marketing and sales

Book Review: Mastering the Complex Sale, How to Compete and Win When the Stakes are High
Ramon Ray, Smallbiztechnology.com
3 July 2003
I'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 the more complex the decision making process is, the more frustrating it is for the customer and simply comparing prices is so much easier for them. If your product gets stuck in this rut - you'll be forced to lower prices and you might put yourself out of business.
Another bit of advise that you'll read about in, Mastering the Complex Sale, How to Compete and Win When the Stakes are High, is that traditional sales techniques do not work in a complex sales environment.
"When sales people use the conventional sales process in a complex situation, they are like major league pitchers hurling 90 mile per hour fastballs at batters who may be at the plate for the very first time or who hit only infrequently.
What are the chances that such batters will connect?"
You are the pitcher and your customer is the batter.
Mastering the Complex Sale, How to Compete and Win When the Stakes are High is a book that will help great sales people sell better and new sales staff learn from the mistakes of others.
There's so much insight in Mastering the Complex Sale, How to Compete and Win When the Stakes are High and it should be mandatory reading for every sales person and marketer on your staff.
If sales persons would take time to LISTEN to their customers and understand THEIR needs and then find the solution that can meet that needs - sales would increase. Technology is very commoditized and at times VERY complex. However the companies that can nurture relationships with their customers and tailor solutions to meet their needs will master the complex sale.

Mastering the Complex Sale is the ideal book for "whale hunting" or going after the really big, really comlicated sale. In my business (government IT), sales cycles are long and complex, not the "one call close" Fuller brush type.

Thanks to the author, I now have a game plan for going after the big game.

I purchased this book on the strength of all the five-star amazon.com reviews. And having struggled through it, I can only imagine that the author wrote most of those reviews himself. I suppose readers who never studied the sales processes developed by Bosworth, or Miller and Heimann, or Rackham, may be able to squeeze enough value out of this book to rate it as high as two stars. But probably not.