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Agile Selling: Get Up to Speed Quickly in Today's Ever-Changing Sales World
Sales expert Jill Konrath offers powerful strategies for sales proficiency in ever-changing situations. When sales people are promoted, change jobs, or face new business environments, they inevitably need to learn new skills quickly. This rapid change is often overwhelming, and sellers face an intense pressure from their bosses to deliver immediate results. Their livelihoods are totally dependent on their ability to get up to speed quickly. Sales guru Jill Konrath offers both new and experienced salespeople a plan for rapidly absorbing new information and mastering new skills by becoming agile sellers. Readers will learn the mindsets, learning strategies and habits that they can use in crazy-busy times to start strong and stay nimble. From time management tools to personal motivation, creativity, and gamification strategies, Konrath teaches sellers how to get more done in less time, regardless of the environment. To succeed in today's sales world, having go-to systems for rapid information and skill acquisition isn't only useful, but absolutely required. Konrath focuses on the meta-skills that will get sellers to high levels of sales and proficiency - and ultimately mastery - much faster than their usual methods. Readers who loved the no-nonsense advice in SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies will find Agile Selling equally valuable.
261 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 29, 2014
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562 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
March 10, 2018
Konrath's emphasis on learning quickly and self-management stood out to me in this book. If you are learning to sell something new (or moved to a new role), this is an excellent book. I appreciated that she shared stories of her sales career at Xerox and beyond. Konrath emphasizes the value of connecting with peers and getting feedback on different aspects of your sales approach. That's a good way to counter the lonely aspect of sales work.
A few of my favorite parts from the book:
-Tap into the triggers: using trigger events to start sales conversations. In the author's case, a trigger event to sell sales consulting and training would be "a new VP is sales is hired." It's not a new idea but a welcome reminder to focus on this point.
-Mental contrasting instead of optimism. With all the rejection you face in sales, it is no surprise that sales authors encourage optimism. However, Konrath points out that pure optimism can be dysfunctional. Instead, she advocates a concept called "mental contrasting" adopted from researcher Dr. Oettingen. In essence, you visualize two concepts - what it would be like to achieve your goal (e.g. a closed sale) AND what are the likely barriers that stand in your way.
-Journal / Recalibrate by yourself to break through problems. Konrath calls the idea "recalibrate over coffee." I love the idea and look forward to trying it out. In essence, you take yourself to coffee with a journal and brainstorm solutions to challenges you face.
A few of my favorite parts from the book:
-Tap into the triggers: using trigger events to start sales conversations. In the author's case, a trigger event to sell sales consulting and training would be "a new VP is sales is hired." It's not a new idea but a welcome reminder to focus on this point.
-Mental contrasting instead of optimism. With all the rejection you face in sales, it is no surprise that sales authors encourage optimism. However, Konrath points out that pure optimism can be dysfunctional. Instead, she advocates a concept called "mental contrasting" adopted from researcher Dr. Oettingen. In essence, you visualize two concepts - what it would be like to achieve your goal (e.g. a closed sale) AND what are the likely barriers that stand in your way.
-Journal / Recalibrate by yourself to break through problems. Konrath calls the idea "recalibrate over coffee." I love the idea and look forward to trying it out. In essence, you take yourself to coffee with a journal and brainstorm solutions to challenges you face.
October 25, 2017
Another book that changed some of my thinking paradigm on how to learn selling (and well how to learn anything really).
This book deals with how sales reps get up to speed quickly in a new job or with a new product or technique. It is especially poignant in high tech sales where things are very rapidly changing all the time. The key is, as a salesperson and a knowledge worker, you can't afford to spend lots of time getting up to speed, the faster you can adapt and learn, the more effective and productive you will be.
Jill gives you tips on doing this.
She also recommends a whole slew of other material.
This book deals with how sales reps get up to speed quickly in a new job or with a new product or technique. It is especially poignant in high tech sales where things are very rapidly changing all the time. The key is, as a salesperson and a knowledge worker, you can't afford to spend lots of time getting up to speed, the faster you can adapt and learn, the more effective and productive you will be.
Jill gives you tips on doing this.
She also recommends a whole slew of other material.
June 7, 2016
In “Agile Selling”, Jill Konrath focuses on giving sales inducing advice to individual sales representatives that are new to their position. While she gives a lot of inputs on the importance of focusing your efforts on the value that the product brings to the customer, the author also incorporates advice on personal working habits that one may expect more in a self improvement book than in a sales techniques book.
The book takes the form of short chapters that focuses each on one skill to acquire for the agile seller to be successful. Because of this, the book sometimes gives the feeling to be a collection of insights more so than being a single entity. However, it is interesting to study the form that the author gives to each of the chapters:
- The title: Factual and pointing towards what the reader will get out of this chapter.
- The body of the chapter: Starting with a real life story and building upon it to extract the meaningful advice that the reader can use to improve his sales skills.
- A one sentence conclusion: A sharp summary of the valuable information to be remembered from the chapter.
I found it interesting to find a “Tell-Show-Tell” structure being used in a book, as it is a useful communication method when you want to convince during a sales process.
--- Spoiler Alert ---
During the following paragraphs, the review will take the form of a summary.
In the first part of the book, the author presents her approach and explains why she believes that the success of a seller is directly linked to his or her learning agility. By presenting the current state of the sales environment and the recent changes in the relationship between a buyer and the sales person, she highlights how important is the capacity to learn new skills quickly and to be able to understand new market conditions rapidly to adapt the value proposition to the new challenges that your customers are facing, in order to be a valuable discussion partner to your prospect. Basing her analysis on several studies by different consulting firms, she presents the sales person as the main differentiator in the buyer choice decision. The buyer expects the sales person to be able to bring value in the discussion and will not be satisfied with a boiler-plate sales pitch that has no link to his particular challenges and pains. Considering the necessity for the seller to be able to provide valuable insights to the buyer, she then goes into the best approach for the seller to gather enough knowledge to become this valuable business partner that the buyer is expecting to meet during the sales process.
After introducing the importance of value based selling in the first part of her book, the author uses the rest of the book to advise sales representatives on how to harness the full power of value selling in their sales opportunities. As she explains that the seller should be a quick learner and focus his energy on self development to be able to conduct a valuable discussion with a prospect, she points out the information that he should master first. This information is exactly what will allow the seller to have industry credibility and be able to have insightful discussion with the prospect. She gives some generic self-improvement tricks on how to learn faster and be able to retain more information on the long term (Such as mapping a battle plan to decide what pieces of information to learn first, creating chunks of information that are meaningful, ditching multi-tasking for mono-tasking, etc.) As she presents the “needs-to-knows-now” information that a new joiner should assimilate in the first month in his new sales position, we can see the importance that she places in value-based selling. As an example, when it comes to the knowledge of your prospects, she highlights the importance to fully understand the status-quo, as it is actually your main competitor (According to her, 60% of the sales are lost to no-decision). She invites the seller to retro engineer the marketing material to fully understand the value that his products are bringing to his clients. She even encourages seller to interview recent acquired clients to understand fully the value that the product just brought to them. It’s her belief that a sales person that does not fully grasp the value his products are bringing to clients is not in a position to be successful.
After focusing on the necessary knowledge that the sales person has to acquire to build a successful relationship with his prospects, the author explains how to interact with prospects. In this section again, she mixes generic methods that are extremely useful to the sales person (Rehearsing over and over again, choosing role models, asking for help, giving yourself objectives so that you can measure your progress…) with advice that is specific to value based selling. In particular, she warns the seller against going into pitch mode too early in the discussion and instead to keep asking questions until the reason for change is fully understood. She also highlights how new technology and in particular CRM tools can help the seller understand better the prospect and his needs.
In conclusion, if “Agile Selling” does not provide new ideas in the Value Based Selling area, it really puts the responsibility to leverage the power of value based selling in the hands of the individuals and does not focus on changes at the organization level. I found this aspect of the book to be really useful to me.
The book takes the form of short chapters that focuses each on one skill to acquire for the agile seller to be successful. Because of this, the book sometimes gives the feeling to be a collection of insights more so than being a single entity. However, it is interesting to study the form that the author gives to each of the chapters:
- The title: Factual and pointing towards what the reader will get out of this chapter.
- The body of the chapter: Starting with a real life story and building upon it to extract the meaningful advice that the reader can use to improve his sales skills.
- A one sentence conclusion: A sharp summary of the valuable information to be remembered from the chapter.
I found it interesting to find a “Tell-Show-Tell” structure being used in a book, as it is a useful communication method when you want to convince during a sales process.
--- Spoiler Alert ---
During the following paragraphs, the review will take the form of a summary.
In the first part of the book, the author presents her approach and explains why she believes that the success of a seller is directly linked to his or her learning agility. By presenting the current state of the sales environment and the recent changes in the relationship between a buyer and the sales person, she highlights how important is the capacity to learn new skills quickly and to be able to understand new market conditions rapidly to adapt the value proposition to the new challenges that your customers are facing, in order to be a valuable discussion partner to your prospect. Basing her analysis on several studies by different consulting firms, she presents the sales person as the main differentiator in the buyer choice decision. The buyer expects the sales person to be able to bring value in the discussion and will not be satisfied with a boiler-plate sales pitch that has no link to his particular challenges and pains. Considering the necessity for the seller to be able to provide valuable insights to the buyer, she then goes into the best approach for the seller to gather enough knowledge to become this valuable business partner that the buyer is expecting to meet during the sales process.
After introducing the importance of value based selling in the first part of her book, the author uses the rest of the book to advise sales representatives on how to harness the full power of value selling in their sales opportunities. As she explains that the seller should be a quick learner and focus his energy on self development to be able to conduct a valuable discussion with a prospect, she points out the information that he should master first. This information is exactly what will allow the seller to have industry credibility and be able to have insightful discussion with the prospect. She gives some generic self-improvement tricks on how to learn faster and be able to retain more information on the long term (Such as mapping a battle plan to decide what pieces of information to learn first, creating chunks of information that are meaningful, ditching multi-tasking for mono-tasking, etc.) As she presents the “needs-to-knows-now” information that a new joiner should assimilate in the first month in his new sales position, we can see the importance that she places in value-based selling. As an example, when it comes to the knowledge of your prospects, she highlights the importance to fully understand the status-quo, as it is actually your main competitor (According to her, 60% of the sales are lost to no-decision). She invites the seller to retro engineer the marketing material to fully understand the value that his products are bringing to his clients. She even encourages seller to interview recent acquired clients to understand fully the value that the product just brought to them. It’s her belief that a sales person that does not fully grasp the value his products are bringing to clients is not in a position to be successful.
After focusing on the necessary knowledge that the sales person has to acquire to build a successful relationship with his prospects, the author explains how to interact with prospects. In this section again, she mixes generic methods that are extremely useful to the sales person (Rehearsing over and over again, choosing role models, asking for help, giving yourself objectives so that you can measure your progress…) with advice that is specific to value based selling. In particular, she warns the seller against going into pitch mode too early in the discussion and instead to keep asking questions until the reason for change is fully understood. She also highlights how new technology and in particular CRM tools can help the seller understand better the prospect and his needs.
In conclusion, if “Agile Selling” does not provide new ideas in the Value Based Selling area, it really puts the responsibility to leverage the power of value based selling in the hands of the individuals and does not focus on changes at the organization level. I found this aspect of the book to be really useful to me.
September 29, 2020
The best think I can say about any sales book is if I gained a new insight from it. In this case there were several things I learned or gained additional insight from. In my view it was a good purchase.
January 3, 2018
Provided ways of becoming more productive.
March 20, 2018
Lean Startup meet Mindset. Both of you I’d like to introduce you to Jill Konrath.
Great book for any sales person with 0-24 months.
Great book for any sales person with 0-24 months.
August 17, 2018
Might be of interest for someone starting in sales.
February 2, 2021
The book is only about being agile, not about selling. No practical lessons are learned.
March 27, 2024
If you sell anything, read this book
March 6, 2018
I initially started reading this book thinking it was going address Agile as in Lean or Agile techniques from SW development that could be applied to the selling process. If that is what you are looking for then this is not the book for you. With that said, Jill has some very sound observations and ideas that are fairly straight forward to implement. Most of them are experiences from her early days a Xerox and from her consulting business. Seasoned Sales professionals may find it a bit rudimentary, but I would recommend for someone relativity new to the sales profession or someone thinking about getting into the sales consulting business.
December 31, 2020
In this book summary, you’ll learn how to roll with the punches in an ever-changing sales environment, through knowing the secret of all great salespeople: agile learning.
April 23, 2016
Sales expert Jill Konrath offers powerful strategies for sales proficiency in ever-changing situations When sales people are promoted, change jobs, or face new business environments, they inevitably need to learn new skills quickly. This rapid change is often overwhelming, and sellers face an intense pressure from their bosses to deliver immediate results. Their livelihoods are totally dependent on their ability to get up to speed quickly. Sales guru Jill Konrath offers both new and experienced salespeople a plan for rapidly absorbing new information and mastering new skills by becoming agile sellers. Readers will learn the mindsets, learning strategies and habits that they can use in crazy-busy times to start strong and stay nimble. From time management tools to personal motivation, creativity, and gamification strategies, Konrath teaches sellers how to get more done in less time, regardless of the environment. To succeed in today's sales world, having go-to systems for rapid information and skill acquisition isn't only useful, but absolutely required. Konrath focuses on the meta-skills that will get sellers to high levels of sales and proficiency - and ultimately mastery - much faster than their usual methods. Readers who loved the no-nonsense advice in SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies will find Agile Selling equally valuable. Jill Konrath is a sales strategist whose clients include IBM, Microsoft, Accenture, Staples, Hilton, and numerous midmarket firms. She's a frequent speaker at sales conferences and kick-off meetings. Her previous books include Selling to Big Companies (one of Fortune's "Must Reads" for sellers) and SNAP Selling. Over 100,000 people read her weekly sales newsletter.
**
July 18, 2015
Excellent book for salespeople! It incorporates some of the most current thinking about sales in clear and straight-forward language.
There are 63 short chapters in this book, and someone earning their living through sales could not go wrong reading a chapter a day and considering how to implement the advice. Do that for a year and complete this book 6 times. See how your career will be impacted.
There are 63 short chapters in this book, and someone earning their living through sales could not go wrong reading a chapter a day and considering how to implement the advice. Do that for a year and complete this book 6 times. See how your career will be impacted.
July 31, 2014
This book is about Knowledge and the way sales people can get that knowledge very fast (actually in an Agile way) to their clients, to the market!
Jill Konrath show us how to do that also in an AGILE way!
Each chapter has only 3 to 4 pages!We read it like a novel (I read it on a weekend)!
Very good book! I liked it!
Jill Konrath show us how to do that also in an AGILE way!
Each chapter has only 3 to 4 pages!We read it like a novel (I read it on a weekend)!
Very good book! I liked it!
January 2, 2016
Very nice insights for both beginner and senior sales reps ..
loaded w/ easy to follow tips.
very easy to read and resume where you left from.
Two thumbs up, and highly recommended for beginners in sales, since it has many and many tricks that will help you get through swiftly ..
Happy selling ...
loaded w/ easy to follow tips.
very easy to read and resume where you left from.
Two thumbs up, and highly recommended for beginners in sales, since it has many and many tricks that will help you get through swiftly ..
Happy selling ...
August 6, 2016
Jill Konrath does an excellent job on stressing the importance of preparing and educating yourself before a sales call. From this point forward I will have the knowledge to execute a more sucuesful sales meeting. Good read for any small business owner.
February 19, 2016
I loved Jill's book "Big Companies," and I have a lot of respect for her abilities, but she really miss the mark with Agile. If there were a lower score then one star, I'd probably rate this book lower.
January 20, 2016
The subtitle of Konrath's forthcoming book (May 29, 2014) could be "Self-improvement for salespeople." It's pretty much a grab bag of things I've heard before, but it never hurts to get a refresher, and she offers lots of tip and tools in an accessible format.
June 16, 2014
Two solid pieces of advice that were specific enough to be useful - the rest has been written in other books more concisely.
August 4, 2015
Exactly what I needed
New to sales and was having trouble ramping up. Jill makes it very clear on what needs to get done and how to do it
New to sales and was having trouble ramping up. Jill makes it very clear on what needs to get done and how to do it
October 19, 2015
Sales for dummies. There were a couple of gems in there.
April 5, 2017
As someone new in a sales heavy job I found this book to be an insightful read. While nothing was earth-shattering or beyond what I already knew about sales, the layout of the book was practical and I appreciated the brevity and clarity of her writing. I didn't lose precious time to a business writer rambling on and on about a simple idea.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews