
hope is not a strategy was recommended....I would not - This sales book is OK, that is all. There are many better books on Sales Strategy out there.
good read - I thought it was well written and insightful - yes, its somewhat dated now, but the principles still apply. After hearing the title over and over again in hallways at work, I decided to read this book and found that it mostly lived up to the hype.
Not just for the sales force - I m not in sales, but, as a technical manager at an IT contracting company, I found myself called upon to do more and more sales-type stuff: presentations, bids, white papers, what have you, none I which I was suited for by training or inclination. Rick Page sold me this book by putting his key points on a poster in the Atlanta airport just as I was wandering by looking for some kind of guidance. Link solutions to customer pain. How simple, and yet, what a revelation to a computer science major! The customer doesn t really want to hear about some new whim-wham, the customer wants to know how you re going to make something that hurts them _stop hurting_. At my next customer meeting, instead of talking features, I talked about what was hurting them--and it was a great meeting.Now, the book, I m going to admit, is uneven. A lot of it reads like hastily-assembled lecture notes. And there s a certain amount of Rick Page trademarked jargon that seems best forgotten. But it is front-loaded with stuff that will most help the newcomer to sales. If you read only the first fifty pages, you will get not only the discussion about customer pain, but a really eye-opening look at the proposal selection process (compliance is just a filter that gets your team in the door) that changed the way I ve thought about every proposal I ve worked on since.I can t really say whether the material in this book is too basic, or too obvious, for experienced salespersons to care about it. But it threw me a rope when I desperately needed one, and it s made me a better software professional as well as a better sales resource. Highly recommended!
...But We Wish It Were - Hope Is Not A Strategy is such a good title for a sale s book that I just had to read it. I am glad I did. Rick Page does a very good job at outlining the process and infrastructure sales teams need to implement to win the Complex Sale. Rick Page describes the complex sale as a long cycle in which a team must maneuver through different departments, company hierarchies and multiple business partners to close the deal and beat the competition. As with any long sales cycle there are many opportunities to lose the sale or have competition out strategizing your efforts. This book helps identify all the potential signs and pitfalls that you may be losing the sale and provides tips on how to re-focus with a new strategy. For those who have long sales cycles with big ticket and big commitment products or services, this book is a terrific resource. It is a manual on how to develop teams and how to work through the sales process avoiding specific hazards along the way. The book also reaffirms basic principles that a salesperson must always remember and focus on to emerge victorious. Even if your product or service does not require a complicated sale, this book should be required reading to those who are responsible for account management and on-going revenue generation from those accounts.
Love the title..... - I have been using that line for years...Hope is not a strategy I recently purchased this book on a longgggg layover at SFO. (It was time well spent) You would be amazed at how many salespeople go into a sales call without a strategy or work on a deal for months to realize they are not at Power The principles in this book are truly a Field Guide to successful solution selling, and will save you many hours of on the Job training. Happy Selling!