Review of Buyer-Centered Selling by Tom Williams @SD_Firm and Tom Saine @TomSaine3

Best Sales Strategy Book in Ten Years

Buyer Centered Selling by Thomas Williams and Thomas Saine

If you enjoyed Strategic Selling and Selling to the C-Suite then I just found your next book. Most sales books today are written for niche topics. It’s rare to find a new title on B2B strategy let alone one that breaks new ground in a tangible and practical way. Buyer-Centered Selling is just such a book and my favorite strategy book in the past 10 years. Tom Williams and Tom Saine are well-seasoned sales experts that somehow managed to one-up their previous book The Seller’s Challenge – which is brilliant.

What’s Inside?

Buyer-Centered Selling is broken down into eleven highly relevant and well-documented chapters. Chapter one begins with the changes that have-been and continue-to change the face of B2B selling and sets the frame for what buyer-centered selling really is. We discover what buyers really want and the widespread mismatch between that and what is typically being delivered by salespeople all around the world.

Buyer’s Journey vs. The Job to Be Done

Chapter two is an incredible contribution to selling. What William’s and Saine have done is applied Clayton Christensen’s “job to be done” JTBD to selling and it is a genuinely new and valuable contribution to the world of selling. It delivers a new and illuminating perspective on the sales process that will make all your sales and call objectives much more relevant to your clients and by extension accelerate your sales cycle. To quote the book, “When you map the customer’s buying process accurately and align sales activities with the information, insight, documentation and perspective needed by stakeholders, you become a guide or navigator for the customer’s buying efforts. You become a seller who helps them solve a problem, capitalize on an opportunity, or mitigate a risk rather than pushing a solution.” This chapter is excellent and bears reading multiple times.

Discovery

Chapter three is about discovery a pet topic of mine. In my opinion, discovery represents one of greatest areas that sales professionals can improve and Tom and Tom provide excellent tools to accomplish concise discovery that is inherently valuable to clients.

Messaging

Thomas Williams and Thomas Saine

Messaging is another inadequately covered area in sales and in chapter five we receive a step-by-step approach to creating relevant massaging that is backed by science. This is a hugely valuable chapter and worthy of it’s own book. (hint, hint)

Sales Biggest Challenges Solved

The remainder of the book systematically dissects and solves some of the top challenges in sales everywhere including: Resuscitating Stalled Opportunities, Selling to the Risk Averse Buyers, Activating Dormant Leads & Inactive Accounts, Upselling and Cross-Selling, and a topic dear to my heart – Closing Professionally. Once again the science and research devoted to each of these topics is incredible. It is science + wisdom at it’s best.

Conclusion

Williams, Muir and Saine with their previous best-selling title The Seller’s Challenge

Buyer-Centered Selling a landmark in in B2B sales strategy books. There’s really nothing else like it available. Every B2B sales leader and student of professional selling should own this book. I guarantee you will return to it again and again. Buyer-Centered Selling is everything I love in a sales book. It contains genuinely new insight, is backed by science and is oozing with practical examples and actionable checklists and addenda. In fact the addenda alone (of which there are 14) are all-alone worth the price of the book. What can I say? This book hits my sweet spot perfectly. The scope and quality of Buyer-Centered Selling is absolutely phenomenal. If I had to recommend just one book to B2B sales professionals to raise all levels of their game – this would be it. You won’t find a better resource for complex B2B selling anywhere. I give it my highest recommendation.

You can find Buyer Centered Selling by Thomas Williams and Thomas Saine on AMAZON.

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Until next time!

James

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The Perfect Close: The Secret To Closing Sales – The Best Selling Practices & Techniques For Closing The Deal