“When you combine strategy with unexpected customer value, politics, and other traditional sources of relative superiority to form Compete Strategy, an invisible force multiplier emerges.”
Jim Holden, Ryan Kubacki, The New Power Base Selling
One lesson I learned early in my career was that gaining control over a customer’s buying process as a seller becomes harder with every day the process runs. And that without control your chances to win are subject to other people’s decisions including the competitions’. So, to manage your success you need to get control over the process early.
But how could a salesperson ever gain control over a buying process?
The answer is: By generating the opportunity yourself rather than responding to requests from the customer. This is what The New Power Base Selling is about.
While it builds and expands on Power Base Selling (see my earlier post here) I decided to provide a separate review as it takes away some of the beautiful simplicity of the first to expand on the more messy execution side. So, reading both provides more value than just one of them.
The authors describe 7 steps to penetrate accounts held by the competition (and that’s the default for Disruptors) with 1/determine the entry point; 2/craft value message; 3/gain access; 4/conduct a meeting; 5/build support base map; 6/move upstream; and 7/complete the triathlon.
They then introduce what they call Competitive Differentiation Analysis to identify areas where to defend and where to attack Incumbents, followed by Milestone Stacking to parallelize and thus collapse the customer’s buying decision process.
I incorporated both concepts in Disruption Selling under Execution. The mechanisms to deliver on it are (generic) Sales Plays and (customer-specific) Sales Initiatives. Both start with an assessment of strengths and weaknesses, develop the Value Statement to trigger the buying process, and pre-define the entire sales cycle to collapse the process and make the competition enter it late.
Applying the concept of The New Power Base Selling makes a Disruptor opportunity-driving rather than opportunity driven, a pre-requisite for unseating Incumbents in their accounts and – ultimately - entire markets.
In this 3rd Party Content Review I provide a synopsis and critique of the book which hopefully motivates you to read it.
I’d like to thank Wiley for their approval to share it under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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