Book Review: Bottom-Line Selling by Jack Malcolm

Over the past couple of decades sellers, in particular sellers who sell to buyers in the executive suite, have been encouraged to sell solutions and to convert the solution into financial terms—demonstrating what impact the proposed solution will have economically on the company.

Although excellent advice, most often sellers have been told what to do but not how to do it.  Addressing the financial concerns of executives means having to have done the proper research, having analyzed the proper data, and being able to recognize where and how the seller’s solution will impact that data.

Unfortunately, a great many sellers don’t have an MBA.  In fact, most have had little exposure to reading and analyzing sophisticated financial reports—and even many that have, really don’t know how to effectively use them to gain insight into how they might be able to impact the prospect company.

Jack Malcolm in Bottom-Line Selling: The Sales Professional’s Guide to Improving Customer Profits (Booktrope:  2011 Second Edition) not only provides an excellent course in how to read and interpret the information and numbers contained in a company’s annual report, but it shows the seller how to convert that basic information into a financial solution that communicates real value to the executive in terms that are meaningful to him or her.

Bottom-Line Selling goes well beyond the “how to” of research and analysis which are important but ultimately useless if you don’t know what to do with the information.  Simply knowing a prospect’s financial rations won’t get you anywhere. 

Anyone with a calculator and sheet with the ratio formulas can work out a prospect company’s various financial ratios from the information on their financial statements.  In order to make that information useful, you have to understand not only what that information means to the prospect now, but how you can impact and change those numbers.  Only when you understand that can you begin to have a cogent conversation with the prospect that will address their core concerns—and unless you can do that, you stand little chance of breaking through and really engaging.

Malcolm breaks the book into three sections:

Understanding: details the “how” of analyzing and understanding a prospect’s financial statements—understanding what has happened in the prospect’s past. 

Fixing:  discusses how to understand what the prospect does, that is how the prospect conducts business—and how your solution can help improve the prospect’s ability to conduct his or her business and, thus, improve their financial position.

Selling:  This is where, in my opinion, Malcolm really shines.  Selling is far more than understanding numbers or business processes or even how your product or service will change those—selling is about influencing people.  As Malcolm points out, if selling were only about numbers “the accountants would be earning all of the commission dollars.”  In this section Malcolm goes beyond the numbers to how to get to the right decision makers, how to make the emotional impact, and how to effectively construct a financial proposal. 

Bottom-line Selling isn’t a book that you’ll sit down and read in a single sittingIt isn’t meant to be.  It is a serious book for serious sellers.  It is a book that is meant to be digested in bits as each individual bit is important to putting together the whole--and each bit must be digested fully in order to move on to the next bit.  But as the bits add up, your ability to discover issues that you can address and improve for your prospects—and to address them in ways that are both meaningful and moving to them—will not only improve, but your confidence in being able to find and connect with executive level decision makers and to influence them will improve—and with that your sales will improve.

Grab a copy of Bottom-line Selling—and plan to spend a good deal of time with it—you’ll be glad you did.

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