Top 4 Tips for All Types of Salespeople

“What’s it take to be successful in sales?”

Over the years, we’ve been asked this question a lot. And the fact of the matter is that there’s no one size fits all response to this question.

There are different types of sales; products, services, solutions, the business segments that you target.
There are different types of sales roles, too; sales development, account executives, customer success (which more often than not has a massive sales component), leadership, and more.

That said, there are certainly some tricks of the trade that every salesperson can adopt to be more successful.

Here are our Top 4 Tips for Success in Sales 👇

Fall in Love with the Effort

Let’s get this out of the way: Sales is hard.

There are few, if any other types of roles within a company that present the recurring, consistent challenge that sales folks confront day-in and day-out. The “success” metrics for most sales roles are rooted in consistent attainment of challenging goals within each successive time period. Designed correctly, however, that consistent achievement — or over achievement — is met with financial rewards that allow the salesperson to be the highest earner within a company.

The notion that you can simply show up and achieve is a gross misnomer. If you’ve spent time in sales, you know this to be true. Every now and then you might get lucky, but on the whole you have to confront the realization that in order to be great or to reap the financial rewards associated with being a top-tier performer on a consistent-basis, you have to put in the effort.

Many of the best salespeople we know personally are consistent and high-performing at the things most other salespeople hate or cast to the side as “unimportant”.

A good example here is cold calling. Rather than fall prey to the constant cycle of procrastination, a good way to get yourself into the flow of consistent activity, our suggestion would be to gamify it. Find a colleague to “compete” with, tracking dials, meetings set, etc. If there’s no one to compete against, set something up with yourself. Block off time, set a goal, and if you achieve it, “pay” yourself with a treat, a short break, or something similar. There’s a Pavlionian effect in building some sort of rewards system.

Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

For us, this is tied to a massive misnomer that many salespeople hold themselves accountable to. It’s the idea that we have to know everything about everything. In practice, this is, well — impossible.

You won’t know the answer to every question. But the reality is that you don’t have to. Those moments of discomfort where you’re asked something pointed and important, but you’re unsure are excellent opportunities to build credibility. A simple, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out” is often the easiest path — and it’s certainly better than the alternative which is to lie.

More broadly, you can attach this mindset of being comfortable with the uncomfortable to adopting a mindset of always learning.

You won’t always be perfect.
You won’t always be at 125%+ of your goal.
You won’t always know all of the latest and greatest tools.

Here’s the problem: Many of us want to project the idea that we’re the masters of the universe.

We’ve seen it all.
We’ve sold it all.
We know it all.

Shedding the ego and allowing yourself the opportunity to be vulnerable is a much more effective way to live, and certainly a much more effective way to navigate business relationships + scenarios.

You didn’t come into this profession knowing everything, and the reality is that you should always be adding to that arsenal of knowledge to better yourself.

Embrace that! The more you accept opportunities to become better rather than applying a defensive stance, the better off you’ll be. If nothing else, you open yourself up to having the chance to filter in the good + filter out the bad, applying what is most meaningful to the achievement of your goals.

Measure, Measure, Measure… And Pinpoint

**Assuming you and your team are using your CRM in the way that it’s intended to be used, data is the most objective storyteller at our disposal. Salespeople tend to lean on their hunches rather than the critical data points that are enormously accessible to tell them what’s going well and what isn’t.

**Note: CRM compliance and standardization is something that so many of the folks we work with seem to struggle with prior to coming onboard. This is largely because there aren’t firm definitions around process (what to do, when) and definitions associated with various lead + opportunity stages. Without this, you leave a lot to be desired in terms of usable data sets to drive decision making from a management standpoint, for sure. But this also impacts a rep’s ability to have a true apples to apples comparison of performance relative to his/her peers.

This often presents a level of cognitive dissonance relative to what we tell ourselves is happening versus what is really happening. At least once a month, sales reps and their managers need to be taking the pulse of the data to pinpoint exactly where there are opportunities to improve. Managers should use these points in time as teachable moments, helping their reps shore up weaknesses, play to strengths, and make their reps better. Sales reps need to be open to those uncomfortable conversations and willing to understand the full breadth of their current skillset to maximize where they need to put some focused attention to improve. It’s much less about punishment and more about skills development.

But going back to the original point — without letting data tell that story as to where the opportunities to improve are, you’re simply guessing. It’s like applying a cookie-cutter solution for our prospects, where we simply give the same solution to everyone, irrespective of what they do, who they are, and what their challenges might be. If you’ve followed along to our previous posts, that doesn’t work in today’s day and age. Similarly, it doesn’t work to develop sales skills, either.

Humanization of Sales Activities with Intellectual Curiosity

Here’s a bit of advice that your sales trainer of yester-year is going to absolutely hate:

Throw your sales script in the garbage.

That’s right. Crumble it up, tear it into shreds, and toss it into the garbage bin.

For all this talk on social media about being our “authentic self”, salespeople are still relying way too heavily on canned communications that do little to put our personalities on display. We all have quirks in the way in which communicate. There’s a comfortable way in which we converse with friends and family that isn’t forced. It allows us to get our points across clearly, and it’s so engrained in who we are that forcibly changing those dynamics actually hurt our ability to sell effectively.

We’re big believers in dynamic frameworks. What this allows sales reps to do is operate within clearly defined bounds to achieve informational outcomes to help us sell. How you get there is up to your comfortable communication structure.

The massive difference is that it humanizes those interactions between prospects, clients, and salespeople.

It’s authentic.
It’s real.
It’s meaningful.

An easy way to adopt this is to approach those interactions through a lens of intellectual curiosity. Asking questions + providing context gives you those informational points that ultimately allow you to sell on/against the meaningful priorities for your counterpart. Using phrases like the following can be a salesperson’s best friend:

“Help me understand how…”
”Out of curiosity, what does…”
and our personal favorite…

“Why?”