Soft Selling to Executives

Originally titled: Decoding the BS of Business.

Executives and professionals speak different languages, as disparate as Swahili and Greek. Agendas, vocabularies, and cultural conditioning destroy meaningful communication between them.

This book exposes selling myths and profit-killing gaps between illusion and reality.

Executives live in a different world from the rest of us. They think differently, act differently, and buy differently. For the professions-those in our culture who package and sell information for a living-architects, lawyers, engineers, accountants, brokers, MBAs, CPAs, marketers, and consultants of every stripe, persuasion and profession, a shift of thinking is required to design and hold a Persuasive Executive Conversation.

A number of preconceptions and cultural myths need to be bulldozed to clear the way for this thinking shift. Three things are required to answer the Buyer's questions and sell well in the executive suite: the story, the tools and the delivery. We will explore each and help you prepare a presentation that works from the executive's point of view, that you can take into any boardroom, tell your story, and double your changes of getting hired.

When selling to executives what you sell is different from how you sell it. While professionals are expert at delivering services to their clients, they are amateurs at telling people what they do for a living. These skills are not taught at Harvard, Yale, or State U.

Our job is to help people make money. For three decades we have intensively trained 12,000 managers, professional salespeople, and consultants to persuade at the executive level. While doing so, we discovered a critical element that managers overlook or ignore that can cost one-quarter, or more, of sales revenues.

So what is this low-grade infection that limits a firm's potential and costs so much money? What is this counter-intuitive malaise that works against the philosophies and strategies of reputable companies managed by bright, educated people? It is this: corporations and consulting firms spend big money to hide what they do from their Buyers.

It is nearly impossible to get a company, much less a salesperson, to explain what they do for a living stated in the Buyer's terms; they cannot tell a selling story that is different form the competitors', makes sense in the Buyer's world, or is even interesting. In many cases, they insult the Buyer's intelligence. The executive market calls it BS.

What we learned from our Clients will surprise you as it did us: If a firm can cut the BS and answer five logical questions on the mind of every executive-level Buyer, sales successes can double. For the professional this book is a cash cow that can be milked for the rest of your career.