This is the first of a series of book reviews by Peter Scholtens on subjects of interest to manufacturers’ reps that will occasionally appear in Agency Sales.

Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away From Your Competition
by Anthony Iannarino
Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Portfolio (Nov. 6, 2018)

While the title may not indicate it, Eat Their Lunch is a book about how to deal with a sales world that is becoming increasingly polarized. Right now, the push in sales is to try to automate everything. Because the B2C world is thriving on making everything a click away, sales leadership teams are trying to push the B2B world in the same direction. Business executives, in trying to reduce the cost of sales, are trying to reduce sales to a transactional service. Eat Their Lunch is a book that tries to push against these trends. It demonstrates that human relationships will always be important, and that a salesperson will thrive in this world by moving towards being increasingly relational and less transactional.

The book begins with a section on finding purpose and meaning in your sales work by learning to genuinely care for the needs of your customers. Having this attitude will help you get up every morning, will propel you to get in touch with your customers. Making a difference “for other people is as worthy a charge as any.”

The second part of the book will help you to understand your customers and prospective clients better. It will give you sharper vision and deepen your understanding of the people that you are trying to help. The goal is to help you develop a more holistic view of your customer so that you can move together towards a better future.

The last section of the book focuses on the concept that you need to improve who you are to improve what you do. Your customers are deciding whom to trust. If you grow and develop, that will give your clients more reasons to trust you. This is the core message of the book. If you want to pick up business from your competition, you need to develop yourself so that there is more reason for your customers to trust you. You can blame lost deals on pricing, your competition, or the customer. But at the end of the day, if you accept credit for the wins, you should also accept responsibility for the losses.

Eat Their Lunch is a very good book to work through. It includes great suggestions on how to find purpose in your sales process, develop relationships with customers, and grow personally. In a world that is increasingly commoditizing the sales process, it will help you to differentiate yourself from the competition by pushing yourself in the opposite direction. I highly recommend it.