Mahan Khalsa is the rare individual who combines a sharp intellect, wit, and common-sense wisdom with the art of sales, influence, and communication. He is not business as usual. In fact, Mahan challenges the conventions that still dominate the business of selling and buying. For those who are willing to think differently and break new ground, Mahan provides a provocative approach that breaks down the dysfunctions in the selling/buying process.

Mahan believes in getting real and becoming maniacally client focused. He helps clients create authentic business relationships through candid dialogue and robust business thinking to produce enduring solutions. Mahan's sales approach is all about helping clients succeed.

The book, Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play — The Demise of Dysfunctional Selling and the Advent of Helping Clients Succeed, by Mahan, shares the philosophy and how-to methodology for helping clients succeed and has become a must-read for anyone wanting to master consultative sales.

Stephen R. Covey says:

"Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play is a marvelous book. Mahan Khalsa masterfully puts the science and art of influence and sales on a higher ground. For any organization looking to re-engage and renew their sales force with pragmatic, disciplined, common-sense sales execution, you will find proven answers in Khalsa's book. His sales methodology proves that you can, indeed, create win-win by focusing entirely on helping clients succeed.

This is a must-read and must-practice for anyone in sales and business development. But it is much more than that. I find Mahan's principles for effective human interaction and trust building invaluable for the entire business world."

See Mahan Khalsa's Bio

Listen to Mahan's audio overview of the Helping Clients Succeed' sales methodology and sales training program.

Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play includes some of the following foundational principles for highly effective consultative selling:

• Helping Clients Succeed'— The implication to the sales role is that you must help your clients succeed. If you do, you both win. If not, you both lose. That's a big switch. It's no longer sufficient to get clients to buy. If you can't reduce their costs; increase revenues or margins; leverage their cost of capital; increase productivity, quality; and customer satisfaction; augment a key strategy or initiative; and increase critical performance, you cannot earn their business over time.

  And if you can't help clients achieve sustainable results, you will be a one-time player rather than a long-term business partner. One-time players don't stay in business.

• Awareness and Choice Liberate Us— There is no single, ultimate sales methodology or way of doing things that brings optimal results in all situations. The goal is to augment your awareness of what's really possible to accomplish in business development dialogues, and increase your choices about how to succeed in a mutually beneficial way.

  Using awareness and choice will also be the most liberating way to approach our clients. Rather than giving clients ultimatums, dogmas, platitudes, we need to give them expanded awareness of possibilities and superior choices'helping them make good business decisions in their own best interest.

• Balance IQ, EQ, & XQ— Your ability to help clients succeed and, in turn, create your own success is in large part determined by your ability to have world-class execution around the following formula:

  SQ = A (IQ + EQ + XQ)

  Where:

  SQ = Your success quotient

  A = Attitudes; your internal beliefs and paradigms and outward expression of who you are and what you are about

  IQ = Your ability to apply intellectual rigor to how value is created in an industry, organization, function, process, etc.

  EQ = Your ability to create a container of safety and trust where people honestly express and explore what they think, feel, and believe to be true

  XQ = Your ability to execute a disciplined, efficient, effective series of events resulting in good decisions

  See article How to Become a Trusted Business Advisor: The Fusion of EQ, IQ and XQ

• Intent Counts More Than Technique— When intent is truly focused on helping your clients succeed, you will gain their trust and create exponential value for them, and higher revenues and margins for you. So, whose agenda are you on?

• No Guessing— If your intent is to help your clients succeed, you have the right and the obligation to not guess about the key elements that will determine success. This involves the ability to ask questions, even very hard questions, in a way that elicits open dialogue and truthful exchange.

• Solutions Have No Inherent Value— Your knowledge, services, and solutions only derive value from the problems they solve or the results they create for your clients.

• Move off the Solution— You have to begin with no end mind'without an assumed solution. When you have a solution-free agenda, sellers and buyers can begin to explore and define the problems to be solved and the desired results. As a result, business conversations develop, rather than sales-talk, and clients, and salespeople are able to explore all viable possibilities.

• Structure the Conversation— To help clients succeed, you need open, honest dialogue not a sales pitch monologue. Salespeople can structure a business conversation with clients by leading them through effective questions that: collect a quick and complete list of all the clients issues; find what matters most; dive deeper for evidence, impact, context, and constraints; summarize the findings; and prioritize each issue in order of importance.