Agile Selling Book Summary: Strategies and learnings
Updated: Mar 11, 2021
Let me be totally honest before starting this blog post.
I have never done Sales in my life.
While in most cases, people start off with Sales and then eventually venture into Marketing.
In my case, I’d say, I took a rather different route of starting off with advertising and then moving to Marketing.
When I look back, I feel having some amount of Sales experience would have benefited me in the long run.
Nonetheless, I learned a lot about it during my MBA, and the greed to learn more never gets too old.
While Zig Ziglar has always been motivating, pushing people to work towards making their sales pitch better, there are other renowned authors out there too.
One of them is Jill Konrath.
She is a sales strategist, speaker, and author of multiple sales books.
One of her books is Agile Selling, the book we will be analyzing in today’s blog post.
The book takes into account the fact that, unlike other job roles, when it comes to Sales there is no room to learn.
You are expected to join in and learn on the way to your first sales pitch.
And that’s where the book comes in, it gives you crisp actionable tips on how to be a fast-track learner.
I am dividing this post into two parts as follows:
1. Concepts learned
a) Six Rapid Learning strategy model
b) Distinct stages of your Customer’s Buying Journey
2. My top 3 learnings from the book
Let’s look at part 1, the Six Rapid Learning strategy model
As mentioned earlier, the book includes direct actionable points to learn, one of them is the six rapid learning strategy.
The image below captures it in brief
Now let’s look at each of them and understand what they mean
1. Chunking
It’s important to understand that in this rapidly changing environment, most often than not you come across a lot of data.
But its important to not overwhelm yourself with tonnes of data.
Instead, break it into smaller chunks, this is the process of Chunking.
In fact, even your brain prefers it, when the data is cut into smaller parts.
2. Sequencing
Once the information is segregated into smaller chunks, now its time to decide which one’s must be tackled first.
Prioritizing the smaller chunks based on urgency or importance is the process of sequencing.
3. Connecting
This is the process of combining old knowledge that you possess with the one you have gained recently.
It’s about connecting your “mental folders” with the new set of skills that you wish to learn.
4. Dumping
Too much information can overload your brain in a way you don’t wish to.
So here you take away all the parts from the new data,that are not of your interest and dump it away.
This doesn’t mean excluding it completely but rather storing it somewhere else, where it doesn’t bother you.
This way only the most required data remains with you
5. Practicing
For salespeople especially, it’s extremely important to practice all the new skills acquired. It's nothing new, we know the more we practice things, the better it is for your brain to retain.
You can indulge in role-playing which helps you practice your new skills in the best possible way
6. Prioritizing
Lastly, prioritize.
Here comes the question of isn’t multitasking a good thing?
Yes, it is, but it depends.
Multitasking more often than not degrades the quality of the result of individual tasks that you need to accomplish.
It’s always better then, especially when it comes to Sales, to ensure that you take one thing at a time, ensure maximum quality, and then proceed with the next.
Part 2 is the Customer Buying Journey
Different selling skills apply to the four distinct stages of your customer’s “Buying journey” as mentioned in the image below:
