Sales Expert Paul Fornelli Shares SALES READINESS: A TEMPLATE FOR SUCCESS

Sales is an ever changing profession and business function, with the tactics and strategies that worked a generation or even a decade ago falling flat today. With a constantly changing business environment, fickle consumer sensibilities, the constant rise and decline of sectors, and a cyclical boom and bust economic cycle, building a resilient sales career that crosses industries relies on a universal set of foundational principles. Rather than focusing on mastering the latest in vogue methodology, sales professionals interested in moving from one industry to working in a field that aligns with their inner purpose and they are truly passionate about - Media & Advertising to Medical, for example -- must be prepared to communicate how those fundamental skills apply to the next job, and how they will hit the ground running on day one.

In SALES READINESS: A Template for Success (December 2015; PPerformance Publishing; $17.95 Paperback) sales expert Paul Fornelli presents Paul's Pyramid of P's, a framework that acts as a communication template for job seekers. It is multi-purpose, and can also act as a sales readiness template for salespeople and a guideline for an organization's internal sales audit. As a communication template, the pyramid helps job seekers understand how to recognize, internalize, and explain the skills within their toolbox that relate to sales jobs outside of the industry they have experience in. It serves as guidelines to help job seekers communicate their relevance to hiring managers for the desired job. The levels of the pyramid are:

· Preparation: Make the conscious decision to prepare yourself as an employee. Gather information on the industry, the company you'd like to hire you, and its competitors, as well as find out all you can about what the job you are interested in is like at that company. Use the internet, data brokers like Hoover's, social media, industry publications, etc.

· Planning: Evaluate all information gathered, learn it backwards and forwards, determine your goal, and find threads of commonality amongst all the data to get a clear picture of the industry, company, competition, and the job.

· Prospecting: Search for potential clients of the company you will be or would like to interview with. At this point, a significant investment in preparation and planning efforts has been made, and you will have all the data needed to demonstrate to the hiring manager that you understand what successful prospecting looks like for the company you want to work for.

· Profile: Take all the information gathered, and determine what the ideal customer looks like for the company you want to work for.

· Present: Determine the style and format you will use present yourself and the solutions you can offer as if you were already an employee Plan to communicate to your interviewer your grasp of what prospects to target and why. Prepare to quickly get to the essence of what needs to be communicated to prospects if you were an employee.

· Process, Product & Pricing: Every successful company offers something different in its process, product, or price. Evaluate how well the organization runs its business from a customer's point of view. Is service fast? What's customer support like? Fully understand the product or service the business provides. And finally, learn why the company has set its price point where it is. For job seekers, being able to recognize, understand, internalize, and effectively communicate what sets a company's product or service apart from the competition is essential to relating their value for the job they want.

· Positioning: The pinnacle of the pyramid, everything beneath it contributes to the job seeker understanding the industry, company, and job.

In a business environment where hiring managers define a laundry list of hard skill requirements, today's sales professionals, Fornelli's SALES READINESS shows readers how to relate their prior experience and mastery of the sales fundamentals to a new job and a new industry, for a lasting, fulfilling career, in spite of the ups and downs of the economy.

Paul Fornelli is an award-winning sales, sales management, and sales training professional. He has over 20 years of sales experience in B2B wholesale mortgage banking, PEO, capital medical sales, and enterprise-level medical device information systems and integration software for health care organizations. He blogs at http://www.salesreadinesstemplate.com/blog/.

Title: SALES READINESS: A Template for Success

Author: Paul Fornelli

Publisher: PPerformance Publishing

ISBN: 978-069-2579-091

Pub date: December 2015

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