Slow Down, Sell Faster!, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 7

The Coach

Make a Plan to Defeat the Competition

Recently, I was in the field with a salesperson who worked for the national accounts group of a large payroll processing firm. We were about to keep an appointment he’d made with the VP of human resources for a hospital with 3,000 employees. The salesperson told me the VP had called him the previous week, saying that she was interested in a new solution for employee benefits administration.

The salesperson expected a challenging situation because his company’s strength was that they offered a single integrated solution that met human resource, employee benefits, and payroll processing needs. His company had different competitors within each component of that integrated solution. In other ...