Anyone who doubts that everything is changing must be in a stupor of some kind. From my vantage point, everything is changing. And the faster that things change the faster the value of what you currently know is evaporating. To a greater degree than ever before, sustained learning is now key to your success as a salesperson or sales manager.

1. Selling by Leading
Change
by Wayne Peterson / Black Canyon Consulting Group Inc.

2. From my vantage point, everything is
changing. And the faster things change, the
faster the value of what you currently
know is evaporating.

3. To a greater degree than ever before,
sustained learning is now key to your
success as a salesperson or sales
manager. No longer can you reach a
point where you’ve “learned all you
need to know” and can stand back
and call it “good.”

4. We live in a world of too many options
and too little time. How are salespeople
effective in that environment? By thinking
on behalf of their clients or customers. By
creating real and customized value for
those clients or customers.

5. Salespeople must be equipped to create value
and not merely to communicate it. Products and
services require customization, tailoring and
refinement. And the salesperson who can make
that happen is the ultimate rainmaker. It
requires a deep understanding of the businesses
of his or her customers.

6. A deep understanding of the customer’s
business enables the salesperson to find
opportunities for gains, and to propose the
change that will deliver those gains to the
customer. But delivering those gains means
the salesperson needs to lead change.

7. Leading change calls for a series of skills that some see as
peripheral to the core skills expected of salespeople.
Leading change requires diagnostic skills. And it requires
the ability to build consensus, adapting to the needs of
multiple constituents.

8. Leading change requires a bedrock of business
literacy uncommon among salespeople.
Developing your business literacy and your expertise
in your customer’s business means a commitment to
continual learning.

9. Leading change for the benefit of the customer is one of the
most powerful ways to create unique value, and uniquely
valuable relationships.
And one of my favorite ways to describe and define “selling”
is this: “creating valuable relationships where none existed
before.”

10. When was the last time someone asked you to
define “selling?”
If you were asked that question before you read
my definition above, what would you have said?
Would you have included “leading change” in
your definition?