Top sellers think buying first, selling second. If you want to succeed in sales, you have to understand how buying works, what buyers are going through, and how to facilitate success. In this lesson, you'll learn:

• 4 buyer mindsets and how they impact your sales efforts
• The 6 stages of the buying and selling processes and what's involved in each
• How to map your sales process to the buying process to facilitate success

Top sellers plan the best way to win sales opportunities. They use checklists and guides to avoid missing important steps, and strategize to win sales against tough competitors. In this lesson, you'll be introduced the RAIN Group Sales Opportunity Planner^SM. You'll learn:

• 5 key elements every sales opportunity plan needs to have
• How to use the Sales Opportunity Planner^SM, a comprehensive tool proven to be effective in increasing win rates
• 4 questions you need to ask to maximize value in each sale

All good sales starts with knowledge of your buyers. How do you help your buyers? What value do you deliver? How can you communicate this value to buyers in a memorable and enticing way? In this lesson, you'll learn:

• The 3 components of value, and what happens if a component is missing
• How to position value early in the sale, when inspiring buyers to consider something new; and late in the sale, when trying to win business
• How to position your value favorably against the competition

Differentiation—or how you, your company, and your offerings are distinct from others—often starts with marketing. But it's in the selling process that it truly comes alive. In this lesson, you'll learn:

• 7 ideas to help you with differentiation in general
• Key points for how you can stand out in the market

Much sales success is determined in the conversations you have with buyers. You have to lead masterful sales conversations and say and do the right things to win the sale. In this lesson, you'll be introduced to the RAIN Selling^SM Conversation framework and learn:

• 7 keys to leading masterful sales conversations
• The top 10 attributes that separate sales winners from the rest
• A proven process to connect with buyers, uncover needs, demonstrate impact, and create a vision for the prospect of what their lives will be like after they purchase from you

Top sellers are constantly evaluating which opportunities are worth pursuing, and how much effort and energy they should devote to each one. In this lesson, you'll learn:

• How to qualify buyers using FAINT (and why other qualification methods fall short)
• How to get access to key decision makers
• When you should ask, "What's your budget?" and when you shouldn't

When it comes to sales, not all opportunities are created equal. You have limited resources and you have to make difficult decision about which opportunities get a full court press and which do not. In this lesson, you'll learn:

• The CARE framework to help you assign a pursuit intensity to your sales opportunities so you're focusing the right amount of time and resources on each sale
• How to pursue your most important opportunities with high intensity and rigor

Many sellers are happy with the strength of their relationships with buyers. Yet how they feel is usually a reflection of the rapport they have with the buyer. They don't think about relationship strength through the lens of the business value buyers receive from them. In this lesson, you'll learn:

• How to analyze the strength of your buyer relationships across 7 important categories
• How to develop enterprise-level relationships and become essential to buyers
• Strategies to move the relationships—with buyers and their companies—to the desired levels

Sales advice abounds for what you should absolutely do and not do in sales. But much of the advice conflicts, so it's hard to know which advice to accept and which to reject. The sales approach you should take depends on the dynamics of what you sell. This lesson covers:

• The 2 major dynamics at play in sales
• How to identify the dynamics of what you sell
• How the dynamics of what you sell changes the way you prospect, build relationships, uncover needs, share insights, and more

Regardless of the business or emotional reasons for why people buy, buyers have personal preferences for how they like to buy. Successful sellers map their selling approaches to the processes and psychology of buying. In this lesson, you'll learn:

• The 6 different buyer personas and how to recognize them
• How each persona prefers to buy
• Mistakes to avoid with each buyer persona

Corporate decisions average between 5 and 8 core decision makers. How they influence the sale depends on their decision roles. In this lesson, you'll learn:

• The 5 decision roles present in every sale and how each influences the sale
• Strategies for succeeding with each of the 5 roles
• Traps to avoid with each

Most buying decisions involve a core group of people who influence the final outcome. They all have the power to kill a sale. Identifying and interacting with this group—the buying team—is critical to win sales. In this lesson, you'll learn:

• How to influence the 5 decision roles
• How to create Change Champions who will drive your agenda forward internally
• How to create shared experiences to gain agreement with multiple buyers

Selling is about change. It's about why a buyer's current reality isn't good enough, why their New Reality is so much more desirable, and how your solution will help them get there.

When presenting a solution, it's a common mistake to simply share a list of the offerings you provide. You need to help buyers connect the dots. You have to bring all of the good work done in the sales conversations into focus, and to communicate the vision of why buying, and buying from you, is so important. In this lesson, you'll learn how to:

• Inspire buyers with the vision of how you will help them change
• Highlight your advantages versus the competition
• Communicate the impact and return on investment case as powerfully as possible

Having a competitor win business that you should have won is one of the most frustrating experiences in sales. In this lesson, you'll learn:

• How to identify competitors and position yourself favorably against them
• A process to craft strategies to neutralize competitive advantages, unseat incumbents, and protect your opportunities from competitive threats

Unless you are fortunate enough to find prospects who completely understand their own needs, recognize the value you provide, agree with the impact of moving ahead, and prefer you above all others, you will at some point run into objections. In this lesson, you'll learn:

• 4 categories of objections and how to identify and handle each type
• A 5-step process to overcome even the toughest objections
• How to uncover hidden objections
• 7 money objections and what's really behind them

For years, the main thrust of advice to sellers has been to diagnose needs, craft the most helpful solution, and then communicate that solution in a compelling way. While this is still necessary, it is no longer sufficient to win sales. Buyers are looking for valuable ideas and new perspectives from sellers. In this lesson, you'll learn:

• 2 types of insight selling
• How to bring new insights and ideas to your buyers during the sales process
• How to use insight selling to stand out from the competition

When the returns could be significant, simply picking up the phone or sending an email to start selling might not cut it. When you need to win and win big, you need a Big Play strategy. In this lesson, you'll learn:

• 4 different types of Big Play strategies
• How to create opportunities where there currently aren't any
• How to gear the strategies to break through to executive-level, enterprise buyers
• How to use a Big Play strategy to win a major, competitive sale

When working on big deals you need a strategy to win. In this lesson, you'll learn:

• The process and science behind Win Labbing your most important sales opportunities
• The PATHS to Action^SM framework to help facilitate collaborative discussions that result in winning strategies
• 5 tips to make your Win Lab a success