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    SPEAR Selling
    SPEAR Selling
    SPEAR Selling
    Ebook174 pages4 hours

    SPEAR Selling

    By Jamie Shanks

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    About this ebook

    The ultimate Account-based Sales guide for the modern, digital seller. SPEAR Selling is the battle-tested process for both sales leaders and sales professionals to leverage in their pursuit for greater account-based sales results. Author Jamie Shanks has trained and advised 100’s of companies on SPEAR Selling to increase sales pipeline in all types of sales functions (inside sales, field sales, customer success, channel sales). The key to account-based sales results is the focus on upfront planning that leverage key competitive differentiators, used to significantly improve account activation and opportunity creation. Combine this focus on account planning, with a relentless accountability to structured sales activity, and this account-based motion will:

    •Increase the volume of opportunities in a territory
    •Shorten the timeline to opportunity creation in key accounts
    •Increase the conversion of prospective accounts into customers
    •Select the right accounts
    •Plan & Storyboard the engagement strategy
    •Engage with a structured process
    •Activate & educate with a Bold & Different strategy than the competition
    •Run or Replace (build sales pipeline with an objective framework).

    If you or your sales organization is running an account-centric sales motion, and you’re not leveraging social proximity as a key competitive differentiator in your account selection process – you’ve already lost your competitive advantage. Let this book be your guide to being first, bold and different in your service of the modern, digital buyer.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJamie Shanks
    Release dateJan 22, 2019
    ISBN9781999009410
    SPEAR Selling

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      Book preview

      SPEAR Selling - Jamie Shanks

      SPEAR SELLING

      The ultimate Account-Based Sales guide for the modern digital sales professional

      Jamie Shanks

      Praise for Spear Selling

      Jamie Shanks shares with you his story, his experience making this a sales book that speaks the truth. You need to make this book the first book you read if you’re serious about improving your sales process.

      Mark Hunter, Author, High Profit Prospecting

      ∼∼∼

      Spear Selling offers a structured approach that teaches salespeople how to leverage the adjacencies of their existing customers and/or personal relationships in order to increase their sales velocity. I would highly recommend this for a sales leader!

      Victor Antonio, Sellinger Group, Sales Trainer & Motivation Keynote Speaker

      ∼∼∼

      Having led sales teams of more than one hundred sales professionals, getting account based selling right is critical. In SPEAR Selling, Jamie nails it when he says that account selection is the single most crucial element of any account-based selling program. If you haven’t been successful implementing account-based selling, this book is built on the realities of today – that social proximity is more important than geographical proximity!" 

      Chad Burmeister, CEO at ScaleX.ai & BDR.ai, & Sales Author

      ∼∼∼

      In prehistoric times a spear was a cutting-edge tool that could feed a tribe. What is old is new again and today, in modern selling, using a spear mentality will feed your forecast in a way no other tool can. Great read!

      Trish Bertuzzi, Author of The Sales Development Playbook, 

      CEO of The Bridge Group, Inc.

      ∼∼∼

      This book should be called The Definitive Modern Sales Playbook because Jamie holds nothing back. If you want to learn what’s working for today’s buyer, this is your book.

      Steve Richard, Founder @ ExecVision

      ∼∼∼

      Jamie does it again! SPEAR Selling provides clear ideas and real ways to implement something new for yourself and your organization. I can clearly hear Jamie in the writing and it’s fun, down to earth, doable, and calls out PEOPLE! At the end of the day, buying and selling happens between two people that mutually agree on a course of action. There are some great pearls of wisdom to be found here that, if implemented, can bring new life to your team and revenue to your company. Thanks, Jamie, for putting this book and ideas out there for all of us.

      Dionne Mischler, CEO @ Inside Sales by Design

      Copyright © 2018 Jamie Shanks 

      ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

      No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means whether by electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner except in the case of a brief quotation embodied in a critical review and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For all other uses, requests for permission may be sent to the publisher, Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below:

      40 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 200

      Toronto, ON M4P 3A2

      DISCLAIMER:  The contents of this book and any additional comments are for informational purposes only and are not intended to be a substitute for professional advice. Your reliance on any information provided by the publisher, its affiliates, content providers, members, employees or comment contributors is solely at your own risk. This publication is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. 

      To contact the authors, write the publisher at the address provided above, Attention: Author Services.

      Table of Contents

      Preface

      Introduction: SPEAR Selling executive summary

      How do I use this book?

      PART 1: SELECT your accounts with a Social Proximity mindset

      Chapter 1: Defining – motions, learning paths, sales plays, and cadences/sequences

      Chapter 2: How account selection radically alters your business outcomes

      Chapter 3: The Sphere of Influence account selection process

      Chapter 4: The Activation List operating framework

      Chapter 5: Sphere of Influence complementing existing sales territory plans

      PART 2: PLAN your sales plays with storyboards

      Chapter 6: Storyboarding: the power of visualizing your buyer’s journey

      Chapter 7: War Room: design prescriptive sales plays within an engagement framework

      Chapter 8: Sales play 1 – The Sphere of Influence connection

      Chapter 9: Sales Play 2 – Stack-ranking the account vs. competition vs. best-in-class

      Chapter 10: Sales Play 3 – Market Intelligence and Trends

      Chapter 11: Sales Play 4 – What does the Emerald City look like?

      Chapter 12: Sales Play 5 – Role/Function Career Guidance

      PART 3: ENGAGE your accounts with your prescriptive sales plays

      Chapter 13: Time management – your account segmentation mindset

      Chapter 14: Digital selling within your sales plays

      Chapter 15: Best-in-class sales plays in action

      PART 4: ACTIVATE your engaged accounts with tailored learning paths

      Chapter 16: Account segmentation: developing learning paths by buying intent

      Chapter 17: Learning path 1: The dead zone

      Chapter 18: Learning path 2: The Yellow Brick Road

      Chapter 19: Learning path 3: The mental pretzel

      Chapter 20: Best-in-class learning paths in action

      PART 5: RUN OR REPLACE your accounts

      Chapter 21: Account objectivity over emotion

      Chapter 22: Run - digitally surround your strengthened buying committee map

      Chapter 23: REPLACE accounts with objectivity inside your account operating framework

      Conclusion

      Preface

      One account changed my business career forever. In my first book, Social Selling Mastery, I told a story about the evolution of my consulting career, which owes much of its success to embracing social selling early enough to help pioneer the category. However, the bulk of my growth over the last six years, as a digital sales advisor and trainer, may not have been possible if it wasn’t for one account: Vision Critical, a Canadian customer intelligence software and market research company. It’s crazy to think that I can trace the hockey-stick-shaped growth of my consulting career from that single account!  

      In 2012, when I was experimenting with the power of social selling for my business development efforts, I needed one paying customer to test my newly developed Social Selling Mastery® training curriculum. I was introduced to Vision Critical’s SVP of Sales, Mark Bergen, who found my ideas (and my apparent eagerness to build a successful company) appealing enough to test out my training. We agreed on a nominal training fee, but in exchange for being paid very little, I somehow conjured up one of the smartest business ideas I’ve ever had. In the boardroom with Mark, I said: I’ll make you a deal. I will ensure that each sales professional on your team creates at least one sales qualified lead from my training in 60 days. Assuming you’re satisfied with the training result, you will agree to field any referral call I send your way for the next year, even if it’s your direct competitor! 

      Mark happily agreed, and I could tell that he just wanted me to get this business off the ground. He even accepted having those terms put in writing within our signed Statement of Work. 

      I’ll admit that, at the time, I still didn’t have a game plan for what would follow once I’d made the Vision Critical sales team successful. Thankfully the training workshop was a success, and the team created 31 sales qualified leads within 60 days. So now I had a story, but I still had no idea where I should go next with that story! I was a lost consultant and sales professional. Night after night I would agonize over how I could win more business effectively. Time was my enemy. I recognized that I had only 168 hours every week to attract new business and that on the 167th hour, my expenses were due. I needed a process that maximized my ROE (Return-on-Effort). I don’t remember exactly how I came up with the idea; as with most sales methodologies, I drew on a sprinkling of ideas mashed together from various experiences. My main memory is of drawing out my plan on a sheet of paper as if I was Dr. Brown from the movie Back to the Future, and I’d just developed The Flux Capacitor. See example:

      Page 4, Page 28 and Page 55 - Sphere of Influence - examples completion

      I started by drawing the Vision Critical logo onto the center of a sheet of paper; I then circled it and drew spokes radiating from that circle. I then would look at my drawing and ask myself who actually cares about my Vision Critical success story?  I would just sit and think about it, and the more I really thought about my story, the more I found my thoughts drifting into the mindset of a customer. It was then that I realized that I was making the same grave mistake many sales professionals do – telling stories to customers that just don’t care about that particular story. They don’t care because THAT story isn’t relatable to THAT particular PERSON. Eureka!  People buy from people, and people like people just like themselves. And people listen to stories that they can actually envision themselves being part of. It was through this customer-centric mindset that I began to draw my first Sphere of Influence around a particular customer. I started by drawing a list of people and companies that I felt would be most interested to hear about Vision Critical and/or hear about Mark Bergen’s success.

      September 2012 was when my fortunes changed. At last I had a sales process that was becoming clearer to me. I could see which people and companies I should logically approach because of my Sphere of Influence drawing. My theory was sound, but my methodology had not yet been tested. Time for an attack plan!  On September 11, 2012, I wrote a blog on our Sales for Life website about the Vision Critical success story. That gave me a visual reference that I could guide future buyers to, and some real-life results that made my story more credible. Next, I crafted two email messages – one that focused on both Vision Critical’s 31 sales qualified leads in 60 days, and one on Mark Bergen’s success

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