Elite Sales Strategies. Anthony Iannarino

Foreword

       By Charlie Green

      Most books on sales follow a predictable pattern—to borrow the philosopher's phrase, they are teleological. That is, all writing prior to the author's book boils down to A, B, and C. But now that the truth has been revealed, all roads can be seen as having led to D: The ___ Sale, ___ Selling, Selling Through ___. It is a rather egocentric way to present one's thinking, and often doesn't time-travel well (look at the sales bestsellers from 30–40 years ago).

      Anthony Iannarino has taken a different approach. He recognizes that there are certain tensions at work in sales, and that these are everlasting and immutable. No methodology or approach is going to transcend them.

Chief among those tensions is the one between the salesperson's desire to make the sale and the desire to help the client. How can we be professional and ethical and client focused, all while getting better at bringing money to our own top line? This tension is felt by most salespeople internally, psychologically. It also shows up in approaches and methodologies; for example, client-focused easily morphs into the client focus of a vulture—focused on the client, all right, but for the sake of the vulture, not the client. Dealing with this tension has actually gotten harder, not easier, by living in a time with instant short-term performance metrics available at every turn, and with countless ways to avoid interpersonal contact.

      Another tension is that between ethics and selling, a combination that all too many customers consider an oxymoron. Most salespeople don't like to reflect on this tension, feeling that the addition of ethics to selling will somehow compromise their effectiveness. But the tension is unavoidable; if the salesperson's job is to influence others, and if most salespeople have some reasonable skill at it, then they are in a form of power relationship. Unless you are willing to completely consider clients and customers as mere means to our own ends (and most salespeople actually mean well), then we must consider some aspect of our client relationships and obligations, if only because it's not all about us alone. Most salespeople don't know how to do this (share the pain? bargaining? contracts?), hence it's tempting to ignore.

      Anthony doesn't ignore these tensions. In fact, he leads right up front with one of the big ones—power and control—in the form of the concept One-Up. Colloquially, being one up on someone means you have the advantage over them. It's an inherently combative, zero-sum metaphor, that of a winner in a struggle against the putative loser—the customer—who is One-Down.

But One-Up isn't so simple. On the one hand, if you're not One-Up with respect to knowing something of value to the customer that the customer doesn't know, then you're wasting everyone's time. But on the other hand, nobody is always One-Up with respect to every subject in the world; and if you try to present yourself as being so, you are obviously a bloviating clown whom nobody will believe. Sometimes you're just One-Down. You can try to ignore this, or cover it up with spin, but neither strategy will alter reality; sometimes you're up, and sometimes you're down. Nor should your goal necessarily be simply to be up more often and down less often. It's more about when you should be each, and being conscious and intentional about it. It's a dance, not a winning military campaign.

      What Anthony has done in this book is to accept that big tension (and others) as a valid description of reality, and talk about how we as salespeople can navigate the reality-based world of selling for the benefit of all. And “for the benefit of all” is not a throwaway phrase. If all you do is “win” sales “competitions” with your customers, you'll eventually be out of a job. No one likes someone who is solely in it for themselves, and such people get found out pretty quickly. Recognizing this basic truth puts Anthony in a small, rarefied group of sales authors who truly believe that the route to their own success lies in making their customers successful, and in behaving that way consistently and with an eye to the long term, in the face of contrary advice (including from their own sales managers and incentive comp schemes).

      So what does it mean to face these tensions head on? Using the big metaphor of One-Up and One-Down, Anthony explores all aspects of sales. While he gives more attention than most to issues of mindset and intent, he also has a foot firmly planted in tactics, implementation, execution, processes, and practical solutions. After all, he has been, and continues to be, very much a practitioner, and the book is chock full not only of solid advice, but also of compelling first- and second-person stories you've never heard before.

This is not primarily a teleological book, but—to borrow the philosophic lexicon once again—a dialectical one. There is yin and yang, always in creative tension, each tension born of prior tensions between older yins and yangs, and each tension resulting in new yins and yangs, which provide an infinitude of more tensions. A great example: The best way to get from One-Down to One-Up on a given issue is to learn from your clients who are One-Up on that issue. The key to getting One-Up is thus to embrace being One-Down and leverage it. As in all cases, it's how we surf the tensions that determines the outcome. To quote that particularly famous philosopher, Spiderman's Uncle Ben (who borrowed it from Voltaire), “with great power comes great responsibility.” Getting the sale doesn't take you out of the responsibility game; in fact, playing the larger game is what gets you both power and responsibility.

      There is no process, insight, or magic phrase that will truly make you a better salesperson. It's an art, and not a black art but a human one. Navigating the tensions inherent in human relationships is pretty much the same way to navigate the tensions inherent in sales. In fact, they're the same tensions.