Tác giả: Bill Stinnett

Nhà xuất bản: McGraw-Hill

When I founded Sales Excellence, Inc., my intention was to develop and offer training and consulting services to help executives, sales managers, and salespeople learn how to do all of the things that every book and seminar on sales had already told them they should be doing. There were already several very successful and widely used sales methodologies on the market, and over the years I had attended seminars and read books on just about all of them. I thought that rather than trying to re-create or repackage what had already been done, our company would provide what I called 'skill-specific' training on various aspects of professional sales such as prospecting, negotiation, reaching and selling to executives, developing business and financial acumen, and so on. We developed a curriculum that goes deep into targeted subject matter in a series of one- or two-day workshops, as opposed to trying to teach everything abut selling in a five-day seminar. This approach was designed to effect substantial changes in the way participants think about selling, which results in marked and lasting changes in behavior.

We work with our clients to determine what specific knowledge or skill-sets can offer the greatest opportunity for improvement. We then develop a custom workshop focused on achieving specific learning objectives that support, and are congruent with, whatever processes and tools they are already using. We find that nearly all of our larger clients-which now include the likes of Microsoft, General Electric, and EDS-as well as many of our midsize and smaller customers, already use one of the popular sales methodologies such as Strategic Selling , Solution Selling , or SPIN Selling as their core sales process infrastructure. Most of them also have some kind of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system in place to manage accounts and opportunities. They hire us to help maximize the return on those investments by making their sales force more effective at executing the processes they already have in place, while adding tools and structure where needed. In some cases, of course, our role becomes much more broad and strategic, providing overall sales process consulting and infrastructure for sales force management, depending on what we and our clients decide is the right approach. But in order to streamline the customization process and maximize the impact of our workshops, we established a five-step diagnostic process for engaging each new client, which involves a great deal of discovery up front. As we worked with a wide variety of sales teams from every conceivable industry, we began to recognize some very interesting patterns.