cause of every one of your problems. If you paid a $35 fee for overdrawing your checking account, it would be ridiculous to claim that the bank made you spend more money than you had. This might sting a little, but you didn't lose that big deal because your prices were too high, your company was too young, or your slide deck didn't have enough fireworks. Your client disengaged with you because you weren't able to stay One-Up by creating value within the confines of the sales conversation. (Oh, and those rambling emails and choked-up voicemails didn't help either.) You can be a wonderful human being, a great parent, an excellent employee, and an incredible karaoke singer without creating enough value to command another meeting.
Like it or not, sales success is individual, not situational. Two salespeople can work at the same company, report to the same manager, sell the exact same product or service to the very same type of customers, and do it all with the exact same pricing, commission, and competitors. But the one who strives to be One-Up will usually find herself at the top of the stacked ranking while her One-Down colleague languishes at the bottom. Perhaps more to the point, she will short-circuit any attempt to avoid responsibility for her losses, instead asking herself what she should have done to win.
One-Up Tactics
I would never leave you with a list of all the ways to be One-Down without providing you a hint of how to become One-Up. The critical outcome of the One-Up approach is that you position yourself as the person best able to help your client make significant decisions around change and improve their results. Chapter 1 explains why the modern sales approach is necessary for being One-Up. In this consultative approach, you don't just ask good questions but also provide professional input and recommendations. To execute this strategy, you must possess greater knowledge and experience than your prospect. In Chapters 2 through 11, I'm going to teach you ten practical tactics to support your One-Up strategy, each in its own chapter.
Chapter 2: The One-Up Sales Conversation: Your Only Vehicle for Value Creation. Of all the strategies you will find here, this may be the most important. The way you create value for your clients and develop a preference to buy from you is exclusively limited to the sales conversation. Your One-Up position makes this possible by helping your clients make better decisions and produce better results through your vantage point, your advice, and your recommendations.
Chapter 3: Insights and Information Disparity. There are some who believe the internet has eliminated the information disparity between the salesperson and their client. This is incorrect, as your clients need more information than ever. However, it's a different kind of information. This strategy will allow you to start teaching your prospects what they need to know to improve their outcomes.
Chapter 4: Supporting Client Discovery. The very nature of discovery has changed. It is less about identifying a need or a problem and more about helping the client discover something about themselves, their business, their decisions, and their results. To be a good guide, you need to be One-Up. But you must also be a good student. There is still much from you to learn from your clients, which is one of the ways you increase your One-Upness.
Chapter 5: Your Role as a Sense Maker. As the world gets increasingly complex, your One-Up position allows you to make sense of it all, by allowing your stakeholders to look through the higher-resolution lens you provide them. Your clients will see something they haven't seen, and something no One-Down salesperson can show them.
Chapter 6: The Advantage of Your Vantage Point. Here you will learn how to guide your clients to better outcomes through your experience helping others on their buyer's journey, preventing them from making mistakes that threaten their future results. Your contacts will find your suggestions far more valuable than anything they have heard from your legacy approach competitors, who still see the decision as a straight line.
Chapter 7: Building Your One-Upness. This chapter offers a road map for identifying and building your insights, as well as an executive briefing that will position you as One-Up from your very first communication—and keep you there all the way to your signing ceremony. Here, you are going to do the work necessary to begin using a modern sales approach.
Chapter 8: One-Up Guide to Offering Advice and Recommendations. As a trusted advisor who is One-Up, you must offer your advice and your recommendations all through the buyer's journey, helping them navigate their actions and decisions. Your advice and your recommendations must be more than “buy my solution from my company.” Your counsel will create far greater value.
Chapter 9: The One-Up Obligation to Proactively Compel Change. The antiquated approaches to sales saddle the salesperson with ideas that make them reactive. These ideas prompt practices like discovering problems and qualifying prospects, or the awful tactic of waiting until your client is prepared to buy before you help them. Becoming a trusted advisor means using your “One-Upness” to compel change, preventing your prospective clients from the harm of not changing before they are forced to.
Chapter 10: Triangulation Strategy: Helping Clients Decide While Avoiding Competition. There is a One-Up position that is incredibly powerful and little known, and never taught or trained. This triangulation strategy removes you from the playing field by elevating you to a position above the board, making you no longer just another competitor but the arbiter and ultimate authority. Your contacts will find an advantage in how they understand their decision and their choices.
Chapter 11: Being One-Up Helps Your Clients Change. The ultimate test of your One-Upness is that you cause your client to change. This change is not simply switching partners or solutions; it's a modification of their beliefs, their actions, and their results. The most important changes you need to make occur inside your client's business. When your client makes internal changes, you are One-Up, and your client is all the better for it.
Chapter 12: Advice for Those Who Are Presently One-Down. If you are not presently One-Up, this chapter will speed your development and put you on the path to becoming truly consultative. To achieve One-Upness, you will have to do the work—work worth doing, and work your clients will appreciate.
A Meeting of Equals
In an important sense, you and your client are equals. You are an expert in your field and your client is an expert in theirs. You happen to be in the One-Up position when it comes to helping your contacts improve their results. Your client is an expert in their industry and their business, making them One-Up in these areas. This combination of One-Upness and One-Downness allows you to work together to produce the best results, solve problems, address challenges, and take advantage of opportunities.
Being One-Up isn't about conflict, trickery, or dominance. On the contrary, it's about creating an obligation to serve your clients by becoming the kind of salesperson they need—one with the expertise and experience to provide them with good counsel, advice, and recommendations. Like teachers, doctors,
