Book Review: Precision Selling

Entrepreneurs know that selling is a core part of everything we do in business. If you’re like me, you’ve seen books, seminars, and web sites claiming to contain the secrets of sales success.

Here’s my problem with most of them: they’re old-school, and many of the key techniques they pitch don’t work, and haven’t for years. With Precision Selling, author Patrick McClure explains how to succeed at selling in today’s world.

Because there are so many ways to be successful in sales, it’s not always easy to know which activities pay off. McClure brings ruthless clarity to the issue, however, and then directs us (with some enthusiasm) to toss the time-wasters.

I believe the hardest part of selling is finding qualified prospects. Once you’ve found a group of people who need what you want, every other part of selling becomes much, much easier.

McClure breaks down the process for finding qualified prospects in a way that you’ll be able to apply to your own organization.

Old school selling says find the customer's pain and sell to that pain. McClure points out that strategy’s “critical flaw. Most potential customers have no idea what their pain is, and even if they did know it, they'd be reluctant to share it with an outsider.” (p. 119)

Old school sales training says sell the benefits (not the features). McClure says sell value in the eyes of the prospect, and illustrates how to find it.

He also brings a “new school” approach to networking, explaining how to build and maintain your network so that you can use it to reach the people you need to close business.

In Closing

The book uses a subtitle of “21 Winning Strategies to Achieve Peak Performance,” but that’s something of misnomer. The book presents an overall approach to sales that is broken into many interrelated components.

You won’t use everything in his book, in all likelihood.

But if you use enough of it, I'll bet you’ll sell more stuff.