What separates ordinary salespeople from Heavy Hitters?


The best salespeople are those "Heavy Hitters" who are able to use human nature, language, and intuition to build trusting relationships with customers and persuade them to buy. Based on his proven and effective sales program, author Steve Martin's Heavy Hitter Selling explains how you too can achieve and maintain that high level of sales success. Using real-world case studies, examples, and exercises, Martin provides the psychological, physical, and language-based tactics you need to turn yourself into a Heavy Hitter.


Inside, there is proven guidance and expert tips on:
• Understanding how people think and communicate
• Finding the right words at the right time
• Predicting a customer's behavior and influencing his thoughts
• Building customer rapport and understanding their motivations
• Persuading both the customer's rational mind and his emotional subconscious side
 
This is a complex subject that Martin makes acessible for the average to excellent sales practitioner. He clearly states the primary enemy of the sales professional is time. Sales professionals that build the strongest relationships with a prospect/customer decipher the truth about what a buyer(s) needs to make a decision. This places the salesperson at a distinct competitive advantage because they discover early in the sales cycle whether they are winning or losing.
 
Like other marketing and sales books published recently, this one stresses the importance of human behavior. But unlike the others, it puts an emphasis on language. The first section deals with the human nature of communication.
 
It describes different layers of communication, including phonetics, content, purpose, and the way the mind uses and interprets language. "Heavy hitters," or successful salespeople, can structure their dialogue and create personal rapport with customers by borrowing ideas from neurolinguistics, the study of how the brain and the body work in conjunction with language.


Through neurolinguistics (how the mind creates language) Martin introduces ways to establish interpersonal rapport where communication is most effective. He gives us insight to how the majority of the population processes information. People are placed in three categories: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. These are scientific tenets but Martin, through his own expertise and his many years of observation of successful salespeople, understands how to naturally adapt to the unique ways people think and interpret data. Salespeople that understand how people process information, can then develop a custom language beyond product feature, benefit, advantages to reach deeper levels of human understanding and ultimate persuasion.
The second section examines strategies for deciding which customers to target and which actions to take. The third section focuses on the power of persuasion, and touches on a deeper level of the meaning of language: the power of metaphor and language's ability to appeal to emotions rather than logic.
 
Steve Martin is a successful speaker, consultant, and the creator of the Heavy Hitter Selling training program.  Over the past 20 years, he has generated over a quarter of a billion dollars of high-technology sales while working for leading-edge Silicon Valley companies.


Though he defines salesmanship principally as an art, he believes that art has a scientific element. Although the genesis of Steve's teaching is from technology sales, his thesis is a thoughtful analysis of the importance of building customer rapport early and throughout the phases of the sales process. It applies to any sales professional irrespective of product or industry.
 
Steve Martin has created a masterpiece for the sales and marketing industry. This is a provocative business book that is a welcome departure from the many process-oriented sales methodologies that crowd the marketplace today.