learning project: sales
I just completed a beginner course on sales offered on Udemy titled "Sales Skills Mastery 1: Sales Training for Beginners.”
For the past few months, I've been applying my accelerated-learning skills and concepts to learning sales. Active recall has been the most effective as well as the Question-Book Method note-taking system. On my vacation, I also studied it so as to introduce novelty to an often unpleasant task. I've learned sales for about 3 or 4 months. I’m also currently listening to the audiobook “The Only Sales Guide You Will Ever Need” by Anthony Iannarino, where it heavily talks about the mindset of a salesperson.
Sales is primarily a transference of feeling between two people. It's a conversation. People need to trust the salesperson. Surprisingly, they don't need to like them.
Sales is also a learnable skill! Which is good news for me because I still tell myself that I am not good at talking with people! Thanks to an emerging growth mindset, that voice is being listened to less & less.
A lot of people when they think of sales, they think of the dishonest, hyperbolic used car salesman or something to that effect. The reason why a lot of salespeople fail is because they never overcome the general image that people still have in their minds about their profession.
Do you actually care about what you are selling? If not, it would be hard to have someone feel comfortable with you sharing the truth of their problem. You are not here to persuade. You are a problem solver for your potential customer.
I also learned that you have to determine what you are really selling and present the specific, personalized offer towards gaining pleasure. It’s less about avoiding pain.
How do you find out what your market actually wants to buy as opposed to what you think they want to buy? What can the product really do for them? Exclude all the fancy features of the product that you love to wax on about and look at how it will truly solve their problem. You find this out by listing out the features of your product, the benefits of those features, and the "bridge benefits" which is where you connect the product’s benefits and the features with the phrase "so that..." or "which means..."
You can also do this by creating a sensory rich visualization that directly voices the desires of the person. You need to think the way they do, just like in marketing.
You don't need to convince everyone to buy though. In fact, it's better if you spend more time in market research and finding potential customers or "prospecting" as it is called. This personalized process involves more work at the start. The way that you find these prospects or potential customers is by asking your team, the previous clients you've worked with, your boss.
Talk with others to continually reframe the list of benefits, features, and bridge benefits so that you have a thorough grasp of the product or service in relation to the specific needs and desires of the client.
One of the main concepts that was really surprising to me was that sales is not a numbers game. It's more about connection! Simplifying the sales process means finding the right prospects at the right time and coming equipped with the right message to make less calls and make more sales [so that you are spending more time with people who are the most likely to make the sale with or the “qualified”]. These are the prospects most likely to sell themselves on your message after hearing it from you, the expert.
And how do you find the ideal clients? By looking at your existing customers. Notice trends in top customers and really hone in on those characteristics. For example, your most profitable customers can be in a specific income bracket or all women.
After noticing these trends, honing in on these characteristics, you can broaden out again to all potential prospects THAT MAKE SENSE. The way that you find out what makes sense is by noticing if they are highly relevant to what you are offering. What do they need and want and how can your product or service help with that? What are the things they have in common? The common pain points, frustrations, values?
The types of questions you ask depend on if your customer is involved in a B2C or a B2B. Questions like age, married, income, location, who is the decision maker, and what else influences the decision whether to buy or not.
The thing is, you don't have to answer all of these questions, only those that are more or less relevant to your industry. For me, how do I look for potential customers? I can look for them through memberships, organizations, LinkedIn, google, team members, previous clients.
Another surprising thing I learned was that every sales call is an opportunity to learn. It's a good idea to take notes. Just like in everyday life, every moment is a learning moment, even an accelerated-learning moment to take it a bit further.
Why do you lose sales? Because of the abundance of options available to your prospects and because there are competitors waiting for them to lift the phone.
When customers aren't buying from you, that means they don't believe in you or the product/service. It's a lack of belief more than anything. Sales and marketing essentially is a before and after scenario where the customer is skeptical but then afterwards has a little more belief built into them. Again, it’s less about persuasive tactics and more about a feeling of trust and if they pick up on a genuine interest in you in aiding them.
Another thing I learned was the 3 key areas of knowing where products are in the market is price, service, and quality. If you can thoroughly answer that, then you are golden.
One of the main things I learned was the order of sales calls as well as what characterizes each phase and the phase’s action items.
Open, discovery, present, close, resistance, follow up.
What are the objectives in the discovery phase? What does it mean to qualify? What is a qualified prospect and how do you find one? What is the key to making selling easier? How do you go forward in the discovery process after you have built some curiosity and desire in the prospect, enough to proceed past the opening, what is the best way to overcome objections? All of these questions and much more were covered in the modules.
Another main idea that I learned was the art of effectively building rapport, warming up the potential customer, and demonstrating that you are truly there to solve their problem and are competent enough to do that.
Sales uses a lot of scripts. Notice which scripts you use that are the most effective and just keep using them. But there is also a naturalness to put on when in the midst of a call. A feeling of common humanity, empathy, and understanding of the genuine desires, needs, and wants of the customer.
The reason why I wanted to learn sales was because I had a genuine interest in learning it but most especially when I recently re-read one of my favorite books by Michael Ellsberg, “The Education of Millionaires.” It’s one of the skills students like me weren’t taught in school.