How to Become A Sales Superstar With Baseline Selling

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This review though not strictly related to online marketing is relevant particularly if you are selling a professional service that requires offline meetings to close contracts. Its important that your online lead generation methods tie in and support your offline sales appointments. I cover how you might do that in this post. How To Use Online Marketing For Offline Businesses

Dave Kurlan the author of Baseline Selling began selling when he was a kid. It is a lot more than merely an instructive guide on sales and closing tactics, it is a detailed book about the business of sales. Its a highly practical and practical program for anyone in sales or sales-management capacity.

It's additionally intended  for company owners, marketing managers, and client-service reps. Such service professionals as accountants, attorneys, engineers, architects and consultants would also gain advantage from it. Basically,  this book is for everybody who works with customers in any capacity, because the four-base (Why Baseball? Only Golf and Baseball are sports where there's only forward progress, and golf has 18 instead of Baseball's 4 steps) system laid out in the book could be applied to any customer interaction.

The 4 bases are:

1st Base = Have an appointment
2nd Base = They require what you've got, there is urgency and you've demonstrated speed on the bases (the S.O.B. High quality, shown likeability, capability and expertise, and stood out from the crowd)
3rd Base = The prospect is totally qualified to carry out business with you and you are completely qualified to do business with the prospect 
4th Base = You have presented a perfect solution, suitable with their budget and they have made a decision to buy from you

Dave Kurlan at his company Objective Management Group, assessed around 250,000 sales reps over the last 16 years and a evaluation of this statistics revealed that 74% of these sales reps had been ineffective. He believes it is for the reason that the professional training that is available for sales agents these days is too difficult for people to learn and remember and virtually impossible to implement in their businesses. So he thought he would teach to them all a way to sell that was not difficult to memorize, fun and, most importantly, actionable. They'll be able to do this right away.

The book suggests and which I think are very true that there are three essentials before picking up the phone. You have to understand your business, understand why your prospects buy and not to give up.

To help reach first base, the book suggests six exercises to complete. List problems that your product solves, list all problems heard from prospects, are these problems the symptom or the cause, create a list of symptoms that will lead you to identify a real problem, create a list of reactions that someone experiencing this problem would have and what the consequences would be if they don't solve these problems. I like the use of role plays with prospects in the book. There is an interesting role play where an issue in a market is used by Dave in a cold call situation.

An interesting suggestion to try with a prospect is finding out their habit quotient-which is the number of times they have to be asked before they are ready to buy. If they have a quotient of three this means that they have to check themselves three times before they are ready to buy and say yes. The book provides an easy to ascertain what the prospect's quotient is.

But how to close a prospect? The suggested proposal or presentation to prepare has seven components that according to Dave need to be included. He gives a great example of using the presentation you are giving to put the prospect in a state where she imagines her problem solved. And he has some interesting views on whether its a good idea to use powerpoint. He recommends to only include one solution rather than the typical three options in these documents.

After the presentation, If you are getting “I'll think it over” then use the “rule of triple elimination”. Using this rule prompts the prospect to say out loud that she likes the price, solution and you. It could just be you need to use the habit quotient and keep asking for the business.

The book suggests an inoffensive close that most prospects won't be able to give a straight no to. “Would you like my help?”. If you are getting price objections when attempting to close it means that you haven't gone through all the bases, use the “infield why rule” (ask more questions) more. You probably haven't developed a good relationship yet between you and her. The book does provide useful methods to deal with most reasons that price comes up as an issue and how to handle them.

In summary if you want to know how to get more prospects, appointments and closes then Baseline Selling gets my recommendation. You'll become a sale superstar if you follow the simple 4 steps outlined in this book which are easy to learn and implement.