Most of the salespeople we train are veterans. Once in a while we encounter a group of ‘newbies’ fresh out of college, but for the most part our target audience on a weekly basis is filled with experienced professionals who are looking for something constructive and practical that will enable them to take their respective games to the next level. Even if you are not a career salesperson, you will be selling yourself throughout you career, from your very first career opportunity to every interaction your have afterward.

Given the recent shift in focus toward cost effectiveness and profitability, your involvement in business will surely touch the sales process at some point, thus creating an opportunity for you to positively influence customer relationships. Whether you manage a small business or are a high-ranking executive in a Fortune 500 company, or if you support the sales organization in a technical or customer service role, you are definitely selling yourself every day.

This is both an exciting and scary time for salespeople, and you can be sure that the current competitive environment will test the mettle of every sales organization. But, as the saying goes, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going."

Have you ever noticed that the best athletes in virtually every sport always want the ball in their hands when the game is on the line? I have noticed that the same thing is true in sales—the best salespeople are the ones who step up and make good things happen whenever a sale is on the line.

If you aspire to be "a gamer" in the profession of sales, this book is definitely for you.

Life is not fair. The world of selling is not fair, either. Look around and you will see that the salesperson with the best product doesn’t always win the sale. Likewise, the seller with the most integrity, or who provides the best service after the sale, offers the highest quality, or negotiates the best deal, is no longer guaranteed to win.

“If life was fair, there would be statues of pigeons in our national parks, and dead army generals would periodically come by and poop on them!”
–Sonny Sammons

Why?

It’s because every salesperson claims to have the best deal, the best service after the sale, and the highest quality. As a result, customers are quick to commoditize these similar-sounding claims of greatness, and instead, gravitate toward products, companies, and salespersons who can differentiate themselves in some way.

So, what are you doing to differentiate yourself, your products, and the company you represent?

In It Only Takes 1% to Have a Competitive Edge in Sales, I build on the concepts of Question Based Selling with a compilation of strategies and techniques you can use to differentiate yourself from the rest of the ‘noise’ in the marketplace. And, because most sales are won or lost by very small margins, you simply need an edge—a differentiable advantage that will set you apart from everyone else.

The idea for The New Era of Salesmanship was actually conceived by QBS clients—former students who, after attending their initial Question Based Selling courses, pushed me to expand the QBS Methodology to get even deeper, wider and more strategic. In hindsight, they were right, and I am grateful for their enthusiasm and encouragement over these past ten plus years.

My goal on this project was not to reinvent the QBS Methodology or to re-explain core concepts that have been explained previously in my other books. Rather, the idea was to merge the current QBS philosophy together with an implementation strategy that would give sellers and sales organizations a fully integrated success formula for getting deeper, wider, and more strategic within their target accounts.

Have I succeeded in accomplishing the goal? The answer to that will likely be revealed shortly after you finish reading this book. If your pipeline expands dramatically and something you implement gives you an immediate boost in your sales effectiveness and results, then I suppose we both will have accomplished mutual objectives and everybody wins!