Self-belief alone is not sufficient—you also have to be able to convince other people of what you believe.
All great careers, to some degree, become sales jobs. You have to evangelize your plans to customers, prospective employees, the press, investors, etc...
http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful
Other parts of the post resonated with me, and this one does too, as something I want to work towards as I build my company.
Looking online, all advice on "sales" is centered around actual sales scenarios, rather than what Sam is referring to. I was wondering if anyone came across any books etc. or had good advice on where to start with "getting good at sales".
Sales isn’t about your product, it’s about the person your speaking with and picking up on queues and verbiages that help you cater the conversation to them.
There isn’t a magic algorithm here. Get out among people and learn how to hold an artificial conversation for longer than 1 minute with a complete stranger without making it feel artificial. Once you can do that and walk away feeing good about it, you can start to figure out how to convert that artificial-ness into something that’s hard to distinguish from comfortable conversation with someone you’ve known for 10 years. That’s sales. It’s being able to interact with people at a comfort level that enables them to feel relaxed and safe.
I push a lot of CS students to get jobs as servers at local restaurants and bars. The pure experience of interacting with a group of new strangers every 5-10 minutes is hugely beneficial to sales development. It’s also easy to practice selling stuff (convince a bud light drinker to try a local microbrew, or up sell the nachos to the nachos grande because it’s the freakin weekend and what’s life without a little adventure). The bonus is that you can obtain a huge amount of experience with very little commitment as serving can be a 4-6 hour /week deal if you need it to be.
In the end it’s not about sales. It’s all about how comfortable you are in your own skin and how comfortable you make them. That takes a bit of time and discomfort to achieve and a book won’t give you that by itself.
Go get experience.
I've worked with people who run the sales part of things, and even they try to avoid conversations with strangers when possible. It's easy to hide behind "social media marketing".
Just be careful not to practice selling "anything" like many people start out. A big part of sales is being able to explain why something is useful to someone else.
Sales is simply finding a stranger whose problem you can solve, and explaining to them how you can help.
One summer holidays while at uni I got a job as a door to door salesman selling internet packages.
I'm not a small talk kind of guy. But after doing this job for a month or so I noticed I was having all these conversations everywhere I went. I'd order a drink and be having a chat with the barman etc. I seemed to connect with people everywhere I went.
I'm a small sample in the world, but at the time I decided if I was struggling to get a job I'd do door to door (or some kind of similar commissions sales job) again while I was looking, not for the money, but for the interpersonal skills it seemed to bring out.
http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-very-most-basic-things-your-com...
https://web.archive.org/web/20161202094244/http://blog.fogcr...
A snippet I liked:
"I used to work as a waiter, and we were supposed to up-sell various things like top-shelf margaritas and seasoned sour cream for the french fries. I sucked at it...
One day the manager wanted to know what was up, and I said something like, “Man, if they want top-shelf margaritas they’ll ask. I don’t need to push it on them.”
My manager said, “That’s true, they are likely to ask if they want something. But what if they don’t know we have it?”"
Off Topic: I hope the whole Fog Creek blog hasn't gone away.
0. "How to win friends and influence others" by Carnergie
1. "Zig Ziglar on Selling"
2. "Unlimited Power" by Tony Robbins
3. "Secrets of closing the sale" by Zig Ziglar
4. "Influence psychology of persuasion" by Caldini
Really made the difference for me when feeding the kids became a challenge.
The best way to start learning is to watch and listen to a good salesperson doing their bit. For example, visit a prestige car dealership after you have read "Influence" and see how they apply the various aspects. Ideally get a job as a junior salesperson working for a great salesperson. Your learning will go much better under expert guidance. You just can't learn enough just be reading books, watching videos.
From your question you appear to have conflated marketing, public relations, negotiating, etc as being sales. They are all distinct functional areas that support sales, but are not "selling" as such.
If you can, it'd probably be pretty effective to get some "actual sales" experience and treat it as a sandbox for experimenting. The alternative seems to be vacuuming a set of sales training materials and then start applying them directly to other scenarios. Anecdote: A friend started reading up on sales and applying to his dating life and expressed positive surprise - but he recently started work as a door-to-door salesman, and has been talking about new sales-related observations at a higher frequency.
AFAIK (haven't read yet) "How to win friends and influence people" is good for the non-actual sales. Supposedly early editions are better than later, as later ones are written by committee? I can - on the basis of my tiny experience - recommend Zig Ziglar's books.
I highly recommend Zig Ziglar books on sales and Dale Carnergie's book "how to win friends" which should indeed probably be the first one to read for anybody - despite the phony title that will put most people off.
Then a few years later I was 30 with a wife who couldn’t legally work, a mortgage, and two cats and sold on commission. I had to execute or I couldn’t make it.
This is how I learned.
From there you will see points of commonalities with anyone and will one day a) enjoy speaking to strangers b) learn from others c) most likely get better at sales as a result because sales at the end of the day is people connecting to people.
Good luck Andrew!
Books and advice are great to get started but eventually there is no substitute to actually doing it yourself.
That being said, we are all actually “selling” in our day to day lives without formally defining it as sales. From convincing your parents to buy you a toy all the way to landing the first job involves similar techniques.
For a really simple sales weekend task, try buying a pack of bottled water and see how many you sell.
In general, sales is something you need to practice every day. Like Sam mentions, it's about being able to convince other people of what you believe and you have an opportunity to do this in your every day life, from convincing your kids to clean their rooms to convincing your reports to adopt a new process.
The first step is to look for opportunities in every interaction to practice sales. Sales starts by listening, so try to understand the other person's point of view and why it's different from yours. Really step into their shoes and see things from their lens.
Once you identify where the difference is, ask questions to learn more. Why do they think that way? Why do they prefer the current process? Why are they hesitant to change?
Again, they key here is to listen. Once they list the reasons why they believe differently, summarize what they said. Then start to work through each difference together.
This is important. You're not competing with them. You need to work together to arrive at a common solution. If they say adopting a new process is a waste of time, then calculate with them how much time it will take and then work to reduce that time by offering help in some area.
In the end, you should both walk away having achieved something together without one person browbeating the other into it.
1. Think from their point of view. What are the biggest pain points they can identify with? What are you solving for them?
2. Show as much as you can upfront. Bring an app with their logo and name on it. Maybe mockups if you don’t have app. Their “customizing and correcting” instict kicks in an the conversation becomes about what to change.
3. Don’t charge anything serious upfront, just take their credit card for a “retainer fee” and have them authorize charges as you go.
4. Use a website for them to choose from predefined choices, like JS libraries used to let you choose what you wanted. Then they leave their email to get a quote.
5. Use your website or app in order to set up a portal for them, including their choices and initial product, and invite others to manage this portal. Make it as easy as possible for them to invite MORE stakeholders in their organization. Build onboarding for the stakeholders where they get to see the work in progress, choices, video, until some stakeholde enters the credit card.
7. Break things down into milestones and deliverables. Put as much as you can on a website to create a feeling that you have lots of customers vying for your tome so they don’t feel they can haggle.
7. Finally, reward your existing customers for adding testimonials, sharing good results, and bringing more customers, with some internal credit system, that can be used to reduce the amount they pay. Make onboarding process for inbound sales, which includes the social proof from the customers.
8. Oh yeah, and consider doing PR and bringing people to your landing page from 7.
So what did an introvert, non-english speaker with no experience of selling do to sell successfully and what did I learn? Here is what I learned, and it is really very simple:
The first rule of selling is don't sell; rather learn, inform and help i.e. genuinely learn about the customer's requirements/problems, genuinely inform the customers about the solution you have or anyone else who could provide the solution and genuinely help the customer with the decision making process. That's it. And your customers then become your recommender and help you "sell" more!
Stay away from books/blogs that teach you into manipulating your customer to sell them something. That usually leads to them regretting the buy later and you not finding product market fit .
If you want to be good at sales you need to turn the question on its head. It's not how to sell but how do people buy?
There is a pain point that creates a want. Research is done into how to satisfy this want. Evaluate the possible solutions. Purchase.
Now you know what your customers will do regardless of you, you just funnel them to you at every step of their buying process. The earlier in the process the more work is required to get to conversion but the easier it is to build reputation with them.
Targeting before the pain point is a waste of time no one will spend money on a backup system until their system fails and they realise they needed it all along.
The information gathering point is the easiest place to target, the customer knows little and will look industry experts like you, to inform them what they should believe.
Don't sell to them, give them all the detailed unbiased information they need to get to the evaluation stage. The more information they get from you the more they will favour you at the evaluation stage as all they know is what you taught them. If you can control what some one hears and sees it stands to reason that you can control what they think and say.
At the evaluation stage, if you are not in their short list at this point you missed your chance. They will have already decided who to go with and are looking for reasons remove the rest from the list. If all their reasoning comes from your advice and you follow your own advice you have won. At this point they are already convinced they just need some reassurance from you to take the leap to purchase.
Purchase This is called the close, its easy Smile, Nod ask a few questions they will answer yes to, then ask them "Are you happy with that?" they will respond with a smile nod and say yes and think to them selves, you know what I am happy, let's do it. If they answer no ask them specifically why not, whats holding them back? Satisfy this concern.
We just did it for silly fun but in retrospect it was a great experience. Learning how to promote something, having the self-confidence to talk to strangers and sell something is really useful.
1. Loosening up creatively(which helps you develop the pitch)
2. Playing a character appropriate to the scene. e.g. during the job interview both parties can play characters that represent themselves/the company in their best light.
Playing a character isn't about lying - it's in the word: play. Every conversation involves some performative aspects, and these skills simply give you additional ways to conduct conversation in business and in life.
Listening is the new prospecting.
On this subject, John Jantsch is masterful > https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21847226-duct-tape-selli...
To get good, you’d need to practice and train your mental and emotional intelligence to the task.
Sales is a very human process and carries a lot of discomfort which you need to learn to work with.
Sell 10 things and you’ll get better. Sell a thousand things and you’ll get good. No shortcut.
But how do you start? You just do. There is no tutorial. The one thing that helps is selling things you know about and can provide an educated opinion on the subject.
If you want to get good at sales, go back and read Altman's post again (http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful). Start with the section you asked about:
4. Get good at "sales"
Notice Altman puts the word "sales" in quotation marks. That means there are other words and terms that you could put in there to increase your understanding. Here are some that he uses: Convincing others, evangelizing, communicating, and believing in what you're selling. Can you come up with some more?
Now ask yourself, for example, "How can I get better at convincing others of what I believe?" What way could you practice convincing someone of something you believed? What would it feel like to convince someone of something you believed? Can you picture what it would look like to be in that situation? What would you need to hear from someone to know they were convinced? Is there any time in your life that you have convinced someone of something that you believed? (Imagine a small child convincing an adult that they believed someone they knew was in danger and you'll realize that a child in this situation knows everything they need to know about "selling.")
Repeat this process with each term. "How can I get better at evangelizing?" "How can I get better at communicating?" (Here he provides some more tips: "Is my thinking clear?" "Am I using plain, concise language?") "How can I get better at believing in what I'm selling?" (Would you buy what you're selling? Have you? Take your reward out of the picture, and find someone who needs what you are selling, and give it to them.) Try with some other terms that you come up with, e.g. connecting with others, understanding the customer's needs, serving the customer, etc..
Brainstorm every answer. The most important thing is that you take Altman's advice and "Show up in person." Test each idea in person, face to face. Engineer situations where you can test your ideas, collect data, and determine what works.
Your problem is not a lack of information. Reading another book is another way to avoid taking action. What you need is imagination, commitment, and a willingness to try everything until you find something that works.
Be patient with yourself. This is a process. It could be a lifetime journey. Enjoy it.
My own journey over the last 20 years has been a slow migration from a technical contributor (About 10-12 years of systems engineering, infosec consultant, pentester) to a full blown quota-carrying, territory-running sales guy. Surprisingly, I enjoy the work. My personal view of sales started negative based on my interactions with the last generation of salespeople, but I've seen a generational shift in Enterprise Sales recently, and there are a lot more people like me than 10-20 years ago when I started in the industry.
It turns out, sales and running a territory is like engineering to me. Like any good engineer, I enjoy building things. I built out a customer base that can contribute to local chapter events to be where I can't. The job is also highly measureable. I can't think of another role where performance is so easily measured day-to-day and forecasted into the future. It's also a critically important function of the company. Bringing in revenue is a top priority and receives a lot of benefits. One driving force that got me to where I am is that I always took steps of becoming more important.
Back to the question.. how to get good at sales? Easy. Take a sales job. A good place to start would be Sales Engineering or Sales Overlay (SME with sales responsibilities). I'd look for a field that is highly technical and complex. Something hard where real technical chops are required and respected. Customers value your output because they genuinely don't have the expertise that you offer. Nothing commoditized.. look for smaller, fast growing segments.
As for specific skills to succeed in sales in these environments, it's mostly about understanding the customer's business problems and objectives. Once you have a firm understanding and agreement with the customer on the desired business outcomes, then dig deeper into making the individuals at the customer successful. Make your customer a hero. Help them overachieve on their goals. Financial reward comes quickly after you reach this point.
Also important: good communication, systems-thinking (ability to navigate complex organizational decision making processes), and understanding people/empathizing with your customers. Over time you'll develop good instincts to know when to push or when to say no. So much of sales can be subjective, so try to use repeatable processes where possible. Your pricing strategy should be defensible and systematic. Don't make shit up.
To get the above to work for you, you must have strong communication skills. Sales is still about talking to other humans. You get small windows of time with influencers, decision makers, and buyers. You have to have good presentation skills and be able to convey value to a customer with clarity. To distill complex ideas down to simple, meaningful value and tie that to the customer's desired outcomes. The customer needs to be able to answer the question of "why choose these guys instead of those guys?" with confidence and expertise. Most of the real selling happens without you in the room, so you need to build them up to be your champion. When you are in the room, you need them to be your coach.. every meeting should be an open book test. Your coach should tell you in advance who cares about what so you can craft your messaging around things that matter to these decision makers or influencers.
The idea that there is some magical persuasion element in sales seems dated to me. Enterprise sales campaigns are complex. 6-18 month sales cycles with dozens of influencers, decision makers, users, buyers, and so on. You don't take someone out to a steak dinner and close a deal. Does charisma and charm help? Sure.. in a few marginal ways. But you don't have to be a cliche salesperson to be successful. You have to understand how the organization makes a decision, and then work backwards to provide the right information to the right people. Explain the technical value to the people who care about technical aspects. Explain how the license model scales to the person running the budget. Explain how your added services will help the guy in charge of operations scale up the program and over achieve on his goals.
Also, the best sales people pick great products in growing markets. That's where the money is. Mediocre products in stable markets do not attract talented sales people.
