November 8, 2010
Freese (Secrets of Question Based Selling) shows salespeople how to gain an advantage over their competitors by polishing their presentation in this meandering, lackluster guide. Freese focuses on developing a repeatable formula for selling yourself that centers on soft sales skills including establishing credibility, forging and using relationships, differentiating solutions, and justifying costs. He also includes a useful chapter on selling yourself at a job interview. Most of the advice is common sense and merely gives old practices with unfortunate corporate-speak labels—questions that elicit predictable answers from customers that open the way for a more detailed conversation are rebranded "mini-invitations." Experienced salespeople will recognize these tactics if not the jargon that Freese employs; neophytes might find useful if not groundbreaking wisdom that will allow them to tweak their delivery and may improve their sales potential.
January 1, 2011
Be honest with your customers. Acknowledge your industry's dark side. Stop trying to persuade your customers, and solve their problems instead. You are constantly selling yourself. Here, Freese, founder and president of QBS Research, Inc., a sales-training firm, covers a lot of familiar ground to help salespeople improve their technique with clients. But there's a twist--many of the sales strategies are accomplished through Freese's Question Based Selling (QBS) process, in which salespeople engage customers in dialog rather than give the standard presentation. After laying some fundamental groundwork, Freese walks readers through strategizing questions to use in their QBS approach to developing trust, establishing a customer's needs, and closing the sale, with nods to creating curiosity and storytelling methods. VERDICT Recommended if you need to refresh your sales-methods collection. A useful title for public libraries and readers in or considering sales.--Heidi Senior, Univ. of Portland Lib., OR
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