Summary: Customer Centric Selling

Review and Analysis of Bosworth and Holland's Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Publisher: Must Read Summaries
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9782806239440
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

The must-read summary of Michael Bosworth and John Holland's book: `Customer Centric Selling: The Message Driven Sales Process`.

This complete summary of the ideas from Michael Bosworth and John Holland's book `Customer Centric Selling` shows how marketers and salespeople should work together to achieve more. Customer centric selling is a system where salespeople and marketers come together and use sales-ready messages to help customers visualise a product and how it can satisfy their needs. The authors share the 8 critical aspects that you will need to master in order to communicate these messages to your customers.

Added-value of this summary: 
• Save time
• Understand key concepts 
• Increase your business knowledge 

To learn more, read `Customer Centric Selling` and find out how you can create sales-ready messages that will dramatically increase your sales figures.

Summary of Customer-Centric Selling (Michael Bosworth and John Holland)

1. What is Customer-Centric Selling?

Conventional selling involves the delivery of a prepared sales pitch focused around product features and benefits. Customer-Centric Selling (CCS) is different. With CCS, you help your buyer visualize how they will use your offering to:

1. Achieve one of their goals.
2. Solve one or more of their specific problems.
3. Satisfy a need.

In other words, CCS transforms the one-way sales pitch into a genuine two-way conversation where the buyer and the seller work together to achieve something worthwhile.

Customer-centric selling has seven basic tenets and thirteen core concepts.

The seven basic tenets of CCS are:

1. You’ll be far more effective having situational conversations with buyers than you ever will be making presentations.
   That is, instead of giving a canned PowerPoint presentation, clients would rather talk with you in conversation. If you’re smart, you’ll use that conversation to help the buyer visualize using your product or service to help do something useful for them – like solve a problem or achieve an objective.
2. It’s better to ask relevant questions than to offer your opinion.
   People love to buy things they like, but hate being sold things they don’t need. Traditional salespeople offer their opinions, which just happen to involve using their products. CCS oriented salespeople ask intelligent questions so as to help the buyer come to their own conclusion.
3. You’ll be more effective if you’re solution-focused ratherthan relationship-focused.
   Traditional sellers stress the importance of building a relationship with the buyer in order to influence the buying decision. A better approach is to be intensely focused on coming up with the best solution. This involves respecting the intelligence and opinions of the buyer rather than getting the buyer to like you and want to do business with you.
4. It’s better to target the key business decision makers instead of gravitating towards current users of your product.
   Most conventional salespeople tend to feel most comfortable with the people who are actually using their product. A CCS salesperson, by contrast, is results-oriented rather than feature-oriented. For that reason, CCS salespeople gravitate towards the business decision makers who share the same obsession with results.
5. Instead of relying on product features, you’re far better off if you focus on relating product usage instead.
   Traditional salespeople can talk for hours about product features and benefits, which is appealing to early-market buyers like technology enthusiasts and visionaries. If the product is advanced enough, this approach will work well at first. To reach the bulk of the market (the pragmatists, the conservatives and the laggards who make up 80-percent of any market), features alone just won’t do it. These people have to be helped to visualize your product or service solving one of their problems or assisting them to achieve a goal. In those situations, customer-centric selling becomes far more effective because potential customers learn how to relate the product or service to their actual needs.
6. Instead of managing the salesperson’s activity, it’s better to monitor the quality of their work with clients.
   Historically, sales managers have tended to monitor activity rather than progress because it has been hard to evaluate progress systematically. By contrast, customer-centric selling, due to its conversational nature, means salespeople know exactly where they are in the sales process at all times. They can then call on their sales managers to help them succeed in making the sale. This is a fundamentally better way of working.
7. Rather than persuading people to buy, a good salesperson will empower customers to achieve their own goals.
   The whole customer-centric sales approach revolves around empowering buyers to solve their own problems and achieve their own goals. From this perspective, salespeople become resources in the quest rather than annoyances or interruptions. This is a much better approach to business.

The thirteen core concepts of customer-centric selling are:

1. You always get delegated to the people you sound like.
   If you sound like a seller, you get delegated to the corporate buyer (who is used to dealing with high-pres...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Book Presentation
• Summary of Customer-Centric Selling (Michael Bosworth and John Holland)
• About the Summary Publisher
• Copyright