The New Strategic Selling: The Unique Sales System Proven Successful by the World's Best Companies Paperback – Illustrated, April 20, 2005

One of the most important books ever written on the subject of B2B complex sales.Back in the late 90's we used this book as the foundation for a Strategic Selling System at a $500 million dollar chemical company, and it was a game-changer.One of the biggest problems in B2B sales is either (a) selling to the wrong type of customer or (b) selling to the wrong people within the account.This book tackles these issues head on.Chapters 5 - 10: The best description ever written about how to successfully navigate the complex sale. Specifically, how to identify the four key buying influences, understand their receptivity to change, and create win-win deals.Chapters 14-15: How to avoid wasting time with low-quality prospects and focus on ideal, best-fit customers.Chapters 17-18: How to use the sales funnel to prioritize work, move deals forward at a steady, predictable rate, and avoid the roller coaster effect.Bottom line is, if you sell products, services or software to other businesses --- or manage and support others who do --- this is required reading.If you're involved in account-based marketing, it's double-required.

The Miller Heiman Strategic Selling process is timeless. As a young sales rep in the late 90's, I was sent to Miller Heiman training by my company (TMP Worldwide) and benefited from it greatly. I am now training my own company (sales reps, account managers and product teams) on the Strategic Selling process. It gives everyone in our ad agency an understanding of our prospective and current accounts as they relate to a single sales objective. It also gives us a common language to use when discussing these accounts. I am enjoying passing on the wisdom of this system.

Useful and self-contained. To anyone involved in selling, both tangibles and intangibles, this book provides a basic and powerful methodology based on a "non-manipulative selling philosophy" that is easy to understand and rather straight forward to apply. It is specially good for seasoned salespersons that can recognize familiar components of the traditional sales approach and that have the true experience to value "life-long" realtionships with customers. For consultants and sellers of intangibles, it provides a valid road map to identify role-players and decision-makers. For new salespersons, it helps them to think strategically. The authors seem to forget the permanent pressure salespeople have and the way sales objectives are set, so some comments do no fit the real world (like relinquishing an account, or letting a client go away), and fall in a rather romantic view of the profession. Although at first it seems geared toward large corporate and tangible accounts, with a little manipulation and some easing of documentation (desk-time) requirements, the methodology can be used in any selling environment. It is straight-forward and simple to use; reduces uncertainty about the process and provides the user (the salesperson) a sense of control over his/her environment and participants. Since change is a constant, and salespeople are inmersed today in a variety of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) strategies and techniques, this books fits nicely within it since it is the Customer and our Relationship with him/her that is at the center of it. It is a good, solid investment.

Clear. concise, and very practical, this is a great book for sales professionals at all stages in their careers. The book presents strategic selling logically and explains basic tools and tactics to implement strategic selling in your organization or your person sales approach. It would be useful as assigned reading as part of a training program and as a desk reference for people in the process of selling and trying to understand specific challenges or obstacles. V

I'm 50% through this really helpful business book which I'm reading on my Kindle. But I seriously need to complain that whomever did the conversion to the Kindle version was super sloppy and unprofessional. There are typos all over the place, words are wrong because of the spelling, inappropriate punctuation comes up -- I just found a question mark in the middle of a word replacing an "i" in the word "timidity"! And the graphics for the charts look like they were scanned in from a 10 year old copier with dirty glass. Seriously, they are just line graphs, how much time would it have taken to scan clean images for a business book?It's gotten to the point where it's distracting from the book content and I'm irritated to read it. For a company who's philosophy is based on giving their customers a Win/Result, this is a bad example. Read the hard copy instead.

The author tells his ideas with logic and examples which makes it easy to follow and impressive.The style of providing personal workshops after each chapter makes it less theoretical but more accessible.

I recently purchased this book due to a recommendation from a colleague. I've been in Real Estate Sales for 15 years and always thought of myself as a (very) good salesperson, but got into B to B sales five years ago and wanted to prepare myself to take my business to the next level.Well, I've been really busy and only to chapter 5 but I can assure you this is the book you hoped to find. My mind has been opened to the dynamics behind corporate sales and decision making. Not that I (or you) don't know it already in concept, but the methodology in this book provides a framework from which you can create predictable, repeatable results. I wish I could download it into my head "Matrix" style, looking forward to finishing this book!