12 Disciplines of Leadership Excellence: How Leaders Achieve Sustainable High Performance

In this era of iPads, iPhones, and apps, sales communications may be growing, but sales conversations are dying--and so are too many sales. Globalization, the explosion in competition, the slow economy, and fast-emerging technologies all have changed buying habits. Salespeople can no longer rely on the traditional sales methodologies. They must change the conversation.

A visionary of the consultative sales movement, Linda Richardson has again moved selling forward by reengineering the sales conversation. Purchasing has become a core competency for clients. They evaluate their options against checklists they carefully develop. Richardson helps you understand what is on their checklists and align your solutions with their business and personal priorities to help you win.

Clients today are focused on business outcomes. They are interested in reducing risk. They turn to peers and social networks to self-educate before turning to salespeople. To engage them you must demonstrate that you know their world and that you are prepared with insights and ideas to add to what they already know. Richardson gives you five clear strategies and tools to help you do just that. You will create and shape opportunities, prepare and probe in an entirely new way, gain client consensus, and use sales process and tools to guide and accelerate closing. You will learn:

• Futuring to prepare for and anticipate customer needs
• Heat-mapping to use insights to focus and engage customers
• Value-tracking to connect your solutions to business outcomes and ROI
• Phasing to use sales process to forecast accurately and close
• Linking to reassert heart and trust into your sales conversations

Linda Richardson was named Sales Thought Leader for 2013 and this book shows why as she helps you sometimes tweak but more often change how you sell. She builds on your foundation to take your selling to a new elevation and bring your sales results along with it.

About the Author

Linda Richardson is the founder of Richardson, a global sales performance company where she serves as executive chairwoman. She consults with sales organizations and sales leadership on sales process and sales effectiveness. She teaches sales and management courses at the Wharton Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton Executive Development Center. Her last book, Perfect Selling, was a New York Times bestseller and received the SBA gold medal for best sales book. Richardson is credited with starting the consultative sales movement, which has guided most sales methodologies used by companies for the past few decades. Changing the Sales Conversation takes consultative selling to the next level to enable salespeople to succeed in the internet influenced sales environment.