * How to identify the four real decision makers in every corporate labyrinth * How to prevent sabotage by an internal deal-killer * How to make a senior executive eager to see you * How to avoid closing business that you'll later regret * How to manage a territory to provide steady, not "boom and bust," revenue * How to avoid the single most common error when dealing with the competition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780446695190
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	04/20/2005
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	167,199
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Stephen E. Heiman has worked in sales development for over thirty years. In the 1970s, as an IBM national account salesman, he increased sales by over 35 percent and was in the top 5 percent for total sales and percentage quota. He continued his success at Kepner-Tregoe as director of marketing and at North American Van Lines where, in four years as executive vice president, he increased sales and profits by 36 percent. In 1978 he joined partner Robert B. Miller in the company that became Miller Heiman Inc. Heiman retired in 1988 as MHI president and CEO; he continues to serve as the company's chairman of the board.

Diane Sanchez began her selling career in 1970 as a field representative for Savin Business Machines. In 1973 she joined the Scholl Corporation, where she developed sales coaching skills and managed promotional programs for the sales force. In 1979, as vice president of marketing for newly formed Miller Heiman Inc., she developed a telemarketing and direct mail system that she implemented there and, in the 1980s, in her own consulting practice. She rejoined Miller Heiman as president and CEO in 1988, when its annual revenues were just over $2 million; in the tenth year of her presidency, that figure is expected to surpass $20 million.

Tad Tuleja, Miller Heiman Inc.'s staff writer, has cowritten five MHI books, including the original Strategic Selling. Among his nearly thirty other books is Beyond the Bottom Line, a study of business ethics. From 1987 to 1991 he directed the School of Management writing program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has just completed a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Read an Excerpt

If It Ain't Broke: The "Why" Behind the New Strategic Selling

Strategic Selling was first published in 1985. At that time, even though the process on which the book was based had been in place for only about eight years, it had already begun to reap significant benefits both for our company, Miller Heiman, Inc., and for the clients who attended our Strategic Selling workshops and programs. In 1985, many of corporate America's most successful selling organizations had already begun to see us as the "process experts," and we had earned the trust of such innovative market leaders as HewlettPackard, Marriott, General Electric, Hallmark, and CocaCola.

As we explained in the introduction to the original edition, we attributed much of our success with these and other forward looking companies to our impassioned support of a nonmanipulative selling philosophy that was the driving force of the Strategic Selling approach. That philosophy was based on the premise that getting an individual order is never enough: True selling success rests on such "beyond the order" achievements as repeat business, solid referrals, and long-term relationships. The key to securing them, we insisted, is to manage every sales objective as a joint venturea mutually beneficial transaction where both buyer and seller "Win."

In 1985, the notion of selling as a "Win-Win" process--indeed, the notion of selling as a process at all-was still a novel approach to the profession. Even among companies who invested heavily in sales training, what was being taught was face-time skills and techniques-the traditional salesperson's grab-bag of hooks, lines, and clinchers. Manipulative tactics were stillvery much in vogue, and Miller Heiman was nearly unique among consultants in insisting that this timeworn approach-the old "Get the order any way you can" approach-was ultimately a way of shooting yourself in the foot. Twelve years ago, if you talked about "serving your customer's interests as well as your own," many salespeople still considered you unrealistic. Everybody paid lip service to customer need, but out in the trenches, according to the given wisdom of the 1980s, it was still numbers, and orders, and hardball, that brought you success. There was something anomalous-some even said revolutionary-in the customer-oriented process of Strategic Selling.

There was also something in it that was eminently practical-so practical that our clients, who were already sales leaders, realized that it was a way to make themselves even better. As "unrealistic" as traditionally trained salespeople might have considered our Win-Win approach, the incontrovertible fact was that it worked. The proof of that could be seen in our clients' financials, which regularly reported major venue gains that could be traced directly to the implementation of our processes. It could be seen in the literally hundreds of success stories about how a "hopelessly confusing" account had begun to yield solid business once the sales team wrote a Miller Heiman-inspired action plan. As those stories poured in, and as our clients confirmed the contribution we were making, we were gratified to see that we had earned a reputation, in the words of one divisional manager, as "the people who brought process into selling."

It was process, to be sure, that lay at the heart of our success, and that was the case whatever in-house terminology our clients used. At Price Waterhouse, for example, our systematic approach is called a "methodology." At Coca-Cola, the preferred term is "technologies." Many of our other clients have adopted our language directly, speaking comfortably and naturally about Buying Influences and Win-Results. Whatever the terms, the point is the same. The systematic approach that we pioneered has fostered a quiet revolution among the nation's sales leaders.

We profited from that revolution as much as anyone. In a sense, by the time the first edition of this book went to press, we had already become our own best advertisement. By running our own business on Strategic Selling principles, we were increasing our revenues dramatically, year after year. Today, while countless companies are wrestling the downsizing dragon, Miller Heiman-like most of our clients-is still on a roll. Over the past five years, for example, we have increased our annual revenues by an average of 25 to 30 percent a year, tripled the staff in our corporate headquarters, and established offices from the United Kingdom and Brazil to Australia. Working with a sales force that has quadrupled in a decade-not to mention hundreds of valued client associates-we have introduced over 150,000 sales professionals to one or more Miller Heiman processes, and we continue to serve roughly 25,000 new ones every year.

All of this has occurred, moreover, during a period of tremendous international turmoil, of dramatic fluctuations in government policies, and of a bewildering "complexification" in selling itself. The world of sales has gone through a thousand major changes, but the processes we teach have been equal to the challenge. They're still relevant, they still work, and they're still improving the revenues of those who employ them. Books on selling "techniques" come and go. Strategic Selling, like the Energizer bunny, "just keeps on going."

Since so much of our success has been based on Strategic Selling-both the process and the book-you might question the rationale for this new edition. Why make adjustments to something that's already working so effectively? Or, to rephrase the old business adage, "If it ain't broke, why fix it?" It's a very reasonable question, and it has two answers.

The first is that our clients asked us to. Even though they found Strategic Selling to be just as effective, and the concepts just as relevant, as they had been in 1985, some of them felt that, after a dozen years, even the best of processes could use a face-lift. Some of the book's examples, they pointed out, seemed a little dated for the 1990s, and they might not be connecting as well as we wanted them to with sales forces who were increasingly geared toward the future.

When we described how rapid changes can generate "future shock," for example, we illustrated the point by referring to the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s. That pivotal event was still a vivid memory in 1985, but as the 1990s wane and the millennium looms, that's no longer true. "Many of the young lions who sell for us today," a district manager told us recently, "were still making mud pies when the oil crackdown happened If you want to connect with them, you need fresh stories." Because we take such constructive criticism seriously, we've tried to give this new book a more contemporary feeling, so it could achieve an effective fusion of the timeless and the timely.

The second reason we revised Strategic Selling relates to a basic axiom of the process itself. "Whatever got you where you are today is no longer sufficient to keep you there:' We had been telling our clients that since 1977, and last year after considerable exhortation from both clients and colleagues-we finally decided to apply this axiom to ourselves, and to undertake a thorough rethinking of the program that had "got us there." In consultation with our expert field force, therefore, we went through Strategic Selling with a fine-tooth comb, sharpening and enhancing it line by line so that the resulting text would be even more real-world and useful than the original text had been for more than a decade.

Some of the changes we made were chiefly cosmetic-the illustrations, for example, have all been redrawn to give the book a more user-friendly appearance. But most of our changes were on a more substantive level. As we fiddled with this manuscript that wasn't really broken, we weren't content just to slap on some chrome and new paint. We wanted to improve the efficiency of the engine itself, to make the thousand and one minor adjustments that would ensure that the analytical tools we were offering our clients were just as sharp and powerful as they possibly could be...

Table of Contents

Foreword

If It Ain't Broke: The "Why" Behind the New Strategic Selling

Part 1: Strategic Selling

Chapter 1: Successful Selling in a World of Constant Change

Chapter 2: Strategy and Tactics Defined

Chapter 3: Your Starting Point: Position

Chapter 4: A Glance at the Strategy Blueprint: The Six Key Elements of Strategic Selling

Part 2: Building on Bedrock: Laying the Foundation of Strategic Analysis

Chapter 5: Key Element 1: Buying Influences

Chapter 6: Key Element 2: Red Flags/Leverage from Strength

Chapter 7: Buyer Level of Receptivity

Chapter 8: Key Element 3: The Four Response Modes

Chapter 9: The Importance of Winning

Chapter 10: Key Element 4: Win-Results

Part 3: Common Problems, Uncommon Solutions

Chapter 11: Getting to the Economic Buying Influence: Strategies and Tactics

Chapter 12: The Coach: Developing Your Prime Information Resource

Chapter 13: What About the Competition?

Part 4: Strategy and Territory: Focusing on Your Win-Win Customers

Chapter 14: Key Element 5: Ideal Customer

Chapter 15: Your Ideal Customer Profile: Demographics and Psychographics

Part 5: Strategy and Territory: Managing Your Selling Time

Chapter 16: Of Time, Territory, and Money

Chapter 17: Key Element 6: The Sales Funnel

Chapter 18: Priorities and Allocation: Working the Funnel

Part 6: From Analysis to Action

Chapter 19: Your Action Plan

Chapter 20: Strategy When You Have No Time

Chapter 21: Strategic Selling: A Lifetime Approach

After Twenty Years: Responding to Our Clients'

Most Challenging Questions

Index

Foreword

Marriott International, Inc., has been fortunate to grow substantially over the years, to the point where today it operates in fifty countries around the world and employs over 200,000 people. Yet we remain in significant ways a family organization, still committed to the values that were honored by my parents seventy years ago when they started in business with a tiny root beer stand.

Among those values was a belief in the importance of relationships, both within and outside the company. Since 1927, we have said that if you commit yourself to taking care of your own people, you can be fairly confident that they will take care of your customers. In a service business like ours, that is essential to success. Marriott's global reputation for quality and value is the direct result of our honoring this principle. That same principle is the heart of The New Strategic Selling.

Throughout our history, we have found that our most productive business alliances have been forged with companies that share this orientation. One of the strongest of these has been with Miller Heiman, Inc., whose commitment to "WinWin" relationships parallels our own. We have worked together since 1986, when our company introduced its first sales associates to Miller Heiman's Strategic Selling process. Since then, nearly a thousand Marriott people have been introduced to this process.

There is a practical reason for this. In the past decade, we have expanded dramatically, in both our lodging and our contract services group, so that today we can offer our customers a wide variety of choices. In managing the complexity that naturally accompanies such expansion, Miller Heiman has been aninvaluable ally. Strategic Selling in particular has made important contributions to our position with business clients. In addition, Miller Heiman's systematic approach to managing change has helped to enhance our sales associates' flexibility as they keep pace with the rapid changes in our industry.

Aside from the practical benefits that Strategic Selling has brought us, I believe that our association with Miller Heiman is strong because of the natural fit between our companies. As we continue to expand toward our goal of operating 2,000 lodging properties by the year 2000, we remain committed to the "human side" of business. Miller Heiman understands and supports that commitment, and it's once again evident in Thhe New Strategic Selling.

-J.W. MARRIOTT, JR.
Chairman and CEO,
Marriott International, Inc.