The Power Base Selling book by Jim Holden and Ryan Kubacki focuses on showcasing selling as a management science and provides valuable information on how to achieve high sales performance. The three main areas of focus of the book are the customer politics involved in selling, how to provide an unexpected value to the customer and how to create a strategy to outsmart the competition to become an effective seller and create better relationships with your clients. Now we look at how to add value to the customer. As effective sellers we should be able to provide our customers with a solution that goes above and beyond their basic requirements, we need to understand how our product is going to affect their business in multiple levels. For example, if we are in the business of selling software and we wanted to sell our software to a retail company, we need to show our customer how valuable we can be to their entire organization. We need to come up with a business solution that can be implemented not only at the retail or store level, but one that will be of good use at the district and corporate level in order to add an unexpected value to our customer. The book also explains how having a competitive strategy will help you outsell your competition. As a salesman having a good sale strategy should be one of your main areas of focus; the sale strategy is the best way to get more customers and to stand out against your competitors.

In the book we learn how to do competitive differentiation to distinguish our product from similar competitors, we learn how to use a direct and indirect strategy in the right time, how to use peaceful coexistence with our competitors to save yourself and learn to use the containment strategy that transition back to indirect strategy. The amazing part of the book is that it explains the way to creating a competitive strategy step by step, for example if you used “Strategy A”, what should you do next? or if you did something wrong which strategy should you use to make up for your mistake?This book will show that having mastered the most important selling skills (such as asking good questions, making a good sales call) and having a good product is not enough to win a sale. Instead you need to be aware of the customer politics such as who is the decision maker and who is the influencer in the customer’s organization.

You also need to be able to provide an unexpected value to the customer that will help them achieve their organizational strategy and you must have a competitive strategy that will make you stand out from the competition to be able to win the sale. Most salespeople are still employing a method of transaction selling which is ineffective in the B2B world, but this book will help you better understand the importance and the ways to become an effective relationship seller.