CHAPTER 1
SALES BASICS
If youâre interested in going into sales, you need to master some learned skills and will continue to polish and improve on them throughout your career. Youâll need to make some preparations before you even land a sales job to help your first days and weeks go smoothly. All salespeople must understand the steps that go into each saleâfrom finding leads all the way to asking for referrals. Mastering the sales cycle allows you to keep prospects moving smoothly through your pipeline and helps you to figure out what to do when a sale goes drastically wrong.
IS SALES RIGHT FOR YOU?
What a Sales Job Is Really Like
The stereotypical salesperson is a smooth talker, is sociable, and can convince anyone of anything. In reality, that kind of salesperson rarely becomes a star performer. As one veteran sales manager put it, âSalespeople have one mouth and two ears because youâre supposed to use your ears twice as often as your mouth.â
The following traits are the ones that truly matter if you want to be a good (or better yet, great) salesperson.
INTEGRITY
Integrity is important for all professionals, but itâs doubly important for salespeople. Because salespeople have an unfortunate reputation for shading the truth and otherwise acting unethically, youâll need to take special pains to keep your behavior above reproach.
Being a person of high integrity means acting both morally and ethically. Morality means choosing to do whatâs right based on an internal code of honor; ethics means obeying the rules set down by other authorities, including your employer. Good salespeople need to adhere to both sets of guidelines.
When thereâs a conflict between your morals and ethics, or if youâre otherwise not sure of the right thing to do, turn to the guiding principle for sales: always put the customerâs needs first.
Good salespeople donât try to trick people into buying something thatâs not the best product or service for them. They help prospective customers identify their most important needs and find a product that will meet those needs.
As a salesperson, you represent the company you work for. Part of your job is helping your company build and maintain a good reputation through your actions. Sales is just as much a service job as medicine or police workâif you think of your field in that light, youâll have an easier time putting integrity first.
EMPATHY
Empathy is the ability to understand and share other peopleâs feelings. As a salesperson, youâll talk to dozens or even hundreds of other people every day. Good salespeople know that they can make every one of these contacts a positive experience for the other person. Empathy is the cornerstone for positive communication: it allows you to guide the conversation in ways that benefit the other party.
Empathic salespeople listen carefully and use open-ended questions to uncover prospect and customer needs. They can relate to people from all walks of life and communicate in ways that make others feel comfortable and safe. They truly care about helping other people, so they get great satisfaction from finding just the right product or service that will make the customerâs problem go away.
Empathy will not only allow you to do your job well; it also will help you to enjoy it. If you feel great about what you do because you love helping other people, youâll be both a happier person and a more effective salesperson.
TENACITY
Sales is hard work. Many prospects are so hardened to salespeople that their reply to anything you say is an automatic âNo, thanks.â It takes time, energy, and commitment to break through that wall and earn such a prospectâs trust. One important part of this is building up touchpoints.
A touchpoint is a point of contact between a seller (i.e., your company) and a prospective buyer. As a salesperson, youâll create touchpoints every time you communicate in any way with prospects or customersâeven when that communication is as impersonal as posting on social media. However, it can take dozens or even hundreds of touchpoints to nudge a particular prospect into buying something.
Touchpoints
A touchpoint can be as simple as seeing an ad on TV or visiting a companyâs website. Sales touchpoints are among the most interactive and occur at a particularly important point in the buying cycle, so theyâre often pivotal.
Tenacious salespeople donât give up when the first few touchpoints fail to move a prospect; they make a note in the prospectâs record to reach out to them a few weeks later and move on to the next prospect.
When things are going badly and youâre struggling to close a saleâany saleâtenacity will be what helps you get through the slump without falling apart. Tenacity can also help you with internal interactions. For example, if youâre trying to convince your sales manager that your quota is unrealistically high, it will probably take more than one attempt to bring her around. Tenacity helps you to keep trying until you either get what you want or at least manage a compromise.
BASIC SALES SKILLS
The Salespersonâs Must-Have Qualities
If youâve got all the important traits mentioned in the previous section, then youâve got what you need to get you to the starting line. However, to become a good salesperson, youâll also need to acquire certain learned skills.
COMMUNICATION
Salespeople spend most of their time talking to other people: prospects, customers, employees from other departments, their managers, and miscellaneous others. These conversations typically involve trying to convince the other party to do something. That means youâll need to be a skilled communicator to do your job well.
Communication doesnât just cover the times when youâre the one doing the communicating; it also means being a good listener. Good communicators know how to draw out other people. They ask questions that get people talking, pick out the important details they need from what they hear, and use those details to create a compelling argument.
Being an excellent listener is actually more important and useful for sales than being an excellent talker. With experience, youâll find that if you can get a prospect to speak freely, heâll often talk himself right into buying from you.
EXPERTISE
Successful salespeople are experts in the fields related to the products and services they sell. Remember, your job as a salesperson is to match up prospective customers with the products that will solve their problems. You canât do that well if you donât understand both the products you sell and the problems that your customers face on a regular basis.
Product knowledge is the first and most basic level of expertise that salespeople must acquire. Before you can sell effectively, youâll need to know your products backward and forward. That doesnât just mean reading user manuals, although thatâs a good place to start. If possible, you should use the products you sell yourselfâas often as you can manage it. If thatâs not an option, at least attend a demo or watch someone else using the product. Your company probably releases new products and services on a regular basis, so acquiring product knowledge is an ongoing process.
The second part of sales expertise is understanding your customers. If you sell to other businesses in a particular industry, you should know that industry backward and forward. Read trade journals, lurk on social media boards related to that industry, and attend relevant trade shows and webinars.
If you sell to a specific subset of consumers, learn everything you can about that subset and the concerns that bring them to you. For example, if you sell baby clothes, study parenting, newborn care, and baby fashion.
Finally, if you sell to a broader audience of businesses or consumers, learn all you can about the particular issue that your products address and about the alternate ways to resolve that issue. For example, if you sell smartphones, youâll need to learn how smartphones differ from basic cell phones and tablets, why people choose smartphones over the other options, and how your companyâs phones compare to the competitorsâ.
TEAMWORK
Good salespeople are able to get along and work well with others. In a good-sized company each department consists of three types of employees: a few people who are really good at their jobs, a few who are flat-out terrible, and a number of reasonably competent employees who make up the rest of the group. As a salesperson, you must figure out where your coworkers fit in that system, especially for departments that are likely to interact with your customers.
Once youâve identified the employees you can trust to do a great job, the next step is to get on good terms with those employees. Good relationships with your most talented coworkers can help you solve any number of problems: engineering department employees will walk you through how a new product works, shipping department employees can help you by expediting deliveries for anxious customers, marketing department employees will work with you to find relevant leads, and so on.
Good teamwork isnât limited to your coworkers; it also includes your customers and your professional contacts outside your company. Good relationships with customers will help you keep them loyal for life, will result in numerous referrals, and will turn them into company ambassadors. And good relationships with professional contacts will help you build a strong and flourishing network that will make just about every aspect of your work easier, from finding a sales job in the first place to helping you reach an elusive prospect.
ACQUIRING SALES SKILLS
In a perfect world your company would provide all the sales training you need. In reality most salespeople have to take responsibility for their own career development.
Webinars
Many companies and institutions hold free webinars to teach various sales skills. Do a quick search online for the skill you want to perfect plus the word webinar, and you may find just what you need.
Try to set aside a portion of every workday to read some useful sales-related material. The time can be a mere fifteen minutes per day, and the material can be sales books, blogs, websites, or social media sitesâas long as they have something new that you can apply to your job. When you stumble upon an interesting tip or idea, write it down. You can sort these ideas into two lists: one for tips that you want to start using right away, and another for ideas that you canât implement yet but will try in the future.
Other salespeople can be a great source for sales knowledge and techniques. If youâre fairly new to sales, then youâll definitely want to learn from your teamâs experienced members. Ask one or two of the best salespeople on your team if you can listen in on their cold calls and/or come with them on appointments, and then take plenty of notes. If youâre a more experienced salesperson yourself, you can exchange ideas with other salespeople on your team. You might even set up a group that meets regularly for that purpose.
BEFORE YOU START SELLING
Prepping for Your First Sales Job
The first step toward becoming a salesperson is finding and getting hired for a sales job. Once youâve managed that feat, youâll have a lot to learn during your first days and weeks on the job.
THE SALES RESUME
Good resumes share certain attributes regardless of the type of job, but sales resumes require a few special tweaks.
First, put your major accomplishments right at the top of the resume. Sales managers often spend only a few seconds skimming each resume, so you want to ensure that they will see your most enticing points. These accomplishments should be as specific as possible. For example, instead of writing âTop customer service representative at Company X,â write âRanked top customer service representative at Company X three years in a row.â Use specific numbers whenever possible.
Breaking Into Sales
The first sales job is often the most challenging to find, because you donât have much relevant experience. A multi-level marketing (MLM) program, such as Amway or Mary Kay, can be a fast way to get some sales experience for your resume.
You should also mention any useful connections you have, relating to either sales in general or the specific industry your target employer sells to. Because relationships are so important in sales, being able to bring a ton of important contacts with you is a big selling point to a prospective employer. If you have impressive social media statistics, like a huge network on LinkedIn with connections inside major companies, list those as well.
After youâve listed your accomplishments at the top of your resume, itâs time to break down your career history. Talk about how your work benefited the company and its customers. Again, use specific numbers whenever you can. Mention things like the awards you received and the major clients you helped bring on board or kept from churning (moving on to a competitor).
Next comes the section detailing your training and education. List any degrees you have as well as any job-specific courses youâve completed. Donât forget...