Silver Bullet Selling is based on over 36,000 pages of notes from interviews, interactions and observations of more than 6,000 top-performing Sales Professionals and Managers . We also have thousands of pages of notes from interviews and observations of what some really poor Sales Professionals do too. That’s a lot of research.

Think of 11 filing cabinets stuffed full with dog-eared, tattered notes from Sales Professionals from dozens of industries including consumer durables, insurance, retail, banking, utilities, financial services, real estate and telecommunications. This research is the gold I mine to develop my ideas and opinions. In fact, these 36,000 pages are the evidence we used to build the Bullet Selling process.

The Bullet Selling process is consultative selling at its best. It refers to an interactive sales process that focuses on the buyer’s needs rather than the salesperson’s inventory. Bullet Selling requires you to work with the buyer toward a mutually beneficial solution, and it includes these six steps:

• Step 1. Pre-Call Planning
• Step 2. Building Rapport
• Step 3. Discovery
• Step 4: Tailored Solution
• Step 5: Addressing Concerns
• Step 6: Closing the Sale

The Bullet Selling process is not meant to be an inflexible process that standardizes every buyer interaction; it is intended to be used as a framework that provides a structure for every interaction. Each step of the Bullet Selling process builds on the previous step and is designed to help you build the relationship and close the sale.

The Bullet Selling process helps us succeed on purpose. This stuff really works. That’s why we’ve trained 10 of the Fortune 50 companies to use it every day. The process helps build the foundation for a solid relationship in a systematic and predictable way. We call it the Silver Bullet Selling process because it is the closest thing we know to a no-fail sales system. We know it works — we use it ourselves — and that’s why we guarantee it with all our consulting clients.