STEVE MARX

“This book is long overdue! Anyone can add these interactive selling
practices and truly start closing like the pros…[which will lead to more] highly
engaged clients, bigger deals, and repeat business.”
—Dr. Tony Alessandra, author of Collaborative Selling and The Platinum Rule

In the ever-quickening pace of society, the pressures today on salespeople
and their prospects for their precious time are nearly insufferable. In a
misguided effort to save their prospects’ time, salespeople take on more of
the work, shoulder more of the burden, and turn proposals around with
lightning speed. That’s hands-off selling—where the salesperson does all of
their work first, handing off the proposal to the buyer as if it were a baton in a
relay race.

It’s time to make a change. Selling and buying become more efficient,
productive, and successful when they are merged into a single
process—interactive selling.

Interactive selling is based on the reality that today’s complex sales always
involve a great deal of back and forth, give and take, questions and answers,
modifying and tweaking. Interactive selling is how the pros close big deals,
and it’s a process anyone can learn.

Close Like the Pros:
• Is targeted at anyone who has a Big Idea to sell in the workplace.
• Gives salespeople the tools they need to get their prospects actively
  involved in crafting a proposal they are eager to buy.
• Shows salespeople how to invest more time with prospects likely to buy and
  less with those who aren’t.
• Is not another re-hash of sales basics—the basics in this book are the ones
  missing from every other one.

Steve Marx founded the Center for Sales Strategy (CSS) in 1983 and has built
it into the electronic media's preeminent sales and management consulting
and training organization worldwide. CSS client firms—including Comcast,
Time Warner, Cox, and Media General—outperform their respective market
benchmarks and achieve sales revenues that make most of them market
leaders by a wide margin. He co-authored the top-selling title in the history of
the National Association of Broadcasters’ Publications Department: Radio
Advertising’s Missing Ingredient: The Optimum Effective Scheduling System,
which was originally published in 1990 and went into a second edition and four
printings. Marx and his wife live in Tampa, Florida. They have two grown
children.