Today we release my fourth book, Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative, and my first book with Wiley publishing. You can buy the book here now!
Here is what the publisher says about the book: "In his fourth book, veteran sales leader and bestselling author Anthony Iannarino delivers an incisive and eye-opening roadmap to commercial success. The book teaches sales professionals to approach every sale from a position of authority and expertise. Emphasizing an ethical obligation towards the client that demands nuanced and helpful advice, salespeople will learn to fully utilize their strengths."
Here is what I say about the book:
What's In It for You or Why Buy This Book
- If you want to be more consultative, lead your clients, and differentiate yourself, your approach, and your company, you will find this book valuable in pursuing those goals.
- To understand some of the changes in what your clients experience as value in the sales conversation, this book will provide you with the strategies and tactics necessary to score points when sitting across from decision-makers and other stakeholders, by helping them learn what they need to know to succeed.
- You know how sometimes your prospective client believes something that isn't true, and you struggle to help them let go of their outdated assumptions? This book will provide you with a way to change the client's mind, by gently helping them understand they are One-Down, without ever making them feel they are One-Down.
- The reason you are One-Up is so you can help your clients become One-Up, with your approach preventing them from being One-Down when making an important decision for their business.
- Have you ever had trouble getting a prospect to do what they need to do, this book will help you provide your contacts with the good counsel, advice, and recommendations that will help them understand what they need to do, and how it will ensure they succeed.
- Most importantly, Elite Sales Strategies will help you create new opportunities and win the deals you need to hit your targets while ensuring your client succeeds. What could be better than that?
The Back Story on One-Up
Each year at the OutBound Conference, I bring a new major piece of work. Last year, I showed up with a very large slide deck titled "Truly Consultative." The main idea is the concept of being One-Up, my way of explaining the salesperson's responsibility and obligation to know more than their client about the decision the client is making and how best to improve their results. Without knowing more than your client, it's impossible to create value inside the single vehicle that is the sales conversation. Why would any client buy from someone who knows less about how to produce the better results than they do?
At the time, I was already deep into the outline and had already written Leading Growth, a book designed to help sales managers grow revenue. After the keynote at OutBound, the feedback convinced me to write Elite Sales Strategies before Leading Growth.
The process of writing this book began with my best friend, Jeb Blount, forcing his editor at Wiley, Shannon Vargo, on me at the OutBound reception. Before that I was dead set on self-publishing, ensuring I could write what I wanted to write, something that Wiley has allowed me to do.
This is a big book week for me. Today I release Elite Sales Strategies. I turn in Leading Growth to the publisher. And I signed a contract for book number six, with a title I cannot share at this time, and my first book with a subject that isn't sales.
The Elevation of B2B Sales
Elite Sales Strategies sets a new standard for B2B sales, one that requires a greater focus on creating value in the sales conversation, as the client cannot ever experience the value of what you sell unless and until they buy from you.
This book extends my previous work. These four books are really one book in four parts. All are part of my documenting the strategies and tactics that work now.
- The Only Sales Guide You'll Ever Need is a competency model for the modern B2B salesperson, dressed up as a book on success in sales.
- The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the Ten Commitments That Drive Sales is a book about controlling the sales process by leading the client through the conversations that would allow them to produce the better results they need, by securing commitments to do what comes next.
- Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition is a book about competitive displacements (i.e., Stealing your competition's clients). Like the others, it is a book about creating a strategic level of value for your prospective clients to differentiate yourself, causing the client to change partners.
- Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative is a book based designed to help salespeople understand the concept of being One-Up and the mechanics to execute the approach.
Launching a Book is a Team Sport
I am blessed to have the support of so many friends. There is no doubt I will have to update this list of people who have helped share the book: Jeb Blount (and my friends at Sales Gravy), Mark Hunter, Victor Antonio, Mike Weinberg, Meredith Elliott Powell, Shari Levitin, Jeff Bajorek, Dave Brock, Jason Bay, Daniel Disney, Tony Hughes, Luigi Prestinenzi, Ron Karr, Patrick Tinney, Mike Kunkle, Gerhard Gschwandtner, Darrell Amy, Jeff Beals, Colleen Francis, Phil Gerbyshak, Simon Hares, Tom Williams, Alice Heiman, Stu Heinicke, Lynn Hidy, Kendra Lee, Larry Levine, James Muir, Tim Ohai, Andy Paul, Lee Salz, Elinor Stutz, Lahat Tzvi.
A very special thanks to Charlie Green for writing the Foreword. When I asked to pitch Charlie on writing the foreword, I told him I believed that he was the only person who could deal with the ethics of the approach, and after twenty minutes, he agreed.
Also, a very special thanks to Tina LoSasso for doing great work organizing the book launch.
