Sales Warrior Lesson 2:
The Framework of Sales Strategy
Beyond
that, Sun Tzu's system of organizing information enables you to
quickly make the right decisions regarding how to respond to sales challenges in a wide variety of circumstances. These
decisions include what things you must accomplish on a daily basis and which
things are not worth your time.
Front-line strategy is a systematic process
that starts with our ability to organize our knowledge about competitive
positions: our position, our competitor's and our customer's.
While the sales process starts with contacting a customer, the strategic process
of positioning starts long before any customer contact. It consists of putting
everything that we learn about our company, products, competitors, and existing
customers into a bigger picture. Every individual
sales contact fills in more of that big picture. Every sales contact is an
opportunity to communicate your understanding of this big picture to your
customers.
Sun Tzu teaches us to analyze our current position in five key dimensions. We then use four steps to improve our position over time. In the strategic
science of bing-fa, there is a great deal to know, but once we understand
the system, we take control of our situation. Almost every chapter of The Art
of War ends with a section on the importance of information. The final
chapter of the book, Using Spies, focuses on
developing good information sources.
