Book Review of Strategies That Win Sales

If you're in business, you should read Strategies That Win Sales

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Review of Strategies That Win Sales, by Mark Marone and Seleste Lunsfors.

Reviewer: Mark Lamendola, author of over 5,000 articles.

Today's selling environment is more complex than ever. This complexity presents problems and opportunities. How to best overcome the problems and take advantage of the opportunities is the message of Strategies That Win Sales.

This book is based on a survey of 150 individuals from 17 top companies. It's an inside look at what customers want and what high-performance sales organizations are doing.

Strategies That Win Sales consists of ten chapters and three appendices. Appendix A, "Five Roles for Successful Sales" is a worthwhile read on its own. The introduction explains the methodology of the survey, and how it relates to the content of the book. The first chapter details the challenges facing today's sales force. These include excessive price pressure, more competition (we're global, now), more sales channels (often competing with each other), and even better-informed customers who make more demands.

The result of the research behind Strategies That Win Sales was the identification of seven strategic areas that leading sales organizations use to win sales. One of the most interesting of these areas is consultative selling (Chapter Five). That kind of selling is not a "one size fits all" solution. If you can identify the customers with whom that approach works, your sales can benefit. But applying it to the wrong customers can hurt sales.

Strategies That Win Sales doesn't provide any "magic bullets" or neat gimmicks an incompetent salesperson can apply to become an overnight success. Nor does it provide any five-step solutions for sales managers needing to turn an underperforming sales team into superstars. This book is low on hyperbole, and heavy on real information. (Actually, it has no hyperbole).

One thing today's successful sales practitioner has in common with the sales champ of yesteryear is hard work. Another is the ability to listen to the customer. That much hasn't changed, and probably never will. But, the devil is in the details, and this book goes over them thoroughly.

On the downside, Strategies That Win Sales is following a recent trend of insufficient editing. The many grammar gaffes in Strategies That Win Sales occasionally hide the meaning the authors had intended. In some cases, I was unable to determine the meaning at all. This book contains valuable information, and a second printing would be good for all concerned--but not until the authors (or publisher) retain a copyeditor to make the text conform to Standard Written English (SWE).

Strategies That Win Sales also contained an odd language convention--I have no idea why. The authors used the word "impact" in odd places, turning some sentences into farsical gibberish. Impact means "to force tightly together." This is why we say teeth are "impacted" and why a doctor prescribes laxatives if your diagnosis is that you are "impacted." I fail to see the value of planning to "impact customers," though the authors talk about this repeatedly. I can't imagine any sales person going around and "impacting customers" without getting arrested rather quickly. Sales has changed, but not that much.

Strategies that Win Sales