Heavy Hitter Selling: How Successful Salespeople Use Language and Intuition to Persuade Customers to Buy

Like other marketing and sales books published recently, this one stresses the importance of human behavior. But unlike the others, it puts an emphasis on language. The first section deals with the human nature of communication. It describes different layers of communication, including phonetics, content, purpose, and the way the mind uses and interprets language. "Heavy hitters," or successful salespeople, can structure their dialogue and create personal rapport with customers by borrowing ideas from neurolinguistics, the study of how the brain and the body work in conjunction with language. The second section examines strategies for deciding which customers to target and which actions to take. The third section focuses on the power of persuasion, and touches on a deeper level of the meaning of language: the power of metaphor and language's ability to appeal to emotions rather than logic. Though the author defines salesmanship principally as an art, he believes that art has a scientific element. Salespeople could well benefit by exploring scientific models of language. Practical exercises and a glossary make the book useful for everyone.

This is not your typical book on sales and there are three things that I believe make it stand out from the rest. First, it is interesting to read. The first section of the book on the human nature of communication reviews how different customers use and interpret language. A fascinating discussion on a topic that no other sales book I know of even discusses. Second, the majority of the material, techniques, and ideas are totally new. The book's second section on customer sales strategies is truly unique. The sales cycle is broken down into terms of people and their thought processes, motivations, politics, power, and personalities. Finally and most importantly, Heavy Hitter Selling is fun to read (and you usually don't say this about a 400 page book!). The final section on persuasion reads like a novel with a climatic ending and an important motivational message for everyone in sales. It's a book that you would want your children to read when they are full-grown so they understand what you really did for a living.

Steve Martin has created a masterpiece for the sales and marketing industry. This is a provocative business book that is a welcome departure from the many process-oriented sales methodologies that crowd the marketplace today. This is a study of the qualities of successful salespeople in business today. Although the genesis of Steve's teaching is from technology sales, his thesis is a thoughtful analysis of the importance of building customer rapport early and throughout the phases of the sales process. It applies to any sales professional irrespective of product or industry. Based on scientific principles of neurolinguistics (how the mind creates language) Martin introduces ways to establish interpersonal rapport where communication is most effective. He gives us insight to how the majority of the population processes information. People are placed in three categories: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. These are scientific tenets but Martin, through his own expertise and his many years of observation of successful salespeople, understands how to naturally adapt to the unique ways people think and interpret data. Salespeople that understand how people process information, can then develop a custom language beyond product feature, benefit, advantages to reach deeper levels of human understanding and ultimate persuasion. This is a complex subject that Martin makes acessible for the average to excellent sales practitioner. He clearly states the primary enemy of the sales professional is time. Sales professionals that build the strongest relationships with a prospect/customer decipher the truth about what a buyer(s) needs to make a decision. This places the salesperson at a distinct competitive advantage because they discover early in the sales cycle whether they are winning or losing. Time will not be wasted on those that quickly uncover whether their business opportunity is real or fantasy. He labels the "heavy-hitter" as owning a finely tuned instrument (their intution) that can read a customer's innermost thoughts and desires through verbal and nonverbal cues. Some may view human intuition as an instinctive almost, visceral interpretation of reality. Martin blazes new ground in his definition of intuition. It is the mind's highly structured database of knowledge, ideas and experience. The salesperson in Martin's view then compiles this information. The more experience and wisdom a salesperson has the richer the database. The sales professional can access this vast reservoir of common customer behaviors and recognize objections and affirmations in any sales situation. Martin's heavy-hitter is one that can readily retrieve this information in an instant and deliver a credible response to a buyer in the right manner, at the right moment. Martin correctly asserts that people buy from others where a high level of trust and integrity are established. This book is not riddled with sales techniques that seek to toss

I found this book to be a breath of fresh air. After making a lifetime study of sales and sales management in the high tech industry, I have read most of the sales classics. What I find most interesting about this book is that rather than just breaking down the sales cycle into component parts, the focus is on interpreting human behavior and focusing on building winning relationships within the complex sales cycle. Paint by numbers sales strategies and tactics worked fine in an exploding economy, but the need to bring a higher level of art and science to today's sales organization is mandatory for survival. I found many useful ideas inside this book that could immediately be put into practice. Ideas that yielded immediate results. And after all isn't that why we continue to buy and read books such as this?

Steve Martin (no, not the comedian) has over twenty years of successful experience in large ticket software sales and sales training. Although his examples are drawn from his direct experience in that industry, those who sell IT systems, engineering services, IT outsourcing and other large ticket professional services will find his advice to be relevant. Unlike many successful sales people, Mr. Martin draws on psychological theory in terms of how people communicate and receive information. His source is the fine work of Dr. Milton Erickson, one of the main inspirations for neuro-linguistic programming. Where most books about complex sales (those where lots of people are involved and many stages) are good for spelling out what has to happen at each step, Heavy Hitter Selling extends beyond those observations to describe in detail what you need to say, how you need to say it and how you need to connect with those on your sales team, the customer's evaluation team and the ultimate decision influencers and decision makers. It was that extra element that makes this a unique book in my experience. I know of no NLP book that looks at complex, large ticket sales. So here, you can get both perspetives in one place. That brings me to the book's main limitation. In some of the areas for describing how to interpret others' eye and body movements, Mr. Martin's conclusions differ from what I have seen described in other NLP books . . . and from the teachings I received during courses I took with Dr. Richard Bandler and Anthony Robbins in this area. I leave it to you to sort out, but I felt that the material in this book wasn't quite as good as what is available elsewhere on NLP and the subsequent enhancements that have been developed for selling. So if you don't know NLP, you should doublecheck the work here in other books and through your own experience. To me the most brilliant part of this book is the description of how to identify and work with "coaches" at the potential customer's site who are willing to help you sell your product or service. That lesson is one that I have emphasized with everyone I have ever helped to learn how to sell consulting services. It is very difficult to succeed unless someone takes you by the hand who works for the customer company and helps you do things in the right way for that company. If you only read and apply that section, this book is a five star resource for you. To test the overall effectiveness of the book, I took a developing client situation that I am working on and analyzed it using the perspectives in this book. I found that process to be very valuable. It made me realize an additional step I needed to take now, and gave me a more thorough understanding of how the relationship is developing with this potential client. I also realized that I had a much better chance of succeeding than I had originally thought, and I will now put a lot more emphasis on working with this potential client than I otherwise would