How can we best share our ideas about Guided Customer Buying?

Whenever we have have the opportunity to provide training about better approaches to selling, it goes without saying the biggest contribution towards learning comes from case studies and sharing of "war stories". In that same spirit we decided to deliver our collective experiences and knowledge through the fictional voyage of a new sales director who is facing the daunting task of joining a new company and improving the sub-par sales performance of his new team. The story has been kept as short as possible so you can get through it quickly, but nor have we "dumbed" things down. The real world provides us with a  difficult selling environment and this story attempts to adequately cover the challenges it presents.

The story is being delivered in chapters and will be published in its entirety over the fall of '09. You don't have to wait for the entire story to be published to get value now. Each chapter works on a stand-alone basis and covers key elements of the Guided Customer Buying framework you can deploy immediately. We summarize the learnings of each chapter (starting with Chapter 2) in a presentation appended to each page.

Publishing in real time through our website gives us the opportunity of accepting feedback and perhaps even changing the path of the story to reflect your input. This is our first attempt at publishing content in this manner so we are sure it will be a learning experience for us all. You will notice that each page of the story allows you to comment (assuming you have created a login). You may also read the story without creating a login.

We are sharing not just the story, but also the tools and methods we suggest you consider in your organization. There is no cost to use the story or the related tools.

When thinking of our lead protagonist, Jim Baldwin, and the company he joined, RKD Consulting Solutions, we wanted to pick an industry (professional services) and solution (web consulting services) which would be relatively simple to understand. This allows us to focus on an updated approach to selling, but we are warning you in advance that Guided Customer Buying requires a very comprehensive understanding of customer problems and their impact, so our examples might look a bit complex on first read. Don't worry. The scenarios we present are no more complex than the customers to whom you are currently selling.

We have also targeted the book at readers that might be sales directors or sales people (or both). The story is the same for both readers, but some of the links to supporting content and tools are customized for either role. We believe executives responsible for marketing and sales will also benefit from our story. After all, we believe strongly that superior selling organizations are not built only through superior sales execution. The entire organization must buy-in to selling in a way that matches up with how the customer wants to buy. It is no longer only the sales organization that interacts with buyers.

Enjoy the story and feel free to comment. Any comments you provide will help us improve everybody else's experience.