Niche Selling: How to Find Your Customer in a Crowded Market

by William T. Brooks

Shows how to increase sales by finding and marketing to your most likely consumer segments. This book directs the reader through the niche selling process, showing how to: develop workable sales... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556234996
• ISBN13: 9781556234996
• Release Date: September 1991
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Basic concepts more relevant now than ever before

As Brooks would be the first to point out, opinions about both sales and marketing have changed a great deal since his book was first published in 1991. (I hope that he soon produces a revised and updated version of it in which he discusses those changes.) That said, the fact remains that Brooks's core concepts of selling remain relevant. As he explains in the Introduction, "Ever increasingly, the power of mass communications, macro- and microeconomic realities, consumer issues, value shifts, and even politics and global affairs will dictate day-to-day selling activities. As such, most traditional sales philosophies are outdated in today's crowded marketplace. The future belongs to the sales organizations that are [in italics] flexible [end italics] and [in italics] nontraditional [end italics] in their thinking." Quite true. And keep in mind that this was expressed fifteen years ago. Brooks carefully organizes his material within three Parts: Knowing Your Organization and Its Markets (i.e. Focus on Focus, Leverage, and Alignment), Knowing Your Customers (i.e. "IMPACT" Selling, Investigate, Meet, Probe, Apply, Convince, and Tie-It-Up), and Knowing Yourself (i.e. Vales and Sales Success, and, Person versus Personality). Granted, for those who read this book in 2005, there are no head-snapping revelations. How could there be? However, Brooks provides a wealth of insights, strategies, and tactics which can help his reader find her or his customer in a crowded market. I especially appreciate the fact that, at the end of each of the twelve chapters, Brooks provides a "Key Tips" section which serves two important functions: It summarizes key points, and, it facilitates a subsequent later review of whatever specific counsel which may then be needed. For example, in Chapter 7, Brooks explains how effective probing will help both current and prospective customers to "discover what they need and want most" as well as how the salesperson can determine what people will buy, when they will buy, and under what conditions they will buy, "then listening them into buying." This is precisely what Neil Rackham has in mind when discussing "SPIN selling": ask questions which reveal the Situation, identify the given Problems, determine the Implications of buying (or not buying), and specify the nature and extent of Need fulfillment. At the end of Chapter 7, Brooks then offers six "Key Tips" which summarize how to probe effectively. Appropriately, one of them reiterates what he calls "The Fatal Flaw in Selling: Most salespeople talk their way out of more sales than they talk their way into." For whom will this book be most valuable? Probably for anyone involved in sales but especially for those responsible for the training and supervision of a sales force, and, for those salespersons who are relatively inexperienced. One caveat: No single source offers everything one needs to know about sales. For that reason, I presume to suggest that other books also be consult