Book Recommendation: Sales Differentiation

Imagine your boss sends you to the store to buy a frimfram. You’ve never heard of frimframs, you have no idea what a frimfram does, yet you have to buy one. You go to the aisle where the frimframs are and see a couple of choices with different prices. Two questions immediately come to mind: what’s the difference between the two, and what are those differences worth? If you can’t answer the first question, you would be silly to buy the more expensive one.

Differentiation is the core of selling. We all want to solve problems, sell solutions, become trusted advisors or consultants, and it all starts with differentiation.

The only reason you have a job as a salesperson is to help your customers make decisions, and every buying decision is fundamentally about differentiators: what are they, what does that mean, and what’s the difference worth?  It doesn’t matter how great your product is, how much it does for those who buy it—if it’s not different in some way there is only one way to sell it, which is to drop your price.

One key theme of Sales Differentiation is that it is YOUR job to differentiate what you sell and connect it to value for the buyer. It’s not marketing’s job; their job is to get the customer interested, but it’s your job to get them to take action. and it’s certainly not the customer’s job.

What’s different about this book?

Because I’m “selling” this book to you, it’s only fair that I tell you what’s different, and I’ll use Salz’s distinction between WHAT you sell and HOW you sell.

This book will help you change WHAT you sell by helping you go “outside the box” to find differences beyond the product itself. If you use the checklist in Chapter 5 it’s easily worth the price of the book—but then skip to Chapter 19 to remind yourself of the single most important differentiator.

This book will help you change HOW you sell by helping you choose different words, develop a “sales crime theory”, and ask the right questions, to name just three differences.

Finally, Salz’s ideas are sensible and actionable. He brings a ton of practical experience selling and running sales teams and illustrates his ideas with instructive examples, both in his experience as a seller and as a buyer.

What are those differences worth to you?

You won’t waste customers’ time talking about things they don’t care about.

You will be better positioned to realize the price you want.

You will gain the confidence to go beyond asking customers what they want, to shaping their perception of their needs and requirements.

There’s only one question the book does not answer: what’s the difference between a difference and a differentiator? My take is this: all offerings have differences, but it takes a differentiator to make those meaningful to the buyer. Buy this book, and you will be that person.