How To Avoid Sales Mediocrity – If You’re New In the Profession
We get a lot of emails and requests from our Advanced Selling Podcast listeners about how to break into the profession of selling.
There is no shortage of tips and techniques out there, but here are five things that we believe you really need to “get” for you to be successful out of the gate. As a new salesperson in 2012, you have platforms and technology available to you that older people like us would kill for when we were starting. So one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to not take advantage of what’s been handed to you.
1. Get clear. This could pertain to many things like your personal goals, your income goals, the number of new clients you want in a 12-month period etc. But I think the biggest thing you can get clear about is “the problems you solve.” Clarity in that area will help you communicate your value and your intentions to your customer in a much more savvy way.
2. Get a method. 90% of sales people don’t have or don’t use any kind of a selling system or method to help prospects walk through the process. My contention is that most methods are just manipulative enough that sales people don’t like to use them. A great method should be less about convincing someone to buy from you and more about a process of sorting those who are tire-kickers and curious only, to those who are serious buyers. Sorting is the thing. Amateur sales people close 15% of their proposals; professionals close 80.
3. Get a coach. I know what you’re saying, “How can I afford a coach when I just started in sales?” My reaction to that is “It doesn’t matter. You must have a coach.” You must have someone there that you can confide in, whose shoulder you can cry on and who you can party with when things go well. But don’t make the coach your sales manager. They have too much skin invested in your success. Find someone, pay them if you like, who is unconditional about your success and doesn’t benefit in any way from it other than just the sharing of feeling of success, other than the feeling of knowing the coach contributed to your success in some small way.
4. Get a channel. Begin to collect your prospect’s and customer’s email addresses so that you have a channel that you can send out information to when it’s appropriate. A list of 1,000 names that are kept in five different software packages/CRM’s is not a channel. A channel is when you have 500 people who have asked you to be kept up to speed on things you learn; it’s your tribe. I must tell you this is not normal thinking for a salesperson. But Day One when you start in sales, you should be thinking, “How can I build my list today?”
5. Get aware. Through our work with high achievers in both sales and leadership over the last 20 years, we realized that one attribute sticks out as a common theme for high achievers: self-awareness. One example of this is the degree to which you keep people OK when you’re in dialogue with them. As a sales professional, you need to be hyper-conscious of what you say and how you behave in the context of, “Does it create an atmosphere for honesty with the prospect or does it do the opposite?”
But if you’re not self-aware, and you don’t know when you’re making someone feel uncomfortable or psychologically not okay, you’ll be able to do nothing to correct it. You will experience an average career in sales; some years up, some years down, but you’ll never realize the real issue: you couldn’t create an atmosphere for the truth because you had no awareness of how your behavior impacted those around you.
So there you have it; my five recommendations for those new in sales.
One Confession: If you ask me what the five things are this time next year, I’ll probably come up with five other ones. But if you can make the job of selling easy and authentic and heartfelt, you will achieve levels of success that others only dream about.
