Sell or Sink: Strategies, Tactics and Tools Every Business Leader Must Know to Stay Afloat!

By Michael D. Krause

Sell or Sink delivers the sales coaching and professional advice you need to keep your business afloat. Business leaders and sales executives need sales sense the ability to understand and apply consistent, reliable sales growth strategies to attain solid results. Sell or Sink explains a key strategy, and then provides structured questions and actions to help you apply the strategy to your own organization. Each strategy is short and direct so you can move through them quickly while extracting value, developing insight about your organization and providing meaningful information that you can implement right away.
At the end of each chapter, diagnostics questions help you apply the foregoing strategies to your own organization. The diagnostics reveal what you need to put your organizations sales team and their results on a sustainable, healthy, upward trajectory. The purpose here is to help you to think constructively about your sales organization, what it is presently and what it can become in the future.
Michael Krause wrote Sell or Sink to give you the basics of selling, then show you how to put the lessons to work to achieve your organizations sales goals. Without a basic understanding of selling strategies, you wont sell productively and, ultimately, you and your organization will sink. With a committed focus on these important areas of business basics and adherence to Krauses plan, any company can turn the tide of weak sales and loss of market share in their core line of business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456751326

Michael D. Krause

Having sold over $100 million in products and services Mike Krause knows a few things about the challenges sales leaders and professionals face. He has spent over twenty years in sales, consistently achieving high levels of success in sales, management, and training and is a veteran of driving and achieving results across an array of business models and sizes. From building a landscape company from inception to 130 accounts and 6 employees in a two year period to being recognized as a top producer in each of the Fortune 500 companies he worked for - Mike consistently sought and delivered top results. After spending over twelve years in Corporate America he realized his true passion was helping business leaders and professionals achieve their sales goals. Today, Mike Krause is the owner and founder of Sales Solutions where he delivers measurable results by providing and implementing Fortune 500 strategies, tactics, and tools. As a result of Mike's work his clients have enjoyed, on average: · 41 percent increase in appointment setting, · 22 percent increase in revenue, · 35 percent increase in closing percentage, and · 100 percent increase in sales process implementation. Mike shares his expertise with more than his clients. He is an adjunct professor at the State University of New York at Brockport where he teaches the next generation of sales leaders about ethics and business of successful selling. In addition to his passion for sales Mike is an accomplished licensed mariner captain, author, speaker, radio show host, a self-described dreamer and doer, and the proud owner of a black lab named Oreo.

Book preview

Sell

or Sink:

Strategies, Tactics and Tools Every

Business Leader Must Know to Stay Afloat!

Michael D. Krause

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2011 Michael D. Krause. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 3/8/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-5071-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-5070-1 (dj)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-5132-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011903722

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Oreo, my black Lab who sailed through life with me. He had the ability to calm waters and made the journey wonderful. Lost at sea, January 2011.

I also want to thank my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, all the members of my family, friends and clients who believe in me.

To all business leaders who are looking to increase their sales sense and, therefore, sales, I wish you the best of luck on your journey.

To your sales success,

Mike

Contents

Preface: Learning the Ropes

My Personal Philosophy

Chapter 1: Getting Underway

Charting the Course

The Value of Diagnostics

Back to Fundamentals

Diagnostic Questions: Fundamentals and Specialized Skills

Action Plan: Fundamentals and Specialized Skills

Chapter 2: Anchors Aweigh

First Strategy: What Exactly Are You Selling?

Your USP and UVP

Diagnostic Questions: Strategy

Action Plan: Strategy

Checking Alignment: Your Ideal Customers

Chapter 3: Belowdecks

Second Strategy: Strategic Planning

Diagnostic Questions: Strategic Planning

Action Plan: Strategic Planning

Chapter 4: Beat to Quarters

Third Strategy: SWOT Analysis

Diagnostic Questions: SWOT

Action Plan: SWOT

From the Street: The Basics Aren’t Easy

Competitive Threats

Diagnostic Questions: Threats

Action Plan: Threats

From the Street: The Hidden Threat

Chapter 5: Back and Fill

Fourth Strategy: Engage Your Star Clients

Diagnostic Questions: Engage

Action Plan: Engage

Chapter 6: Full to the Gunwales

Fifth Strategy: Build a Cash Reserve

Diagnostic Questions: Cash Reserve

Action Plan: Cash Reserve

Chapter 7: The Ship’s Company

Sixth Strategy: Core Capabilities and Realistic Goal Setting

Diagnostic Questions: Culture

Action Plan: Culture

From the Street: Learning the Hard Way

Chapter 8: Know the Ropes

Seventh Strategy: Keep Your Balance

Diagnostic Questions: Structure and Balance

Action Plan: Structure and Balance

Chapter 9: Smooth Sailing

Eighth Strategy: Do You Have What It Takes?

A word about social media marketing

Diagnostic Questions: What It Takes

Action Plan: What It Takes

From the Street: Small Companies Use an Online, Sales-Driving Tool Effectively

Chapter 10: Taking Command

Sales Sense: The Final Key to Real Results

Do It Yourself

Outsourcing

What to Look For in a Sales Consultant

An Outsourcing Checklist

Chapter 11: Sail Away

Appendix A: The Ship’s Hold

Appendix B: About Sales Sense Solutions

From the Street: A Case Study

End Notes

Preface: Learning the Ropes

Sell or Sink delivers the sales coaching and professional advice you need quickly and efficiently. After reading through this book once, keep it handy to use as a reference guide for the future and to refresh your memory.

The book is organized to review a strategy, and then provide some structured questions and actions to help you apply the strategy to your own organization. Each strategy is short and direct so you can move through them quickly while extracting value, developing insight about your organization and providing meaningful information that you can implement right away.

At the end of each chapter, a set of diagnostics questions help you apply the foregoing strategies to your own organization. The diagnostic reveals what you need to put your organization’s sales team and their results on a sustainable, healthy, upward trajectory.

Take time to answer each question thoughtfully and note any actions you need to take if you don’t have an answer. Most questions provide you with several lines of writing space. If you need more room, use a notepad to capture your thoughts and action items. In every case, it’s your job to dig in and peel back the onion: what I mean is, there are usually several layers to a question’s answer. Don’t be content with just the easy, first level answer. Challenge yourself to keep digging until you uncover the bottom line response – the bedrock.

Unanswered diagnostic questions represent weak points in your understanding of business strategy basics. These weak spots will directly affect your sales. Because simply knowing what’s wrong isn’t enough, each diagnostic is accompanied with a hands-on, minds-engaged action plan, with tools and tactics you can use to identify and shore up any weaknesses you discover in your sales systems.

Throughout this book, I’ve included stories from my own experiences on the sales street. From the Street sidebars are true anecdotes from past selling experiences and they illustrate real-life examples of the eight sales strategies in action.

My Personal Philosophy

I have invested a tremendous amount of thought in this book and before we start, I want to share my personal philosophy with you. I believe when you are working you should work and when you are relaxing you should relax. This book is not about relaxing. This book is designed for you to work, not harder, but smarter. My purpose here is to help you to think constructively about your sales organization, what it is presently and what it can become in the future.

Sell or Sink is much like an old adage from Edwin Louis Cole, You don’t drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there. [1] If you are not swimming in sales, then you are sinking, or more appropriately – you are drowning! That is how it feels when we are expected to convince others to buy products and services that we have no idea how to sell. We are drowning in a sea of irresolution, oscillating in old methodologies.

After training thousands of sales professionals over the years, I have concluded that there are two types of people, doers and dreamers, I consider myself to be both. The doer will do, with little direction charge out to get it done! In their frenzy to do something, they do just about anything. This may keep them afloat accidentally for a while but ultimately they will sink. A dreamer will think and think to the point of doing nothing. In sales, this almost always leads to drowning.

The stories of the great explorers like Ferdinand Magellan, Christopher Columbus and Hernando Cortes, are inspirational. These adventurers would cast off in wooden sailing vessels into the unknown with nothing for guidance but a sextant to read the stars. Often they would suffer such extreme hardship that their stories were raw courage