Click here to Download Gap Selling PDF Book by Keenan Language English having PDF Size 1.7 MB and No of Pages 229.
It was 0-0. Our opponents were on our 10-yard line. We had stopped them seven plays in a row. It was impressive. We must have had a penalty or something, because as I recall they hadn’t gotten a first down. But now it was 4th and goal late in the fourth quarter. All we had to do was hold them for one more play. The year was 1979, and I was eleven years old.
Gap Selling PDF Book by Keenan
| Name of Book | Gap Selling |
| PDF Size | 1.7 MB |
| No of Pages | 229 |
| Language | English |
| Buy Book From Amazon | |
About Book – Gap Selling PDF Book
I had never played competitive football before and this was my first season. I didn’t watch it on TV. My mom and dad were ‘60s hippies, not sport enthusiasts, and certainly not football fans. So, my knowledge of the game was pretty much zero. I was skinny but fast so the coaches figured I’d make a great running back.
They pulled another kid and me aside and showed us a chalkboard with circles and numbers scrawled all over it. These represented the offensive line and the “holes” between each lineman. It might as well have been in Chinese. I honestly can’t remember if I didn’t have much desire to learn or if I found the whole thing too complicated, but the outcome was the same: I didn’t pay attention.
| Click here to Download Gap Selling PDF Book |
In our first scrimmage, the coach put me in at running back. We huddled up and the QB called the play. I had learned enough to understand that the quarterback’s play determined who got the ball and who didn’t, but nothing else made any sense to me. So, once the huddle broke, I asked the other running back, “Who gets the ball?” “You do,” he said, giving me a weird look.
Ok. Got it. When the ball was snapped, I took the handoff and ran. A scenario like the one I just described really happened during a study at the University of Arkansas. It supports the idea that humans suffer from longevity bias, the phenomenon in which we ascribe more positive feelings toward things that have been around for a while than toward things that are new.
For More PDF Book Click Below Links….!!!
In the Graveyard of Empires PDF
Interestingly, when those in the study were given five choices by which to rank the reason for their opinion, they consistently marked time on the market as the least important reason. And when participants were asked open-ended questions to explain their opinion, none ever actually mentioned time on the market.
Yet the data was consistent—every time participants thought the chocolate was an older, more established brand, they gave it higher marks than participants who thought the chocolate had only been on the market for three years. The suggestion of longevity had clearly subconsciously affected their judgment.
The phenomenon held true in other tests, too, such as when participants were asked to judge the aesthetic value of a painting or a tree. Consistently, the older the participants thought the object, the higher they rated it. The researchers wrote, “Because longevity promotes favorability, it may confer legitimacy.” Gap Selling PDF Book
The studies suggest that whether we’re talking about aesthetics, food, or tech, people are naturally inclined to subconsciously like and trust what they know and what is established and familiar. This means that even when people say they want change, deep down they often fear it. So even if your customer calls you expressing complete certainty that after ten years he is ready for a whole system overhaul.
As the time comes closer to close the deal, his alarm bells are going to start to go off. If that’s true of someone who actually initiated contact with you, imagine the shit show going on inside the head of a prospect you have called who isn’t even sure he wants to be talking to you at all. Have you ever watched someone close to you try to get a baby to eat something he didn’t want to eat?
Even the most easy-going baby will scrunch up his face like an over-baked apple after noticing even the tiniest portion of some food he’s decided offends him, like steamed carrots or spinach. Most parents get that it’s going to take some time for a child to develop a taste for certain flavors, so they’re prepared to eat or toss whatever the baby rejects and try again another day. Gap Selling PDF Book
What doesn’t compute, however, is when a baby turns his nose up at something he’s been eating with pleasure for weeks. All of a sudden, mashed potatoes are poison. Again, to a parent it’s confusing and surprising, but not a huge problem, until the kid starts reacting the same way to everything they put in front of his high chair.
Then feeding time becomes a huge daily battle with a certain outcome: The baby is going to win. There’s not much anyone can do to make a child swallow something he doesn’t want to. It’s one of the most frustrating rites of passage in a new parent’s life. The thing is, kids usually have very good reasons for behaving the way they do, even if they’re pre-verbal or can’t articulate them very well.
If only they could tell us at an earlier stage in their lives, “Mom, Dad, I had mashed potatoes at daycare that makes yours taste like cement. Please, don’t feed me this slop anymore until you learn to love salt and butter like I do.” Problem solved and drama averted, because now we know exactly what reality our child is experiencing, how it affects him, and how it has influenced his thinking and perspective. Gap Selling PDF Book
That’s vital information. In one simple sentence, he has given us the context and reason for his hunger strike, which means we can start figuring out a way to give him a reason to eat. The thing is, this dynamic is not reserved for parent-child showdowns. Everything we do, whether we’re six months old or sixty years old, is influenced by an invisible backdrop of events.
Feelings, and biases that affect the way we perceive the world and react to each other. They all play into the creation of our current state. Your customers have a current state, too, that includes everything we’ve talked about so far—their feelings about change, their intrinsic motivations, the realities of their business, and the facts of their work lives.
Their current state is the world they live in, their perceived reality. And when we salespeople understand our buyers’ current state, we’re in a much better position to effectively communicate, which also puts us in a good position to find solutions to their problems. Your product or service doesn’t matter right now. For real. Gap Selling PDF Book Download
Everything you do or say at this stage of the game should be entirely focused on your customers, understanding their current state, and getting to the bottom of what ails them. Every step of the sale is contingent on you getting the right information via the discovery process. How you proceed during this moment will set the stage for success or failure.
That’s no exaggeration. The sale is won or lost during the discovery. If you don’t get enough information, miss a few key points, misdiagnose the problem, incorrectly assess the problem, miss the customer’s desired future state, miscalculate the gap—any of these and more can doom the sale. The sale is won at the beginning, not the end.
Remember that old adage, Always Be Closing? ABC—a vicious Alec Baldwin writes it on a chalkboard in the movie version of Glengarry Glen Ross, in the same scene where he barks at sales has-been Jack Lemon to “Put. The coffee. Down . . . Coffee is for closers only.” Yeah, well, that scene is a joke. In real life, closing isn’t a thing. It’s not something you do at the end of the sale. Gap Selling PDF Book Download
It’s not something you do to a prospect. I’ll say it again: You don’t close prospects. This old idea that good closers are good salespeople is garbage, at least in the traditional sense. Closing skills like the assumptive close, the option close, the urgency close—all these close techniques are a waste of time. They only serve to put you first and aren’t focused on the customer or prospect.
To make things worse, they don’t work. In his blog post titled Closing Techniques in Sales are Dead—Here’s Why, Chris Orlob, senior director of product marketing at Gong.Io, published the results of an analysis his company did of more than one million sales calls. You know what they found? Closing calls sounded essentially the same whether the seller made the deal or lost it.
The discovery calls, however, showed enormous differences, particularly in what they call the “talk-to-listen ratio.” During the discovery calls that led to closed deals, salespeople spent more than half of their time listening while their customers talked. The opposite was true of discovery calls that led to missed deals. Gap Selling PDF Book Download
In those calls, buyers talked only 28% during the length of the call; the salespeople talked almost 80% of the time! Other data showed that “early in the sales cycle there is a linear relationship between the number of questions you ask and the likelihood of closing a deal.”xii Did you get that? The number of questions you ask early in the sale cycle increases your chance of making the deal.
The close happens at the beginning, not at the end. Gap selling is all about asking questions to get to current and future states. That can’t be done with just a few questions. Gap sellers will almost always ask more questions than people who use traditional selling techniques. They have to. Gap selling demands it and the data backs it up.
Your discovery is all about quantifying your prospects’ current and future states. You are drilling down for definable, objective goals—an increase to 20% growth from a current state of 10% growth, for example. Once you know that goal, you have to wonder, though, why not some other goal? Why 20% growth? Why not 30%, or even 50%? Why not 5%? Gap Selling PDF Book Download
That subjective reason, that intrinsic motivation, is behind every future state. Is it possible that a client who wants to see a 20% growth rate just pulled that number out of the air as a reasonably attainable goal? Sure. More likely though, there is a strategic reason for choosing that number, such as hitting that 20% growth rate will meet their commitment to Wall Street or put them in a position to sell the company.
My interest in learning more about intrinsic motivation is what helped me beat out some of the industry’s best-known sales consultants to land one of my favorite clients. My client and now good friend, Darren Gloster is COO and a director of ARMS Reliability, asset management company.
This is a sophisticated way of saying that they help large asset-dependent businesses like utility providers or oil and gas companies proactively maintain and manage the machines, equipment, and software that allow them to operate with minimal cost, break-downs, and interruptions whilst maximizing safe, reliable, productive time. Gap Selling PDF Book Free
Darren is in charge of their global operations across North America, Europe, Australia and Latin America. At the time I met him, the company was entering the third year of a five-year plan that was contingent on a significant amount of ramp and growth. Unfortunately, their sales strategies weren’t delivering the results they needed to meet their goals.
They were growing, but not as fast as they wanted to, and Darren was concerned that their growth might even slow down. As he put it, “I had a gut feeling that we were going to hit our ceiling of growth, so we needed to continue to develop the skill sets and capabilities of the sales team that we had in place.
We weren’t going to get the sales results we wanted to achieve by not developing the team and sticking with the same strategies while expecting a different result. So, Darren started looking for someone to help improve their sales management strategies and teach them better ways to lead the team and improve everyone’s forecasting accuracy and sales performance. Gap Selling PDF Book Free
He wound up screening four consultants, three of whom he found through their bestselling sales books. I was the last. Darren threw me into the mix because he had seen me speak at a conference, and though that talk was centered more around personal branding and marketing, not sales—the emphasis of my first book, Not Taught—he liked my pragmatic content and entertaining delivery style. He figured it couldn’t hurt to talk to me and see what I had to say.