Publisher's Synopsis
Sex Sells…
With a gift for sales, Sydney Biddle Barrows, once known infamously as the Mayflower Madam, found wealth in selling her customers exactly what they wanted - and shockingly, it wasn't sex! Yes, ultimately a sure thing was involved, but if that was really her clients' main objective, they could have gone elsewhere for a lot less.
The business she was really in? Selling a fantasies.Fantasies inspire, excite and motivate - they make us feel good about ourselves. We all buy fantasies everyday - from a car dealership, a spa, a realtor. The salesman that masters the art of selling fantasies can write his own check. Now the Mayflower Madam shows you how - in a way you've never dreamed of.
This one-of-a-kind sales guide works for any business and any salesperson. Through racy examples and entertaining anecdotes, discover how to:
- Unearth your prospects' unspoken expectations so you can create a sales design that delivers the goods
- Figure out what business your customers want you to be in - and how to reverse engineer it so your customer actually receives that experience
- Be selective and attract affluent customers where price is not a barrier
- Reverse the sales process, creating a sales choreography to take control of your prospect
- Quickly establish your clients' trust - lessons from a business where trust is hard to come by
Plus get Sydney's 25 XXX-Rated Sales Secrets!
Provocative and clever, Biddle Barrows brilliantly addresses hidden, overlooked and neglected aspects of selling. Through her own experiences, she takes you where no other sales expert has ever taken you and equips you to fine-tune your own sales process providing the ultimate payoff!
[REVIEW:]
The fast-talking, closing-obsessed salesperson of the past is dead and doesn't know it. Potential customers hate being bullied; though they may cave in the face of such old-style aggression, they won't be back and they won't send referrals. Barrows and Kennedy make an irrefutable case that people are more beguiled by an approach centered on providing an experience consistent with inner desires than a pressure-sell.
Barrows urges listening first, then selling clients what they yearn for. "What problem are they trying to solve, what pain are they seeking to al-leviate or avoid? What pleasure or gain are they hoping to experience? What do they see as the ideal outcome and how will that make them feel?" This approach meets less sales resistance than trying to convince people to want what is already on hand.
The author and co-author are an absolutely unique duo in the sphere of marketing. Sydney Biddle Barrows first came to the public's notice when labeled by the press as the "Mayflower Madam,"-mistress of a highly lucrative out-call service, called Cachet. She is now a highly in demand public speaker, business mentor, and management consultant. Dan Kennedy is a consulting guru whose daily fee (which folks line up to pay) is about the same as the average annual per capita income in the U.S.. His eleven previous books include The No B.S. series of specialized sales guides.
According to Barrows and Kennedy, the smart seller should shift focus from products and pricing, to the minds of customers, and put their energy into building honest relationships. Those who aren't sure exactly what business they're really in (answer: whatever legal business the clients want you to be in) will soon be out of business. Niche businesses are lucrative, but sub-niches serving a very particularized segment are even more suc-cessful because the seller can tailor their approach to more closely match expectations. One proviso: the techniques detailed here apply without modification only to those serving clients with plenty of disposable cash. Individuals on limited budgets might like to be catered to, but they still check the price tag.
Several additional sales specialists contribute short sections that reinforce Barrows' and Kennedy's priorities through examples of their own successes and learning experiences. The general approach is concerned with ending overt coercion in the sales process; it's about deeply understanding the movies playing in clients' heads. That's the direction of the future for the entire occupation. Don't discount the advice of the madam and the madman; they might know more about your business than you do.
(January) Review by: Todd Mercer, Foreword magazine, January/February 2009
