TO SALES PEOPLE EVERYWHERE

Hey, salespeople, you guys rock! You are the extreme athletes of the business world. You only get paid if you deliver. You put any wherefrom 40% to 100% of your salary on the line in commissions. There are no guarantees, and you shrug off the idea there should be. You suffer rejection and get pummeled with No’s at the hands of rude, terse, and overwhelmed buyers. You spend weeks, months, and years working a deal only to lose it to the competition over a few dollars or an insignificant feature. You’re constantly shadowed by overzealous managers pounding you about quota and the next deal. The life of a salesperson is tough, and yet you come back every day, ready to grind it out, looking to make your buyers’ and customers’ lives better.

It’s because of my love for you that I created Gap Selling and wrote this book. Gap Selling is about making your life easier. It’s about helping you understand that selling isn’t as hard as we’ve been led to believe. Selling shouldn’t be fraught with countless lost deals, fruitless price negotiations, prospects going dark, people ignoring your emails, and unpredictable sales pipelines. It’s only like that when you’re doing it wrong. When you’re doing it right, selling is fluid, predictable, and efficient. This book is about helping you get there.

Gap Selling is going to take you on a ride and for some of you it will be an uncomfortable one. It’s going to challenge many of your entrenched beliefs and approaches to selling. It’s in direct conflict with what we’ve been taught to believe for years, like:

• Relationships really don't matter
• People really do buy from people they don't like
• There is no such thing as "closing"
• You should never defend your product or price
• No one gives a shit about you or your product and service
• Pitching is not selling
• Selling to a customer's need is wrong
• and more

Almost all of the issues and challenges within sales are self-induced. We create the reasons the customer goes dark. We create the focus on price. We allow the customer to hold us hostage over an irrelevant feature. We allow the competition to swoop in at the eleventh hour. We create the situations where the buyer chooses to do nothing. We make it easy for prospects to ignore our emails, voicemails, and LinkedIn messages. These failings are almost always our fault because we haven’t been taught the game of sales. We know the rules, we know the objective, but most of us don’t understand the nuances of the game and it’s costing us and the sales industry billions of dollars a year.

Gap Selling is going to teach you what the game of selling is all about and how to win. It’s going to give you the practical advice and executable skills and methods to win more deals, shorten sales cycles, and avoid losing on price. It’s going to show you how to get buyers to partner with you and be an integral part of the sale so they no longer go dark, avoid your calls, and put up unnecessary roadblocks.

The book is divided into four parts. Part I is devoted to teaching you the rules of gap selling so you can approach every sale with the right mental framework and psychological insight. Part II will teach you the specific skills and strategies you need to play this game better than everyone else, from the steps of a killer discovery, to conducting a kickass demo, to avoiding pitfalls and diffusing objections. Part III will reveal the surprising ways gap-selling principles can be used to generate more productive prospecting so you can build a bigger, better pipeline faster. And finally, Part IV serves as a guide for sales leaders to build and manage a gap-selling environment, assemble a killer gap-selling team, and never lose another night’s sleep worrying about making their numbers.

We’ve been playing the game too long without understanding the game we’ve been playing. You deserve better. Are you ready to learn the game of sales? Good! Now, consider this the last day to sell the way you’re selling. There is a better way.