One of the best ways to teach is through the telling of stories. When a highly successful sales veteran sits down and recalls his failures and his successes, why they happened and what he learned, people listen but more importantly, they learn and retain the information. That’s why Sales Wise (Fenestra, 2006), the new book from Market-Partners CEO Martyn Lewis, is must-read material for sales professionals. In the book, Lewis, a 25-year sales veteran, shares 30 of his favorite selling stories. Here’s a brief synopsis of two of them:

Do you know your competition? In the early 1980s, Lewis left one large computer vendor to join another. During his first few months at the new company, he went through a lot of sales training, much of which included a look at competitive offerings. “There were many ‘us vs. them’ charts,” recalls Lewis, “which almost invariably showed that the ‘us’ offerings were superior – often vastly superior – to the ‘them’ products.” Sound familiar? It’s a common problem at many organizations where a marketing department’s zeal for its own products can lead them to overemphasize the capabilities of those products while downplaying those of the competition. In this case, Lewis, who had just arrived from one of the “them” companies on the charts, realized the charts compared his new employer’s latest technologies to his former employer’s products of three to five years earlier. In turn, he became suspect about all the competitive information and set out to do his own research. “Although your company’s competitive intelligence can be useful, never rely on it alone,” cautions Lewis. “All too often the information provided can be out of date or incomplete, and there is no substitute for doing your own legwork.” Your best bet, of course, is to get your hands on your competitors’ latest products and check them out for yourself. At the very least, talk to competitors’ customers to find out what they like and don’t like about those products, says Lewis.

Why should someone buy from you? A few years ago, Lewis was sitting in on a simulated loss review for a large, strategic sales opportunity. A simulated loss review is typically conducted toward the end of the sales process, just prior to submitting the proposal. The selling team comes together and role-plays that they have just lost the business to a competitor. They then try to understand where things went wrong and what they might have done differently, the goal being to prevent the loss from happening. During this particular review, says Lewis, things went well until the team simulated the “bad news” call from the prospect. A team member playing the part of the prospect politely explained to the account manager that his company had decided to go with the competition and he would be informing executives of this decision at lunch later that day. Bad news, certainly, but it wasn’t lunchtime yet. There was still time to change the prospect’s mind, right? Yes, except that’s where things fell apart. “We had lots of detail, lots of information, and a great deal of confidence that we were presenting a better solution for the business,” says Lewis. “But we could not say – in simple and straightforward language – why the prospect should buy from us.” Armed with that realization, the team ordered “pizza and lots of midnight oil,” then combed through all its information and research to come up with a clear and compelling reason why the prospect should buy from them over any other alternative. “We then condensed, edited, and polished that information so that we could express it in not only a few words but, just as importantly, in the prospect’s words,” says Lewis. Ultimately, they won the business.