This week’s book review is Lead, Sell, or Get Out of the Way by Ron Karr
Karr explains his time-proven and successful sales philosophy in this book. Essentially, salesmen need to be leaders and sales leaders have five beliefs:
These beliefs enable the seven essential traits of a sales leader:
Way too frequently business leaders set the price for their products or services based solely on their own perception of the value of what they offer. They do not look at things from the perspective of what the customer wants, needs or values.
Consequently, they price too high, which limits their ability to grow. Or, they price too low and leave “money on the table.”
We have all experienced a situation where a potential client refused to purchase our product or service because they were happy with the status quo and afraid of change. Basically, their fear of change outweighed any concerns and frustrations that they were experiencing with their current way of doing business.
Until we are able to convince the client that what we offer can add more value than pain, we will typically have a hard time selling anything.
I ran into a great example of this about five years ago when I bought a Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad.
I had been using my iPad for doing a lot of writing while traveling on business. The iPad was light, very convenient to pack and perfect for doing some simple document editing or article writing. When I bought the iPad, one of the sales people was trying to upsell and get me to buy a wireless keyboard. At that point I saw this as simply an upsell attempt. I had not experienced any of the pain of trying to scroll and type on a small screen.
