Book Review: GAP Selling

Reading time ( words)

GAP Selling: Getting the Customer to Yes
Author: Keenan
Copyright: 2018
Price: $9.99 (Kindle edition), $24.30 (hardcover)
Pages: 197

Get ready for the ride of your life because this book will rock your world. It is the best book on selling that I’ve read in 10 years, and I read all of them. This book debunks all of the so-called “axioms” about selling that you have heard throughout your career. The author “Keenan” (don’t ask, I didn’t) handles all of that sticky stuff that slows down—nay, just about kills—your sales effort.

Here are some of the more cogent examples from the book:

• Customers do not care about you. Customers do not care about your company, how long it has been in business, or how it started. They only care about one thing, and that is what you can do for them.
• The salesperson is dead. You are a consultant, an advisor, an expert, a peer, and someone the customer comes to rely on for valuable solutions.
• Customers don’t buy from friends (or drinking buddies or golf partners). They buy from someone who can bring them value, even if they don’t like that person.
• Customers like change. They will even embrace change if you can prove to them that it will make their product and company better.
• Show them the future. Customers will change when the future you show them is better than the present they told you they liked.
• Customers will return your phone calls and answer your emails if they are provocative enough—if the messages surprise them and if they are intrigued. You don’t like to answer boring sales calls, so why should your customer?

And there is so much more. Keenan shows you how to move the customer off the dime when they are stalling. Or how to get the customer to tell you what they need? Ask the customer a series of questions that will drive them to let you solve their problems.

I started sending this book out to some of my sales training clients even before I finished it. Please, if you are the kind of person who never reads a book on sales, start with this one today. Or if you are the kind of person who reads sales books all the time, grab this one next. You might even stop reading the one in your hand right now and pick this book up instead—I guarantee that it is better.

Dan Beaulieu is the president of D.B. Management.

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