Like it or not, sales is often a zero-sum game: Your win is someone else's loss. Most salespeople work in mature, overcrowded industries, your offerings perceived (often unfairly) as commodities. Growth requires taking market share from your competitors, while they try to do the same to you. How else can you grow 12 percent a year in an industry that's only growing by 3 percent?

It's not easy for any salesperson to execute a competitive displacement--or, in other words, eat their lunch. You might think this requires a bloodthirsty whatever it takes attitude, but that's the opposite of what works. If you act like a Mafia don, you only make yourself difficult to trust and impossible to see as a long-term partner. Instead, this book shows you how to find and maintain a long-term competitive advantage by taking steps like:

- ranking prospective new clients not by their size or convenience to you, but by who stands to gain the most from your solution.

- understanding the different priorities for everyone in your prospect's organization, from the CEO to the accountants, and addressing their various concerns.

- developing a systematic contact plan for all those different stakeholders so you can win over the right people at the organization in the optimal sequence.

Your competitors may be tough, but with the strategies you'll discover in this book, you'll soon be eating their lunch.