Slow Down, Sell Faster!
Understand Your Customer's Buying Process and Maximize Your Sales
By: Kevin Davis
Published: January 5, 2011
Format: Paperback, 272 pages
ISBN-10: 0814416853
ISBN-13: 978-0814416853
Publisher: AMACOM
"An understanding of buying is where selling should start", writes President of TopLine Leadership, Inc.; Kevin Davis, in his groundbreaking and sales transformational book Slow Down, Sell Faster! Understand Your Customer's Buying Process and Maximize Your Sales. The author describes how sales people fail to close sales because they try to sell too fast, fail to understand the buyer, and attempt to put the customer on their own schedule.
Kevin Davis redefines sales completely from a traditional selling model to helping customers buy. The author recognizes how sales people have long been taught the tactics and techniques of sales, but have rarely been shown how and why customers make their purchasing decisions. Kevin Davis writes that the standard sales process is based on the perspective of the seller. Instead, the author turns the entire concept of sales upside down, and presents the alternative idea of having sales people adapt their their selling behavior to the customer's buying behavior. Kevin Davis presents a fresh sales paradigm that places the sales representative in sync with the psychology of the customer.
Kevin Davis (photo left) understands that unsuccessful sales people make the mistake of trying to sell too fast. Not only is the speed the only problem, but the high speed sales process places the focus on the seller, and not on the buyer. For Kevin Davis, this misplaced emphasis is the core of the lack of closing problem. By trying to sell too fast, the sales person fails to ask either enough questions or the right questions, is unable to identify the customer's real needs, or offer the the buyer the right solution. At the same time, the solutions that are offered to the customer are presented in the wrong order and with the wrong approach. This traditional sales model doesn't provide for what the author describes as a win-win sales process. For Kevin Davis, a win-win sales approach is essential for meeting the real needs of the customer. Since the customer has their own buying process, timetable, and needs, it's critical for the sales representative to slow down and become attuned to the real needs of the customer, in order to provide the right solution to the buyer's real problem.
For me, the power of the book is how Kevin Davis describes effectively the real underlying problems with the traditional sales approach, and provides a more effective and buyer focused alternative. Not only does the author offer strong theoretical reasoning for slowing down the sales process, but shares his proven methods for becoming a more effective sales person who is better attuned to the real needs of the customer. By changing the overall emphasis from that of the seller to the behavior of the buyer, Kevin Davis challenges sales people to transform their approach to the entire sales process. Instead of simply replacing one set of traditional sales methods with another, this book presents total change of thinking and acting on the part of the sales person.
Kevin Davis also understands that different customers possess widely varying styles of buying behavior. The author identifies eight different types of sales roles. Only through slowing down the sales process, and really getting to know the customer's behavior, and tune their sales role to each customer's individual psychology in every step of the process. The author guides the sales person through the revolutionary change in thought and approach to sales with practical advice on both the technical and interpersonal aspects of sales, always with an eye to slowing down the process to synchronize the seller with the buyer's psychology. With the selling process aligned with the customer's buying process, more sales will be closed, and the customers will achieve greater satisfaction through having their real needs identified and the right solution put into place.
I highly recommend the revolutionary and must read book Slow Down, Sell Faster! Understand Your Customer's Buying Process and Maximize Your Sales by Kevin Davis, to any sales manager, sales person, or any organization serious about developing an effective and customer focused sales process. This book will not only change completely the way you approach the sales process and increase the number of closed sales, but also develop deeper rapport and relationships with customers.
Read the outstanding and essential sales enhancing book Slow Down, Sell Faster! Understand Your Customer's Buying Process and Maximize Your Sales by Kevin Davis, and discover why slowing down will boost the total number of sales, but will paradoxically result in those sales being closed faster.
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