Exceptional Selling: How the Best Connect and Win in High Stakes Sales

By: Jeff Thull

Narrated by: Jeff Thull

If you're one of the six million people who work in the fast-paced, high-stress world of complex sales, you want the latest strategies and skills for success. This practical guide gives you the tools to take your sales game, your communication skills, and your career to the next level of success.

Exceptional Selling features street-level straight talk about the one-on-one skills that professionals need to succeed. In this prescriptive and practical guide, author Jeff Thull challenges conventional thinking and gets down to the key ingredients of sales success - the magic formula based on a powerful communication mindset, exceptional skills, and winning disciplines taken from the best in the business. You'll get the edge you need to set yourself apart from the competition, connect to your customers' hearts and minds, and clearly establish the value you offer.

Exceptional Selling is about what works. Its focus is the most dynamic and challenging part of the sales process: the authentic conversation - what top sales professionals talk about with their customers as well as how they say it. Successful communication resides at the intersection of content and delivery, substance and style. It's your key to privileged access and privileged insight.

Exceptional Selling is a step-by-step guide to the kind of critical conversations you must have to win the high stakes sale and build powerful relationships. From the crucial first call that sets the stage, to the critically important C-suite executive conversations that build your credibility, to the financial conversations that create a compelling case for your value (and all the important conversations in between), you'll find specific examples that will propel you forward and help you achieve greater success and profitability.

This is the first book to apply powerful diagnostic principles directly to sales conversations. It shows you how to create a customer engagement in which the common barriers to success - limited access, ambiguous words, objections, and cutthroat negotiations - melt away. If you want to set yourself apart from the rest, connect with your customers, raise the bar for your competition, and win in the game of high stakes sales, Exceptional Selling is the book that will take you there.

In his book... sales expert Jeff Thull shatters decades-old assumptions about B2B selling and presents a new approach that he calls Diagnostic Selling. Thull delivers straight talk about the one-on-one skills that professionals need in order to set themselves apart, connect with their customers, and raise the bar for the competition. - CRM Magazine, October 2006

Exceptional Selling's approach extols the value of Diagnostic Selling: professional involvement and emotional detachment, not confrontation and persuasion. Author Jeff Thull breaks down complex business-to-business sales with clear, step-based directions, easy to understand diagrams and charts, and case studies of successes and failures. Exceptional Selling gently prods salespeople toward corrective strategies for errors that often go undiagnosed in the chase for the deal. - Sales & Marketing Management Magazine, October 2006

Exceptional Selling focuses heavily on the actual processes of the diagnostic process Thull advocates and offers excellent advice and examples on such topics as protecting the customer's ego during the sales cycle, learning how to develop analyses of customer needs that are credible, and (perhaps my favorite topic in the book) why you should avoid those PowerPoint presentations the industry is addicted to. - Rick Chapman, Managing Editor and Publisher of Soft letter

About the Author: Jeff Thull is a leading-edge strategist and valued advisor for executive teams worldwide. As President and CEO of Prime Resource Group, he has designed and implemented business transformation programs for companies such as Shell Global Solutions, 3M, Microsoft, Siemens, Citicorp, IBM, Raymond James, and Georgia-Pacific, as well as many fast-track start-up companies. He has gained a reputation as a leader in the area of sales and marketing strategies for companies involved in complex sales. He is an in-demand public speaker who has delivered more than 3,500 speeches and seminars. Thull is also the author of The Prime Solution and Mastering the Complex Sale.

For more information, please visit www.primeresource.com.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2006 Jeff Thull (P)2012 Prime Resource Group

Critic reviews

"[S]ales expert Jeff Thull shatters decades-old assumptions about B2B selling and presents a new approach that he calls Diagnostic Selling. Thull delivers straight talk about the one-on-one skills that professionals need in order to set themselves apart, connect with their customers, and raise the bar for the competition." ( CRM Magazine)

The most relevant book on Selling I’ve read lately

I believe this is the most comprehensive and relevant book on professional Selling since The Challenger Sale.

How to standout against other salesmen.

I'm definitely going to listen to this again to digest some of the teachings. He teaches on how to sell on the absence of value to customers and what I call great customer service and tech support skills to sell. Non traditional way of selling. The only thing is that some sales jobs don't give agents the freedom to sell using every method he provides. My new job is insurance so I can use these tactics but my old job was TV services and it's cutthroat. It's management way or the highway. If they catch you doing customer service tactics they penalize you for soft-selling. Tough training but I became a superstar. I like Jeff's approach and I think upper management need this training. I also but his other books and i can't wait to see what they have to offer.

Excellent !

This was an “exceptional” book on advanced sales. The information is the next level in your sales understanding.

Glad...

Most of my competition will never read this material. This book is godsend to any salesperson intent on moving beyond the beginner level tactics of objection handling and phone scripts into the higher realms of business insight and change management. Complete gem.

Same as every other sales book you'll listen to

Would you try another book from Jeff Thull and/or Jeff Thull?

Nope.

There was no new insight, no real depth to the "advice" contained in this book.

What could Jeff Thull have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

Provide some better real-world insight.

How could the performance have been better?

Performance was fine. Just lightweight content

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

Not really.