"I've been in sales and marketing for 29 years. I've read practically every one of the business books on the subject and attended countless seminars . . . . If you're looking to sell on value rather than price, if you want to wake up your sales force, if you want to change the game, then this is the book you need to read. Mike's Partnership Selling ProcessTM gets results!"
Robert Kemple, Executive Vice-President Sales and Marketing ASCO Numatics Americas, Emerson Corporation
"He has identified the Sales, Marketing, and Service competencies at each level of the organization, necessary to achieve WORLD CLASS EXCELLENCE and has developed his training around those competencies (in other words, it's not 'one size fits all')."
Michael A. Androlewicz, Director Corporate Training and Development
Emerson Worldwide
"I attended one of Carson Internationals sales programs at our company and was totally skeptical. I was already a top sales performer and figured, "What could he show me?" Boy was I wrong! PSPTM showed me the way to triple my sales and INCOME in the first year of implementing the skills."
Senior Sales Representative Spectranetics Corporation, A Cardiovascular Company
"It has been my experience that no one who has mastered PSPTM has ever made less than a six-figure income.Tim Seekely, Vice-President Sales Trek Diagnostics
The NEW Sales Profession Is Not Like the Old One The New Sales Profession is an outcome of our global business arena and the technological advances we’re experiencing everyday. For the sales professional, this is both a great opportunity and a great challenge. No one has ever experienced this explosion of competition; vast world markets; static-to-shrinking domestic U.S. markets; lack of differentiation; non-exclusivity; lightning-fast, low-cost technological growth; and mind-numbing business pace. It’s no wonder that most companies and sales professionals are still using the sales tools of the past the same way they have always used them. In fact, most companies and managers don’t even realize the tools are out of date and thus perhaps keeping their sales teams from achieving the success they so desperately want. Let’s look back at the period from WWII to the present. Following WWII, the world was in shambles. Even our own U.S. market was reeling from the 1930s depression and the shortages created by the war. By the 1950s, however, the tide had turned. It seemed anyone and everyone wanted something . . . everything! Demand was high, needs were great, innovation was king, and supply was short. Thus, salespeople needed only to have product knowledge and available product, and, at nearly any price, bingo!—they had a sale. Yes, this is an oversimplification, and not every market was like that, but most were indeed. During the next decade, the economy kept growing, and “SO, WHAT’S YOUR PRICE?” 2 The Product- Focused Sale focused first on the product and then on the customer. salespeople continued on a high. A style of selling emerged that I refer to as the “Product-Focused Sale.” The Product-Focused Sale Once Worked Well The Product-Focused sales method relied on salespeople to possess a true grasp of product knowledge. Knowledge of every aspect of the product or product line was important. Salespeople spent enormous amounts of time, formally and informally, learning product. The longer you were in the job with a specific company, generally, the more successful you were as a salesperson. Why? Because it took a long time to get all that knowledge of the product and the customers. Salespeople forged business relationships based upon product awareness and product knowledge. Customers welcomed salespeople into their establishments, because they had the information customers needed to be successful. They knew best how to use the product, which products were best for different applications, and even which leading-edge products would be out soon so customers could leap ahead of their competition. What a great time to be selling! Yes, some customers still resisted seeing salespeople but not in the same way they do today (as we’ll discuss shortly). The Product-Focused Sale focused first on the product and then on the customer. Essentially, the meeting consisted of the salesperson showing, telling, and detailing the product, all the while asking leading questions (such as, “ . . . wouldn’t that be of benefit to you?”). Then the salesperson asked the customer, “Well, what do you think?” In most cases, this was the first time the customer was allowed to talk, except for answering those leading questions. From here, the salesperson and the customer discussed the merits of the product as it related to the customer’s business application. If it INTRODUCTION 3 didn’t apply, the salesperson offered, “Well, maybe this model would be of interest to you then.” And the showing, telling, and detailing began again . . . until the customer ran out of time or the salesperson ran out of product. As a last ditch effort, the salesperson almost always said, “Thanks for your time. Oh, by the way, in a couple of months we’re coming out with our New Super XYZ model. I’ll bring it by on my next trip here. OK?” Re-Engineering Changed Everything This cycle repeated itself for years . . . right up into the late 1970s and 1980s, when things started to change. And then, Wham! Someone invented a new term that shook customers to their foundation—reengineering! Well, people were re-engineered right out their jobs, and thousands of employees were laid off. The survivors of re-engineering were left anxious and wondering, “Am I next?” and with a ton of work to do that used to be someone else’s. How did this affect salespeople? Now when salespeople stopped by to show, tell, and detail their New Super XYZ product, stressed-out, highstrung, anxious customers were pressed for time and hugely reluctant even to see salespeople. People who had been willing to see salespeople just a few years before were now slamming the door in their faces. About this time, global markets and imported “just as good as” products started to emerge in huge numbers here in the United States. Businesses pressed to increase Then in the 1990s, three strange new tools emerged and synergized: computers, telephony, and the Internet. Now customers had new tools that helped them find information about products, applications, and even prices. “SO, WHAT’S YOUR PRICE?” 4 productivity and strengthen the bottom line through cost savings. True customers had always wanted things cheaper, but when the Product- Focused Sale began, supply was short and differentiation was KING. So many times, buyers had to buy the product at whatever price the market sold it. In the past, salespeople really had held the upper hand. Imagine that. However, now the tables started to turn, and salespeople were faced with look-alike products, many at cheaper prices and in big supply. How did the sales profession react? Companies leaped into high gear, splitting territories and adding more salespeople. They sought out new and fancier brochures, created marketing campaigns, and, increasingly, employed advertising. Most of all, companies gave their salespeople even more product training to shorten their learning curves, so it didn’t take years to become a product expert. Companies even hired technical people to support the sales team, adding application engineers, product specialists, and even sales engineering positions to help these Product-Focused Sales succeed. National and regional sales meetings featured top salespeople who knew the product inside and out. Like mother birds feeding baby chicks in the nest, these top performers detailed and dispensed their knowledge of the products to open and anxious sales teams. The teams emerged from these sales meetings with renewed hope for huge sales success in the coming weeks. Management expected big, timely results—anticipating starting the year off on a high or, later, saving the year from a below-expectations performance. For a short time, all this worked; fresh eager salespeople with vast product knowledge, armed with hot-off-the-presses brochures and sales collateral, bombarded customers and wore down their resistance. Then, in the 1990s, three strange new tools emerged and synergized; they were now so affordable that everyone was getting them: computers, telephony, and the Internet. Now customers had new tools that helped them find information about products, applications, and even prices. Their new tools brought with them their own personal protection devices: email and voice mail. While it had always been a INTRODUCTION 5 challenge to see customers, especially competing with ten times more salespeople asking to see the same customer, now it was extremely hard even to get a live person to talk to at all. Customers finally had their revenge; now the salesperson needed the customer more than the customer needed the salesperson—or so they thought. With so much information available, the customer perceived all products in a category as virtually generic. They were more knowledgeable about the products (they thought); they could get information about virtually anything via web pages. And with this new fast-paced speed of business, they had virtually no spare time to see salespeople. Oh yes, re-engineering kept re-inventing itself under different names until, today, most companies are a mere shell of what they once were only a few years ago. So the survivors are extremely pressed for time. New Challenges Require New Tools It’s a shame that the sales forces of most companies are still trying to fight this new battle using the weapons of sales invented in the 1950s. Virtually all salespeople still focus on product knowledge as their primary tool to compete. They arm themselves with marketing material that supports the “better mousetrap” theory and sales campaigns that drive product into the customer’s face. Now salespeople focus their day on getting in, answering objections, and confronting customers on why “they (the customer) must get this product.” Struggling for scraps of people’s time and to make their numbers, too often salespeople go home exhausted and frustrated. But it doesn’t have to be that way. New challenges require new tools and new methods. Why? Because using a Product-Focused Sale will not work consistently enough from year to year to succeed. It may work in a few cases (that’s why companies still think it’s good), but it’s not good enough to sustain true sales growth and customer loyalty. In fact, companies who rely on the Product-Focused Sale as a method to “SO, WHAT’S YOUR PRICE?” 6 succeed are plagued by constant near misses to their sales plan and stressed-out managers who are constantly blaming the salespeople for the lack of sales success. Thus, they turn over salespeople continually either by driving them out or terminating them. They do this in their constant search for salespeople who are excellent “like we had when I was selling.” But the numbers just keep falling short. Every once in a while, a year comes in over plan (usually when an unexpected spike in demand emerges), and, because “a rising tide raises all boats,” as soon as the market spike slips away so does the great success. Then managers go back to blaming the salespeople, “What are you people doing out there? You were successful last year! Now get out there and show our New Super XYZ product to every one of your customers! They will love it!” That’s the old, Product-Focused Selling Game. In the New Selling Game, sales professionals must build trust and long-term relationships for both the company and themselves to succeed year after year. No longer is it enough to “show our New Super XYZ product to every one of our customers!” Without a new customer-over-product focus, everyone is doomed to generate a constant seesaw of peaks and valleys on their sales charts. The Partnership Selling Process™ Is Born During the mid-1970s, Xerox lost its best and most powerful differentiating factor: plain paper copying. Seemingly overnight, the market was flooded with new plain paper copiers from IBM, Kodak, Minolta, 3M, Savin, Toshiba, Canon, Ricoh, and others. The once Master of the Market was being attacked from all sides. Large numbers of salespeople were leaving the company, and those of us who stayed had to start changing our approach to succeed. We were able to hold off the competition for a while even though they were cheaper and could be leased or purchased. At that time, customers only rented Xerox equipment and could cancel it at any time. During this hand-to-hand combat with the competition, I found I INTRODUCTION 7 needed to create a new way of selling, using the basic selling skills that I had learned in new ways, so I could survive and then thrive. After leaving Xerox, I landed in the medical business selling devices and consumable products to hospitals. Here the Product- Focused Sale was still KING, and product differentiation was still the way to win. But I noticed a big difference right away—relationships and trust were as important if not more so than the products and the pricing. For the first three months in my new territory, I tried the Product-Focused Sale as my company and my sales trainer instructed me to do. The result was a complete disaster! After 90 days, I was at the bottom of the sales force and had a negative commission balance of $6,600! From a star player to the rock bottom, fast! Then and there, in the spare bedroom of my first house, I began to develop the concepts, methods, and tools of what has emerged over the years to become the Partnership Selling Process™, a “Customer-Focused Sale” model. Just as with anything new, I was reluctant to tell anyone what I was doing because I didn’t know if it would work. As I applied the basic skills that Xerox had taught me with my own twists and added tools, my numbers began to improve. And by the end of that year, I was the Number 1 salesperson in the company by a huge margin. My meteoric rise in the rankings caused many top brass to fly out from headquarters to see what I was doing and how I was doing it. They even hired a consultant to detail my every move for nearly a week. The result—at the company, nothing changed; they continued to provide the same training and tools or sales collateral. But in our district, I took on the role of sales trainer and helped our team to succeed. So what was I doing differently from the others? How did I achieve the results in such a short period in my first year? Could YOU do the same in today’s marketplace? How do you begin? “SO, WHAT’S YOUR PRICE?” 8 I will reveal the answer to all these questions in this book. My goal is to help YOU achieve the level of success YOU want plus experience the JOY and REWARDS of working in the BEST career in the world! It will take time, focus, energy, and discipline. But as one of my clients said, “No one who has truly followed all the steps of the Partnership Selling Process (PSP™) has ever missed their sales plan.” Do YOU want to join that exclusive club of sales greats in your company? If so, this book is for YOU!
About Mike Carson
Mike Carson is a performance consultant, keynote speaker, executive coach, trainer, and author. He is the founder of Carson International—a performance-consulting firm dedicated to helping companies increase their bottom line “without spending one thin dime more on marketing or adding one more salesperson.” Mike consults for businesses from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.
He is a results-oriented professional, who has been successful in sales, marketing, service, operations, and senior management positions at Xerox, Baxter Healthcare, and Picker (Marconi) International. His skill in creating hands-on practical solutions to company problems coupled with his “Edutainer” style of delivery has helped make his workshops, consulting, and programs effective and sustainable.
In October 2006, he was chosen as the sales trainer for Emerson Corporation, in St. Louis, Missouri, by a select group of sales and human resource vice presidents throughout the organization.
Mike earned an MBA from the University of Southern California. He is an active Board Member of the Association of Professional Consultants (APC) and Peppermint Ridge (A Residential Community for Developmentally Disabled Adults).
Mike lives in Southern California with his wife Cyndy.
"I've been in sales and marketing for 29 years. I've read practically every one of the business books on the subject and attended countless seminars . . . . If you're looking to sell on value rather than price, if you want to wake up your sales force, if you want to change the game, then this is the book you need to read. Mike's Partnership Selling ProcessTM gets results!"
Mike Carson is a performance consultant, keynote speaker, executive coach, trainer, and author. He is the founder of Carson International—a performance-consulting firm dedicated to helping companies increase their bottom line “without spending one thin dime more on marketing or adding one more salesperson.” Mike consults for businesses from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.