The EPOCH Approach is a breakthrough method of selling because it treats the selling process more like a complex interaction between buyers and sellers than a simple series of steps. To be a top-producing salesperson, you need to monitor a customer’s behavior and constantly modify your own behavior to correspond with your customer’s behavior.

     EPOCH's product-value formula demonstrates easier ways to respond to price objections, and the use of acronyms and other memory devices makes learning how to sell quicker and easier. To illustrate how key points and powerful techniques can be applied, carefully crafted dialogs and practical examples are used throughout the book.

     The EPOCH Approach enables you to customize your selling to any individual or group. You will be more effective with today's buyers—who are more resistant to spin, hype, and doublespeak than buyers in the past—and you will close more sales. You will also learn how to increase customer loyalty, which can give you testimonials, referrals, and repeat business.

     Comprehensive and realistic, EPOCH covers techniques that range from honesty-is-the-best-policy to buyer-beware. While the emphasis will always be on ethical and legal methods of selling, this book also describes coercive techniques that use false information, confusion, or surprise to close sales.

     The EPOCH Approach is a successful model because it explains human behavior in terms of values, attitudes, beliefs, emotions, facts, and logic—and shows you how to influence customers and help them make intelligent decisions. The key to persuasion is giving people what they want so they will do what you want—and you can get what you want.

     EPOCH Approach has value far beyond the field of selling. By demonstrating techniques that allow anyone to be more persuasive, it can make doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, or parents better communicators. By explaining what coercion is and how it works, this book can help you protect yourself against manipulation—which can save you money or help you make better decisions. When it comes to exposing lies, fallacies, or hidden agendas, the EPOCH Approach is very effective and a good way to sort out the truth when dealing with politicians, swindlers, or infomercials.

     What separates the EPOCH Approach from other methods of selling is that the EPOCH Approach helps you react with lightning speed to the way people make decisions.  When people have a problem caused by pain, stress, discomfort, or dissatisfaction and they believe that purchasing a product will help them solve the problem, this is the mental process that most people use to make a buying decision:

     1.  Identify products that will solve the problem.
     2.  Collect relevant information about the products.
     3.  Compare competitive or similar products.
     4.  Select the best product based on value.
     5.  Purchase and use the product.
     6.  Evaluate the buying decision.

     After you learn how to use the EPOCH Approach, you will understand why the primary keys to being persuasive all relate to the way people make decisions. Just looking at the six steps listed above will make it clear why knowing your product, giving people the information they need to make intelligent decisions, and making it easy for people to buy your product will make you a better salesperson. Since people often repeat steps one through four many times before they decide to buy, you can understand why good salespeople are flexible and why they try to stay focused on their customers.

     Besides helping you react quickly to what people do, using the EPOCH Approach will help you understand where people are in the sales process and when they are ready to buy. The worst mistake most salespeople make is not asking for the sale. If someone is ready to buy, you may lose the sale if you talk about benefits when you should be asking for the sale. If you use the EPOCH Approach, you will know how to ask for the sale and when.

     The EPOCH Approach will also show you how to handle objections and complaints. Almost any salesperson can look good when things are going well, but only the best of the best can look good when things go wrong. Like turning lemons into lemonade, a top-producing salesperson can turn objections into sales and people who complain into satisfied customers.

     If you are looking for a powerful method of selling that starts when you greet a customer and then continues on after you close the sale, the EPOCH Approach could be your answer.