Mastering the Complex Sale: How to Compete and Win When the Stakes Are High!

I had a chance to read 'Mastering the Complex Sale', by Jeff Thull, a few weeks before it was released to the public. For the last 18 years we have used many of the concepts contained in the book and had a great deal of success. Like any book, it does not give a reader the complete experience; I often explain it by asking people to read about a football game, compared to watching the game, verses going to the game. You can't smell the hotdogs or hear the 'fanatic' fan reading about the game. While you will learn about concepts and principles that work, you will experience them when you master them and use them to serve your industry and customers. The concepts in the book have worked and worked very well for us, we are on our 2nd generation of sales managers and 3rd generation of sales reps using the material. Even after going from a market unknown to the dominant market leader, we still enjoy 15-20%, adjusted sales growth, year over year. We have acquired other companies and produced new products; using the fundamentals and the culture derived from implementing them we see a great, consistently growing future ahead.

Complex sales are those which involve a lengthy process of cultivation and solicitation, a "circle of influence" within which the purchase or pass decision is made, a product or service whose functions/features/benefits/ etc. require technical verification, and a substantial purchase price. In this volume, Thull focuses on the process by which to "compete and win when the stakes are high." To understand how to master the complex sale, one must first understand how and why the role of the salesperson changed throughout the last half of the 20th century. Thull respectfully but clinically explains the inadequacies today of sales strategies, processes, and skills which were effective from the early-1950s until about the early-mid 90s. How well I recall the advice I received from various sales managers when I earned my way through college by selling automobiles and smaller trucks in the Chicago area during summer vacations. Never take "no" for an answer, for example. "Selling begins when the prospect says `no.'" Another chestnut was flattery: "You look great behind the wheel! This car was built for you!" Times change, of course. One paradigm inevitably gives way to another. I agree with Thull that, today, "It's not about selling -- it's about managing [a prospect's] quality decisions." Actually, I view that approach as the purest form of selling: to serve as advisor, concierge, consigliere, consultant, etc. when collaborating with a pre-qualified prospect to make the most appropriate purchase decision.Thull carefully organizes his material within ten chapters which range from the first, "The World in Which We Sell" (almost worth the price of the book all by itself) to the last, "A Complex Sales Future," in which Thull agrees with Jack Welch that we must either control our destiny or someone else will. Given what I now do to earn a living, Chapter 6 ("Designing the Complex Solution") was of special interest to me. In it, Thull suggests that "Prime professionals approach [Thull's] solution design phase of the complex sale as an exploratory process. The aim is to equip the customer to make the best, most effective choice among the solutions competing in the marketplace." By taking precisely the same approach, the IBM sales force was able to recapture most of the customers it had lost while improving its chances when cultivating and then soliciting prospective new customers. As Thull explains, the process built during the Diagnosis, a precise agreement on what a customer is experiencing in the absence of the needed solution and it's financial impact, with a collaborative discussion that determines precisely what a customer's desired outcomes are. "The easiest way to begin to define the parameters is to ask customers how they expect their situation to look after the problem is solved." For me, Thull then makes an especially important point when alerting his reader to the "trap" of unpaid consulting which begins "when we cross the line between defining par

I thought I knew how to sell. I really did. I usually beat quota, even during the recent bust. I've taken home 6 figure commissions 12 of the last 15 years.But sales is the kind of career that always surprises you. I've started to see more "No Decision" deals: you qualify the customer correctly, you create the perfect proposal with undeniable ROI. They go away excited. Then no decision the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year. They don't go with your competition, they just don't do anything. What the heck is going on?Or the customers who demand (and usually get) free consulting. Most vendors were desparate during the recession, and happily gave away free consulting to stay in the game. Now things are busy. How do you deal with the demand? Or RFP's. Yea, we all know that if we didn't help write them, then we're probably too late to win them. Many of us refused to participate in a lot of them. But most deals are coming in with RFP's now. Customers are researching technology on the internet, and writing detailed RFP's themselves. Some are good, some are crap, many have real dollars behind them that I'm not willing to give up on.Or commidization. Technology that we were selling as a premium, highly-differentiated solution a couple of years ago is available from three other suppliers who compete on nothing but price.If any of this sounds familiar, you need this book. Mr. Thull has fugured out what's happening, and presents a step-by-step solution. You'll be shocked when he describes exactly what sales techniques you were using, which you thought was so smart, and shows how flawed it really is.

I read a great deal of business related books in a quest to enhance my overall understanding and to provide me with usable knowledge. A lot of the stuff that I read is pretty dry and occasionally sleep inducing. This book is fascinating. For me, it hits the nail firmly in the head when it comes to describing the modern sales environment and providing you with usable sales insight which would otherwise take you years of trial and error to develop on your own. If you are involved in sales or business development, this book won't cost you much, is well written and you really must read it.

Book Review: Mastering the Complex Sale, How to Compete and Win When the Stakes are HighRamon Ray, Smallbiztechnology.com3 July 2003I've been actively covering the technology industry for about 4 years now and IN the industry as a consultant for many years before that. What I've noticed is how far the divide is between technologists - real hard core geeks who understand technology and those who do not.Interestingly enough, what happens is that technologists (or half baked techies) are given the job of selling technology to non-technical (often times) business owners.In very large corporations, this process is not always the case. The tech seller of vendor X meets in a meeting room with the "tech team" of HUGE company Y. There's a blending of minds and at least the technical barriers are lowered, if not completely removed.However in selling to smaller businesses there's often not an in house expert that you are dealing with. Sure, you might be meeting with the office techie but she might not be up to speed on your particular technology or know more than she needs to know to keep the office computers up and running.I was in a small GOVERNMENT office the other day, helping them understand email marketing and we could not get to the Internet for whatever reason. It was about 1:00pm in the afternoon and the person I was talking to said, well the guy should be here tomorrow to have a look at it. See what I mean.I've been reading Jeff Thull's Mastering the Complex Sale, How to Compete and Win When the Stakes are High and the insight he shares helped me to understand so much better how this bridge between business who have a problem and DO NEED a technology solution and tech vendors who have the solution (or one of several possible solutions) can be shortened or altogether removed.He explains that sales are being squeezed by two opposing forces - commoditization of products (read Dell's solution to that) and the increasing complexity of products. This combination of forces results in profit reduction and of course more difficult sales.His book is not just for fresh sales staff out of Sales 101, but Jeff explains how even TOP SALES PERSONS need to sell better."To survive, a company is required to recruit and equip sales professionals who are capable of understanding the complex situations their customers face, configuring the complex solutions offered by their companies, and managing the complex relationships that are required to bring them both together".This is the crux of Jeff's book, and the solution for the "Dry Run".The "Dry Run" is what happens when a sale appears to be going just so right, you have the right solution, the customer appears receptive but after months and months - you get no sale. The customer has bought from another company or even worse - they have not bought at all.So many companies I speak to focus on how low cost their product is, or focus their whole presentation on THEIR product and NOT the customer's solution.Jeff writes that