Getting Into Your Customer's Head: 8 Secret Roles of Selling Your Competitors Don't Know

This marketing manual has an imaginative format and a step-by-step strategy to help win that sale in a technology-dominated marketplace. Davis, president of a sales training and consulting company, contends that getting inside a customer's head means chucking traditional pitches and adopting eight new roles: student, doctor, architect, coach, therapist, negotiator, teacher and farmer. You study your customer's business until you think you are the customer, prescribe remedies, design bold new systems, direct their use, assuage customer fears, win a fair contract, provide instruction for using the product purchased and tend the soil of customer relations. Davis doesn't pretend this is easy, because each step opens many possibilities, but he comes up with a plan for each of them-with specific suggestions for writing letters, telephoning, e-mail and voice-mail communication and face-to-face encounters. He specifies the order of points to raise and questions to ask, and even suggests the words to use. (May)