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    FAQs about Selling with CLASS:

      How is Selling with CLASS™ similar to other sales models?

    • Selling with CLASS™ is a logical sequence, tightly linked to many customer's typical decision-making process, beginning with rapport building, helping customers identify needs an unmet goals, working with the customer to create a win/win solution with the salesperson's products/services, and concluding with gaining customer commitment.

    • Selling with CLASS™ was first conducted for clients in 1987 and has been continuously revised and refined since then. Its core techniques reflect a number of well-known sources and the research behind those sources: SPIN Selling (1988),David Sandler's questioning techniques (without his cynical assumptions about customers' motivations) from You Can't Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar (1995), Sharon Drew Morgen's decision-making questions as first developed in Selling with Integrity (1997), and most recently, Jeff Thull's Exceptional Selling (2006)

    • It makes extensive use of emotional intelligence research and thinking, dating back to the work of Peter Salovey and Jack Mayer prior to Goleman's publication of Emotional Intelligence, research and concepts in human persuasion a variety of sources including Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, and insights from NLP (without the imitative use of NLP techniques.)

    • Selling with CLASS™ is grounded in the belief, shared by sources such as Miller Heimann and others, that business-to-business selling (and in many cases, personal selling), takes place in a complex system of the buyer's world. It helps salespeople learn how to successfully work within the buyer's system as well as the buyer's personal beliefs and style.

      How is Selling with CLASS™ different from other sales models?

    • The unwavering focus of the Selling with CLASS™ process is on creating sales success based on what you do with customers rather than to them or even for them.

    • It occupies a flexible middle ground between manipulative, pressure-style traditional selling and relationship-based customer service (which arguably isn't selling at all). It helps salespeople develop versatility along a spectrum of assertive and supportive behaviors (rather than working at either extreme of aggressiveness or passivity).

    • Selling with CLASS™ shares with some of its sources the conviction that "objections," as they are usually treated in traditional selling, don't need to occur if salespeople don't make them occur in the first place.

    • The process is designed to help salespeople avoid the customer resistance that comes from pushing too hard, too fast, and too blindly in "making a sale." Customers do need to be able to decide why a salesperson's products and services are a better choice than the competitions', than customers solving problems themselves, or doing nothing.

    • It assumes that the purpose of selling is not simply to go from door to door, making sales, but rather to continuously build a business based on long-term, sustainable, increasingly profitable loyal customer relationships.

      What is the learning (training) experience like?

    • It emphasizes participant-led learning and de-emphasizes didactic, facilitator "presentations" as much as possible; participants spend 70% of their time practicing and getting feedback.

    • It's deliberately simple in structure (based on an easily-remembered acronym, "CLASS"), so that salespeople can understand and use it flexibly and confidently.

    • Rather than employing externally-driven techniques ("here's how we want you to start selling now,") it helps salespeople build their own skill set from their knowledge of how they want to buy.

    • It is always highly customized, so that salespeople practice selling their products and services to their customers, against their competition and in their markets.

    • In most cases, it has also been tightly integrated into clients changing business strategy as a foundational tool to ensuring the success of that strategy It is a "self-monitoring" process. Salespeople learn how to recognize where they are at each stage of the sales relationship based on the customer's response, and modify their approach accordingly.

      What is the Accelerate phase about? (It doesn't appear in otherwise similar models)

    • In a successful sale, the goal is a new, desired future customers can best attain (through your programs, products and services). Desire exists as a feeling and belief - in the minds of customers - that they need to take action in order to achieve a goal they care about. For most customers, demand exists below the level of conscious thought.

    • It results from the customer's belief that the risks involved in change will be offset by the future value received. Acting on that desire represents in effect, a "leap of faith" on the customer's part that the salesperson can be trusted and that his or her products/services will perform as promised.

    • Selling with CLASS™ concentrates on changing customer's behavior by helping them change their beliefs about what is possible and desirable for them to accomplish. This change needs to happen where the real "sale" takes place, at the level of customer's beliefs and feelings.

    • In Selling with CLASS™, the collaborative decision-making that constitutes the actual "sale" happens after the customer has realized the desire for the sale to happen