The Key to the C-Suite: What You Need to Know to Sell Successfully to Top Executives - Hardcover

With budgets more stringent than ever, important purchasing decisions have moved up the ladder to the C-suite. These days, it is crucial for sales professionals to understand the financial metrics senior level executives use to make strategic buying decisions and be able to communicate the positive effect their products or services will have on a company’s financial statements.

This book shows readers how to build a convincing business case and present it to C-level executives. Readers will discover how to:

· Find key financial information on a prospect

· Determine a corporation’s financial stability

· Clearly define the value of the product or service they are selling

· Calculate the value impact of their offerings in financial metrics

Clarifying how sales packages fit into metrics such as return on asset, return on equity, operating costs, net profit, and earnings, this book reveals how readers can determine their product’s value as perceived by an organization’s ultimate decision makers, and unlock the door to greater sales.

As economic realities press ever more forcefully on business, executives will be keenly aware of the specific financial ramifications of every large buying decision. In fact, they’re unlikely to pull the trigger without the direct and detailed involvement of their own finance teams.

In short, the buy will be tied not just to a general sense of strategy but also to individual, targeted components of a budget or forecast. To sales professionals like you, this means understanding how top executives evaluate and prioritize potential purchases, recognizing the challenges they face, and presenting your product or service as a value proposition.

Packed with real financial knowledge, but geared toward the layman, The Key to the C-Suite identifies and defines ten key financial metrics that C-Suite executives use throughout their buying-decision process and shows you how to build your value proposition and business case to complement theirs. The book also guides you in:

· Defining your value and building a value inventory

· Calculating and communicating your potential value impact on a prospect’s C-Suite metrics

· Discovering and analyzing prospects’ financial information so you can tailor your approach to their financial realities

· Forming and asking the questions that will repeatedly lead your prospect back to your value proposition

· Preparing and delivering the formal presentation to C-level executives

The Key to the C-Suite also provides an array of powerful tools to help you not only redesign your general business approach but also tailor it on a prospect-by-prospect, client-by-client basis. In addition to resource information on where to find financial metrics for corporations in 19 major industries, you will have:

· Clear definitions and examples of the financial metrics used in strategic decision making

· A Value Inventory Matrix tool linking your proposition directly to specific client needs

· Step-by-step instructions for creating the value-focused questions you need to ask

· Presentation tools and strategies, with many real-world examples from the author’s own experience and customer base

· Parallels and links with other major sales methodologies to take advantage of familiarity

· And much more

Each chapter concludes with a detailed summary that neatly encapsulates major concepts and lays the groundwork for your next steps.

Perhaps most important, The Key to the C-Suite helps you understand the financial language and realities that inform and drive every major buy­ing decision. And if that language is the key to the buy, shouldn’t it also be the secret of your sales success?

Michael Nick is the author of ROI Selling, as well as president and founder of ROI4Sales, Inc. He has taught selling techniques, developed sales tools, and implemented sales processes at companies throughout the world, including Hewlett Packard, Microsoft Great Plains, NEC, Emerson, Oracle, S1 Corporation, Rockford Automation, Autodesk, 3E Company, Imation, and TSYS.