The New Strategic Selling: The Unique Sales System Proven Successful by the World's Best Companies

334 Pages·2005·2.25 MB·English

by  Stephen E. Heiman, Tad Tuleja, Robert B. Miller, J. W. Marriott

STRATEGIC SELLING® is a Service Mark of Miller Heiman, Inc., 1595
Meadow Wood Lane, Suite 2, Reno, NV 89502

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Grand Central Publishing Edition
Copyright © 1998 by Miller Heiman, Inc.
Copyright © 1995 by Miller Heiman & Associates, Inc.
Charts copyright © 1998 by Miller Heiman & Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any
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First eBook Edition: March 1986

ISBN: 978-0-446-54878-6

Contents

PREFACE

FOREWORD

IF IT AIN’T BROKE: THE “WHY” BEHIND THE NEW STRATEGIC
SELLING

PART 1: STRATEGIC SELLING

CHAPTER 1: SUCCESSFUL SELLING IN A WORLD OF CONSTANT
CHANGE

CHAPTER 2: STRATEGY AND TACTICS DEFINED

CHAPTER 3: YOUR STARTING POINT: POSITION

CHAPTER 4: A GLANCE AT THE STRATEGY BLUEPRINT: THE SIX KEY
ELEMENTS OF STRATEGIC SELLING

PART 2: BUILDING ON BEDROCK: LAYING THE FOUNDATION OF
STRATEGIC ANALYSIS

CHAPTER 5: KEY ELEMENT 1: BUYING INFLUENCES

CHAPTER 6: KEY ELEMENT 2: RED FLAGS/LEVERAGE FROM
STRENGTH

CHAPTER 7: BUYER LEVEL OF RECEPTIVITY

CHAPTER 8: KEY ELEMENT 3: THE FOUR RESPONSE MODES

CHAPTER 9: THE IMPORTANCE OF WINNING

CHAPTER 10: KEY ELEMENT 4: WIN-RESULTS

PART 3: COMMON PROBLEMS, UNCOMMON SOLUTIONS

CHAPTER 11: GETTING TO THE ECONOMIC BUYING INFLUENCE:
STRATEGIES AND TACTICS

CHAPTER
12:
THE
COACH:
DEVELOPING
YOUR
PRIME

INFORMATION RESOURCE

CHAPTER 13: WHAT ABOUT THE COMPETITION?

PART 4: STRATEGY AND TERRITORY: FOCUSING ON YOUR WIN-
WIN CUSTOMERS

CHAPTER 14: KEY ELEMENT 5: IDEAL CUSTOMER

CHAPTER 15: YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE: DEMOGRAPHICS
AND PSYCHOGRAPHICS

PART 5: STRATEGY AND TERRITORY: MANAGING YOUR
SELLING TIME

CHAPTER 16: OF TIME, TERRITORY, AND MONEY

CHAPTER 17: KEY ELEMENT 6: THE SALES FUNNEL

CHAPTER 18: PRIORITIES AND ALLOCATION: WORKING THE
FUNNEL

PART 6: FROM ANALYSIS TO ACTION

CHAPTER 19: YOUR ACTION PLAN

CHAPTER 20: STRATEGY WHEN YOU HAVE NO TIME

CHAPTER 21: STRATEGIC SELLING: A LIFETIME APPROACH

AFTER TWENTY YEARS: RESPONDING TO OUR CLIENTS’ MOST
CHALLENGING QUESTIONS

About Miller Heiman

BUSINESS LEADERS AND THE PRESS PRAISE

STRATEGIC SELLING

“Even more timely and effective today than when The Dow Chemical Company
first adopted it in 1986.”

—Gary Hardy, global leader of sales education and development, The

Dow Chemical Company

“The idea of playing Win-Win has helped us considerably in the sales process
and also in our interoffice dealings with one another. No other principle has
impacted us as much.”

—Joe Dejohn, vice president, direct sales division, Atlet, Inc.

“At Harris Corporation we have trained over 500 sales and marketing people
worldwide on the original Strategic Selling concepts. Our old copies are worn
out. The new and updated book is warmly welcomed. The old one helped us win
many multimillion-dollar orders, and I’m sure this new one will win even more.”

—Carleton L. Smith, vice president, Asia sales and marketing, Harris

Corporation

“A practical guide offering new insight into the way salesmen can successfully
promote big-ticket items to large organizations.”

—Financial Post

“A method that sales professionals can use effectively. The authors clearly and

engagingly describe numerous ‘workshops’ in which readers can apply their own
sales experiences. Professionally yet clearly presented.”

—ALA Booklist

“We quickly went from just a few thousand a month in sales to over $100,000 a
month. Strategic Selling gave us confidence in what we were doing. We pegged
some accounts as low probability, and even on those we were able to penetrate
deeper and put our action plans into effect. We’ve been able to get a portion of
every account out there.”

—John Witkowski, director, Southeast business unit, Amersham

Healthcare

“The year after implementing Strategic Selling was our best sales year ever. This
is the second full year we’ve been using the Miller Heiman processes, and we’re
going to come very close to doubling that.”

—Roger Ballmer, manager, district marketing, Owen Healthcare, Inc.

“The largest sale ever done at my previous position used Strategic Selling to win
an extremely difficult and complex sale. The sale was over $5 million year one
and it continues to gross over $2 million a year for the past three years. We
couldn’t have won it without the discipline and hard work of the team and
certainly not without the Miller Heiman course.”

—Andrew Lee, vice president, sales and marketing, Microvision, Inc.

“The best books I have read on selling.”

—Scott DeGormo, Success magazine, on Strategic Selling and Conceptual

Selling

“Efficient, professional … the finest high-level training program I have seen …
a mini-MBA in how to sell national accounts.”

—Henry J. Cockerill, former senior vice president, U.S.A. Fountain Sales,

Coca-Cola Company

“Thousands of HP sales engineers worldwide have been trained in Strategic
Selling, and its influences can be directly seen in the results they have attained
… Its usefulness has spanned product disciplines and national boundaries.”

—John A. Young, former president and chief executive officer, Hewlett-

Packard Company

“A totally professional planning process. If Willy Loman had taken the Miller
Heiman program, he’d have been salesman of the year.”

—Walter H. Drew, former senior vice president and general sales

manager, Consumer Products Division, Kimberly-Clark Corporation

PREFACE

Every year I meet or hear from dozens of graduates of Strategic Selling,
Conceptual Selling, and other Miller Heiman programs. I also meet a lot of these
people face-to-face at places where I am speaking, giving a seminar, or on sales
calls. Virtually all of them say the same thing to me. Invariably it is some
version of, “Bob, thank you so much for all the money you have made me over
the years! The greatest thing about Strategic Selling, and Conceptual Selling and
LAMP is that they work!” Now I am as susceptible as the next guy to flattery
like this, and indeed it is very gratifying to hear this over and over again from so
many alumni. But I always respond in the same way, “We appreciate the great
feedback, but you are the one who had the discipline to apply it.” And therein
lies the key. Countless seminars are filled with ideas, some good and sound, and
many worthless nonsense. But no idea or concept is worth anything unless it can
be applied to situational reality. This has always been a planned hallmark of
Miller Heiman, Inc. programs. We can provide the knowledge and show our
participants how to do something, but the individual must deliver the discipline.

Nor has it been just money that gives credit to Strategic Selling. Consider the

stories of just a few of our alumni, of whom we are very proud:

• Mike Jackson, western region senior vice president and general manager

for General Motors, was the Coca-Cola account manager for Jack in the
Box when he first was exposed to Strategic Selling in 1981.

• Rick Justice, executive vice president of worldwide operations at Cisco

was a twenty-two-year-old sales representative for Hewlett-Packard when
he took Strategic Selling. He used the process on everyone of his deals
that year, became Sales Representative of the Year, and the rest is
history.

• Mike Cronk was a young district sales manager at Saga Food Service

(now part of Marriott Sodhexo) when he ran Strategic Selling for his

district team. (Incidentally, it was the first seminar we ran for a Fortune
500 company.) He just retired from being president of Aramark
International.

• Reed Hilliard recently retired from a general manager’s position at

Agilent Technologies. He was also a young newly appointed district sales
manager at Hewlett-Packard when he introduced Strategic Selling to his
team in 1976.

These are but a handful of people who thank Strategic Selling for helping

their success over their careers. There are hundreds more.

Next year will be the thirtieth anniversary of the first Strategic Selling

seminar. Of course, it wasn’t called that thirty years ago, and the exercises were
sort of a “work-in-progress,” but you would recognize the same key principles:
Win-Win, Four Buying Influences, Four Modes, Win-Results, Red Flags, Ideal
Customer. These have all been concepts that distinguished Strategic Selling from
the very beginning.

Many alumni comment that the principles in our programs have stood the test

of time. “Everything you teach in each program is as valid today as it was in
1975, but more so. Why is that?” The fact that this is true is no accident. The
reason they have stood the test of time is each of the key ideas taught in all
Miller Heiman programs, and in all of our books, relate a fundamental principle
of the selling process. Note the two words emphasized in the previous phrase,
principle and process. That is the secret to what makes Miller Heiman programs
so practical and useful. And that was done by design. We have always focused
on teaching our participants the underlying principle instead of just the
technique. If you learn only the technique without understanding why it works,
you will soon forget it. If you understand the principle, you understand what its
place is in the selling process and you will get more sales and better sales. For
example, one technique taught in Strategic Selling is “Make sure you identify
and cover the bases with the Economic Buyer.” The principle underlying this is
“There is one place and only one place wherein resides the final approval for
each sale.” In understanding that principle you now know why it is so important
to identify and cover that Economic Buyer base.

Similarly, we focus on giving people principles that are part of a selling

process. Selling used to be looked upon as a haphazard, trial-and-error, fits-and-
starts, luck-related type of venture. One of the key contributions Strategic
Selling has made is to prove to salespersons and their managers that, while
selling is not a science, we can go about selling in a systematic way because

there are repeatable processes involved in both buying and selling. It does not
rest upon fickle luck. A process is simply a systematic set of actions we take to
achieve desired results. Having repeatable processes is what takes the trial and
error and guesswork out of life. Doctors have a very defined and systematic
diagnostic procedure to determine the cause of illness. IT programmers have a
systematic step-by-step method for developing software. The beauty of
understanding and improving processes is that many, if not most, are universal,
thus not dependent upon the specific knowledge and content of a particular
situation.

Over the past thirty years I have been involved in coaching people in literally

thousands of sales deals. I have helped Sikorsky Aircraft sell helicopters to the
Thai government; I have coached Hewlett-Packard to sell huge complex
computer systems; I have helped Coca-Cola national accounts sell marketing
programs to Burger King; I have been involved in Cymer’s sales of its excimer
lasers to Nikon and Canon and in Kimberley-Clark’s paper goods promotions to
Kroger; and so on. Am I an expert in helicopter technology? In computer
systems? In consumer beverages? In consumer paper goods? Or in excimer
lasers? Absolutely not! I only have a layman’s knowledge of each of these areas.
I do have a systematic repeatable proven sales process in Conceptual Selling,
Strategic Selling, LAMP, and our other process-based MHI programs. This
process is applicable to all complex sales situations, so I focus upon the process
since I am not knowledgeable in all these industries. Another thing about
understanding processes is that they are slow to become outdated if they are
effective processes. For example, the process for building a house is basically
thousands of years old. Even though the technologies have changed, the first step
is still to dig and lay a foundation, followed by framing of the outside walls and
interior support structure, followed by the gables and the roof, and so on. Ditto
for the making of wine, thousands of years old.

The third element is practice. Thirty years ago, the case study was the

primary learning tool for business and industry. I always felt that the weakness
in this approach when used in seminars was the transition from the case study to
application in real life. So workshops to practice the principles and processes we
espoused were built into all of our seminars from the very beginning. It is a
methodology that has been much copied, but never matched in its effectiveness
—learn the principle to understand why something works, learn the process step
to understand how to do it, and finally take a real-life situation upon which to
plan and practice how to implement this to reality.

Finally, now that I have talked about why it works, I want to talk about how it

works. When talking to prospective clients, I practice what I preach with this

Win-Win concept. I absolutely know that I ‘win’ when my customers get more
and better sales by using our programs. I get satisfied customers, repeat business,
and referrals. However, I also let them know, that we cannot deliver the results
alone. I can provide and teach the processes and the principles to their
salespeople and managers, and even provide the practice. But they have to
provide the discipline that makes it work and gets the results. I urge client
managers to take a disciplined approach, which says, “This is the way we sell in
this company, and the expectation is that we will all do it this way. We will
make deals that are Win-Win for our customers and ourselves. We do not play
Win-Lose. We have a plan before going on a sales call. We seek out coaching,
and don’t close a deal until we have identified and covered bases with all buying
influences. We ask questions, probing to understand the real issues; we talk no
more than 20 percent of the time and listen 80 percent of the time. We try to find
out what we don’t know. We look for Basic Issues. We do all of this because we
know that, if we do, we will have more sales and better sales and long-term
customer relationships.” Corporate mandate, with the expectation that the rigor
used day in and day out, is what engrains the process into corporate culture. This
is the discipline of successful selling organizations!

We know our processes and principles work. They have been proven in a

crucible of reality for thirty years. You, our readers and clients, need to be
prepared to provide the discipline to have your people use those principles and
processes. It is our job to show you how, but we cannot do it for you. It is
actually surprisingly simple: processes,principles, and discipline. We promise no
magic. There are no silver bullets to selling success. We both need each other.

ROBERT B. MILLER
San Diego, California
September 2004

FOREWORD

Marriott International, Inc., has been fortunate to grow substantially over the
years, to the point where today it operates in fifty countries around the world and
employs over 200,000 people. Yet we remain in significant ways a family
organization, still committed to the values that were honored by my parents
seventy years ago when they started in business with a tiny root beer stand.

Among those values was a belief in the importance of relationships, both

within and outside the company. Since 1927, we have said that if you commit
yourself to taking care of your own people, you can be fairly confident that they
will take care of your customers. In a service business like ours, that is essential
to success. Marriott’s global reputation for quality and value is the direct result
of our honoring this principle. That same principle is the heart of The Mew
Strategic Selling.

Throughout our history, we have found that our most productive business

alliances have been forged with companies that share this orientation. One of the
strongest of these has been with Miller Heiman, Inc., whose commitment to
“Win-Win” relationships parallels our own. We have worked together since
1986, when our company introduced its first sales associates to Miller Heiman’s
Strategic Selling process. Since then, nearly a thousand Marriott people have
been introduced to this process.

There is a practical reason for this. In the past decade, we have expanded

dramatically, in both our lodging and our contract services group, so that today
we can offer our customers a wide variety of choices. In managing the
complexity that naturally accompanies such expansion, Miller Heiman has been
an invaluable ally. Strategic Selling in particular has made important
contributions to our position with business clients. In addition, Miller Heiman’s
systematic approach to managing change has helped to enhance our sales
associates’ flexibility as they keep pace with the rapid changes in our industry.

Aside from the practical benefits that Strategic Selling has brought us, I

believe that our association with Miller Heiman is strong because of the natural
fit between our companies. As we continue to expand toward our goal of
operating 2,000 lodging properties by the year 2000, we remain committed to the
“human side” of business. Miller Heiman understands and supports that
commitment, and it’s once again evident in The New Strategic Selling.

— J. W. Marriott, JR.
Chairman and CEO,
Marriott International, Inc.

IF IT AIN’T BROKE: THE “WHY” BEHIND THE

NEW STRATEGIC SELLING

Strategic Selling was first published in 1985. At that time, even though the
process on which the book was based had been in place for only about eight
years, it had already begun to reap significant benefits both for our company,
Miller Heiman, Inc., and for the clients who attended our Strategic Selling
workshops and programs. In 1985, many of corporate America’s most successful
selling organizations had already begun to see us as the “process experts,” and
we had earned the trust of such innovative market leaders as Hewlett-Packard,
Marriott, General Electric, Hallmark, and Coca-Cola.

As we explained in the introduction to the original edition, we attributed

much of our success with these and other forward-looking companies to our
impassioned support of a non-manipulative selling philosophy that was the
driving force of the Strategic Selling approach. That philosophy was based on
the premise that getting an individual order is never enough: True selling success
rests on such “beyond the order” achievements as repeat business, solid referrals,
and long-term relationships. The key to securing them, we insisted, is to manage
every sales objective as a joint venture—a mutually beneficial transaction where
both buyer and seller “Win.”

In 1985, the notion of selling as a “Win-Win” process—indeed, the notion of

selling as a process at all—was still a novel approach to the profession. Even
among companies who invested heavily in sales training, what was being taught
was face-time skills and techniques—the traditional salesperson’s grab-bag of
hooks, lines, and clinchers. Manipulative tactics were still very much in vogue,
and Miller Heiman was nearly unique among consultants in insisting that this