In the past few years, companies large and small have called on Darius Lahoutifard to get help with their non-performing sales teams. The described symptoms are different from one company to another, but Darius noticed that all they are related to the same illness: the inability to qualify. This book covers both the why and the how of sales qualification. It describes the MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion) sales methodology in-depth. This is not a book of theories or academic concepts, but techniques with practical recipes.

The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades.

Why do salespeople fail to build pipeline, avoid buyer objections and conflict, and convert sales meetings into qualified opportunities? It's not a methodology, process, tendency to challenge, or their product knowledge. They don't know how to sell to people.

Working Backwards is a practical guidebook and a corporate narrative, filled with the authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how it has affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon’s scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously executed principles and practices - shared here for the very first time.

Another extraordinary business fable from the New York Times best-selling author Patrick Lencioni. This new book in the popular Lencioni series shows what it takes to gain a real and lasting competitive edge.