A book review and recommendation by Dan Beaulieu
GAP Selling: Getting the Customer to Yes: How Problem-Centric Selling Increases Sales by Changing Everything You Know About Relationships, Overcoming Objections, Closing and Price
by Keenan
Copyright: 2018
Price: Kindle Edition $9.99 / Hardcover $24.30
Pages: 197
Buy at Amazon
This one will rock your world
This is the best book on selling that I’ve read in 10 years. And I read all of them. Get ready for the ride of your life.
This book debunks all of the so-called axioms about selling that you have heard over the course of your career. In this book, the author, Keenan, handles all of that sticky stuff that slows down; nay, just about kills your sales efforts.
Here are some of the more cogent examples from the book:
• Customers do not care about you. They do not care about your company, or how long it has been in business, or how it started. The customers only care about one thing, and that is, what can you do for them?
• The salesperson is dead. You are a consultant, an advisor, an expert, someone who is a peer, someone who the customer comes to rely on for valuable solutions.
• Customers don’t buy from friends, or drinking buddies, or golf partners. Customers buy from someone who can bring them value … Yes, even if they don’t actually like that person.
• Customers do like change. Heck, they will embrace change if you can prove to them that it will make their product and their company better.
• Show them the future. Customers will change when the future you show them is better than the present they told you they liked.
• Customers will return your phone calls and answer your emails: if they are provocative enough; if the messages surprise them; and if they are intrigued. You don’t like to answer boring sales calls, why should your customer?
And there is so much more. The author shows you how to move the customer off the dime when he is stalling. Or, how to get her to talk and into telling you what she needs, by asking her a series of questions that will drive her to let you solve her problems.
I started sending this book out to some of my sales training clients even before I finished reading it. Please, if you are the kind of person who never reads a book on sales, start today with this one. Or, if you are the kind of person who is reading sales books all the time, grab this one next. Heck, stop reading the one in your hand right now and pick this one up. I guarantee you that it is better than the book you are reading now.
Dan Beaulieu is the president and founder of D.B. Management LLC, a consulting firm specializing in all aspects of sales, marketing and branding with a focus on rep-principal relationships. His latest book is The PCB 101 Handbook which can be purchased online by emailing danbbeaulieu@aol.com. Dan is also the author of “It’s Only Common Sense,” a weekly sales column appearing at pcb007.com. Dan can be reached at 207.649.0879.