Rethinking the Sales Cycle: How Superior Sellers Embrace the Buying Cycle to Achieve a Sustainable and Competitive Advantage Hardcover – Illustrated, December 14, 2009

This book has been out awhile, but it is light years ahead of any sales book on the market. The treatise is, buyers have taken full control of the buying cycle through becoming much more aware of what they want and how they want to be engaged. Sellers who have not adjusted their methods to these buyers who are fully engaged in researching and contacting other users of products are now stuck in a very old paradigm. Sellers have no control and if they attempt to manipulate buyers they will suffer dearly. Most sales loses are due to now being outsold. If you are being forced to sell on price, it likely reflects on poor salesmenship, lack of good sales training, and a lack of sales ready messaging from marketing. And it seems like 90% of sales and marketing organizations (and training programs) are way behind the ball. Marketing is charged to now come up with much more relevant content for the interested buyer as well as sales ready messages/materials (for many different players and verticals) for the sales team. Every page rings so true that I literally could not put this book down (plus it directly aligns with content marketing). I shared so many items from it that Facebook said I was sharing too frequently!!! If you are a CEO, in Sales and/or Marketing this book is a must buy and multiple read. The authors have a training program at [...]

Thoughtful well thought out approach to sales in today's modern environment of the internet, email and social media.

This is one of the best current books to describe the customer's buying cycle and decisions made. A must read for sales people.

An apt title for this book in my mind is "Social Buying : Rethinking the Buying Cycle"and this alone should be a sufficient reason to put down the two tens for this book. I admit my desire to add the book to an already garnered collection of books and discs dealing with sales was only due to Neil Rackham having written the forward. But as I scoot past the forward, I am drawn into the book. The book is unlike any other sales process book I have had the boring opportunity to peruse. Yes, I have to say all of them on my shelf except this one and previously Kaplan's "Bag the Elephant" prevented me from falling asleep from boredom before turning the final page.Pretty early in the book, the case study buying using social networking helps to stake out the difference between this book and others. The book is up to date and recognises the importance of buyers using social technologies to empower themselves and learn as much if not more than the sales person representing the product or service of interest. The contemporary nature of the book is well supported with a 5 stage B2B buying experience which the salesperson must comprehend to be successful in today''s global marketplace. If one only reads the chapter "Traditional Selling Conflicts with New Buying" the cost of the book would have paid for itself many times over.Overall, reading the book, the reward is a gem not only in learning (e.g. Lovaglia's law) but the humour does not go unnoticed (e.g. "training produces wind up toys"). The authors have taken a staid approach to the teaching of sales process and turned the method inside out by taking the buyer perspective and very strong consideration of the changes online social networking has wrought upon the salesperson.

I just read this book cover to cover. It is a spot on description of the mess that sales has gotten itself into. I have read the other works by John Holland,and others at CustomerCentric Selling,and I have attended and conducted training authored by CustomerCentric principals. That being said, I identified entirely with the problems of being a buyer in a market populated with bad sales techniques. I don't know what it will take to turn the tide of bad sales practices, but Holland and Young are pointing the way. Every sales and marketing manager should read this book and do their best to apply the insight thay gain to their own organization. I particularly liked Chapter 6 which is titled Stage 4: Reassurance referring to the 4th stage of the buying cycle. If you have read Strategic Selling which marked the 70's thoughts on selling, and Solution Selling which marked the 80's, and CustomerCentric Selling which marked the 2000's you will want to read this current work to see how far leading sales organizations have come from product marketing to customer solutions marketing. Neil Rackham's foreword is worth a read on it's own.