How to become a better salesperson

Hey all, I am new around here. I normally write in r/entrepreneur but have discovered IH over the last couple of weeks and I am loving it - awesome community.

I have worked in sales for the past 9 years. 18 months ago, I started a service-based business called harris&wilde. I love sharing tips and things I have learnt over the years selling. Whilst the sales strategy for a product-business differs slightly from a service-business, the fundamentals are the same.

I wanted to introduce myself to the community with a ‘How to become a better salesperson’ post. Would love to chat with you in the comments if you find any value from it :)

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A bit of background. My first experience of sales was at a double-glazing call centre. I was 16 at the time and for 4 hours after school I had to sit in a room, cold call people AT THEIR HOUSE and schedule a time for a senior salesperson to visit them. It was a horrible job but I was quite good at it. 6 months in they had “promoted” me to listen in to my colleague’s sales calls and suggest ways for them to improve. I was 16 telling 28-year-olds how to sell - it was farcical really.

Next, I was working as an Account Manager for a small digital marketing agency. 50% of my role was to bring in new business, upsell my existing client base other marketing services and generate leads. Following that role, I started work as a sales manager for a corporate accommodation operator in London. My role was to increase nightly room bookings we received, grow revenue and our customer base.

Which leads me to where I am today, which is growing my own animation production agency called harris&wilde. We started with 0 clients and £0 money.

Here are 6 simple tips that anyone can adopt to become a better salesperson. (I want to keep it light rather than drill down and bore everybody but if you have any questions feel free to ask).

1. Pick one sales channel and go all-in

You only have a finite amount of time as a salesperson. There are only so many hours in the day, you need to use them efficiently. Rather than spreading yourself thin across different sales channels, pick one and go all-in. For example, your most suitable channel might be LinkedIn. Ignore cold-calling, ignore networking, ignore cold email. Go all-in on LinkedIn. If you choose cold calling then ignore everything else and so on.

Finding the right channel for your business is trial-and-error. Track successes and failures and then choose to spend your time on the most efficient channel.

When I first started in sales, I would try and do everything at once. I’d cold call for two hours in the morning, I’d move to LinkedIn for a couple of hours, then I’d start cold emailing in the afternoon. It was fragmented, frustrating and hard to measure. I decided to scale back my process and concentrate on one channel for 8 hours a day 5 days per week. This clears your mind. You know what you are doing, how you are going to approach it and how to measure it. There are no distractions. Many of you are not full-time salespeople, but even if you set aside 1 day per week selling, then do so on one channel.

By concentrating on one sales channel you can hone your strategy. You can test different messages, automate certain processes, measure results and iterate over and over again until you find a winning formula.

For B2B sales, you probably want to concentrate fully on LinkedIn. Connect with your ideal customer, engage with their content, reach out directly.

When I was selling double-glazing, it was a call centre. We sat there and made calls for the whole shift.

By concentrating on one sales channel, you improve and become more confident. I improved my cold-calling, objection handling and confidence with each and every shift. When you are trying to find sales through multiple channels, you will improve slower.

2. Niche down on your ideal customer

This is so important. Think about your ideal customer and write down everything about them. Build a ‘customer persona’. Your perfect customer. A customer persona might look like:

“A male commuter aged between 16 and 28 who works in the entertainment industry. They live alone, play video games and enjoy reading anime. They are vegan and support animal rights charities.”

I just made that up by the way. I have no idea what product I would be selling to that person but never mind! You get the point. This customer persona doesn’t exist (well, they might do). But from this persona you can think about where this person hangs out online. What communities are they part of? What is important to them? Flesh out your customer persona. You can also do this for businesses instead of individuals.

Once you have this nailed down. Find them and reach out to them. Again if your sales channel was LinkedIn, do a customer persona, then search for all the matching businesses for free on LinkedIn. Find the most suitable person in the company to speak with and approach them. Consistently approach your ideal customers every day on your one sales channel. Become known to your ideal customers. The biggest killer to businesses is not a bad product, it’s obscurity. If nobody knows you exist how will they ever buy your stuff.

3. Straight to the point

If your first message to a potential customer is longer than 25 words, don’t send it.
If your first message asks more than one question, don’t send it.
If your first message starts with ‘I hope this finds you well’, don’t send it.
If your first message starts with ‘We’ or ‘I’, don’t send it.

When reaching out to somebody for the very first time, your sole job is to get them to reply. That’s it. Nothing else. Even if they reply, “no thank you”. A perfect first message might be:

“Hey Jake,

Are you currently working with anybody to [your proposition]?”

That’s it. Ask them a direct and blunt question. Get the reply and then take control of the dialogue. If they are interested you can send them links, case studies, videos in the second or third message. If they are not interested, you move on to the next person no hard feelings.

By getting to the point straight away, you will be less intrusive, it shows you respect their time and you make it very easy for them to reply.

4. Automate the boring stuff

Depending on the channel you choose, automate the things that take the most time. Automate sending connections on LinkedIn. Automate phone dials with cold calling software. You want to spend as much time selling and as little time doing admin. Find ways to improve your process to free up your time. Again this comes with improvement and iterating your sales process on one channel over time.

5. Don’t sell...seriously

Humans hate to be sold to. We get defensive and respond bluntly. Salespeople are tarnished with a bad rep but it is the sales team that can grow a business. You want them to become aware of you. Sure, you could watch YouTube sales videos like “Say these 3 words to CLOSE ANY DEAL”. And sometimes they work. But they piss off the majority of people.

Play the long game. Build a network of people who you are in dialogue with. People love to do business with people they like. If you are selling a B2B service, they might be interested in your product but the timing might be wrong. Forcing your product on somebody is pointless.

Build relationships, don’t sell.

6. Turn up every day - without fail

0.1% of salespeople worldwide are actually talented. They are born with the gift of the gab, people love them instantly and they can sell a glass of water to a drowning man. The likeliness you will ever meet somebody like that is close to zero.

The greatest salespeople turn up every day. Without fail. They do things they know will benefit them in the long run. Sales consistency compounds over time. Trust me, turn up every day. Even if you are finding people are interested but they are not converting into customers yet. Don’t stop. Momentum is a powerful force, use it to your advantage. Find a groove and turn up on your chosen sales channel every day. If not every day, every week at least.

“There is no talent. Just hard work.”

So there were a few simple tips to become a better salesperson. I hope some of you found value in this but if you didn’t find anything useful that you can apply then I apologise! I’d be more than happy to jump in here once a month with sales posts like these if people were interested, but I’ll leave that up to you.

In the meantime, I will go back to lurking around IH.

Cheers