I just took delivery of “Hope is Not a Strategy”, by Rick Page.

I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.  But that’s what I did.  More precisely, I judged the title of the book on the cover.

Hope, in sales, is indeed not a strategy.  Yet when we are out there training, we see it all the time.  We ask sales people a simple question that can produce a visible and catastropic allergic answer:

“What are you doing right now to proactively close this account?”

The answer usually amounts to nothing more than hope, manifested with a few voice-tag phone calls.  So hope is out.

Now, over to Rick for the best start of a sales book since “Selling with Integrity” by Sharon Morgen:

“Things were going fine in this sale at the beginning but now you feel something’s not right. 

The prospect didn’t call back for three days and then suddenly came up with a new requirement – one you can’t meet. 

There’s a new person on the evaluation committee you don’t know. 

And you’ve just discovered that of the two people on the committee who seemed to like you, one is helping the competition and the other is not respected within the company.

The capabilities presentation was uncoordinated and unfocused, and you spent too much time on the wrong topics.  Countless hours have been spent coming up with a proposal and the executives are still not accessible.  Nothing seems to be driving the prospect to a final decision, but the client is asking for a discount. 

This deal is out of control.

Many more prospects like this in the forecast and you’ll have to tell the CEO a bad quarter is on the horizon.  Or that you’ll have consultants on the bench with nothing to do. 

And to make matters worse, your account manager has forecast this business for the current quarter.

Once again, over-optimism has overcome critical thinking.

Hope is not a strategy.”

Here here!  Love it.  The scene is set for Rick Page to tell us how to avoid all of the above.  I’ll check it out and let you know what I think.