Description:
A step-by-step "how-to" guide to selling in the contemporary world with a focus on storytelling to enhance relationship building and help drive sales; alongside skills development for sales management and today's role for sales data analytics.
Brief description: Dr. Lisa Spiller is Professor Emerita of Marketing in the Joseph W. Luter, III School of Business at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. She has been teaching marketing courses to undergraduate business students at CNU for 30 years and has helped the Luter School pioneer a major in direct and digital marketing, and has been a leader in her school's initiatives in sales education. As a member of the University Honors Faculty, Dr. Spiller also teaches a course on personal marketing and is passionate about helping her students learn to "sell themselves" to achieve success in their careers and in their lives. Dr. Spiller is the author of Direct, Digital, and Data-Driven Marketing, now in its 5th edition by SAGE Publishing. Most recently, she was the lead author of a scholarly journal article, "Sales Education in the United States: Perspectives on Curriculum and Teaching Practices," that was awarded the Outstanding Journal of Marketing Education Sales Education Article of the Year for 2020.
Review Quotes:
Lisa Spiller takes a fresh and comprehensive look at professional sales by examining the roots of what's necessary to succeed as a salesperson. She teaches the student how to examine and develop an understanding of the customer needs and then translates that into strategies for satisfying customer objections, making presentations, and closing the sale. The student is walked through the tactics of networking, finding qualified leads, strategic marketing to qualify leads, cold calling, making sales presentations, satisfying customer concerns, closing the sale, and sales management. Chapters include biographical highlights of actual professional salespeople to relate to student interest. Also included are tools for the professor at the end of each chapter, including case studies and role-play exercises to reinforce the chapter learnings.
Spiller's unique contribution to the pedagogy of sales education is how a salesperson can be successful in making presentations through storytelling. Research shows that retention of key elements of presentations increases to 60-70% when presentations are turned into stories. Spiller shows the student how to do that. I highly recommend this book.
--Harvey Markovitz, Clinical Professor of Sales and Marketing, Director of the Lubin Sales Team, Lubin School of Business, Pace University, New York