The Hallmark of a Good Salesman
Everything I learned was from selling menus on the internet to burger joints and pizzerias
I used to be a camelback-wearing twenty something year old cold calling diners in South Dakota to convince them to get their menus put up on the internet. It was 2013 and I had found myself ‘starting over’ after departing from Bloomberg and a friend of mine called me and said “hey, why don’t you come to SinglePlatform and learn how to sell?” I needed to pay rent and saw how well she was doing so I took my chance. I went into my two week intensive training and then I hit the floors with a water camelback on (stay hydrated while cold calling!) and a standing desk to make sure I was in a “power position.” I know, I know, I sound like a foolish caricature but it was my way of having fun with a job that was seen as repetitive and mentally taxing. This job is where I learned to sell - I mean really SELL! Those nine months in the boiler room environment set the foundation for the rest of my career and left me with transferrable lessons about sales that I find myself recalling often.
Leave your ego at the door
Your customer doesn’t care who you are, where you come from or how many sales you’ve made that week. Your customers care about solving THEIR PROBLEM. If you want to win, you have to be ‘buyer centric’ and focus on how you’re going to help them solve their problems, not advance your own agenda.
“Consistency is the Hallmark of a Good Salesman”
Showing up every day, putting in the work, making the calls, not getting emotionally invested in every outcome and not relying on “happy ears” to meet your number. The best sales people would put in the work and consistently hit their numbers. While we certainly had some anomaly sales reps who got lucky and ended a month in the top 5, the best ones were at the top month after month. The top sales rep, Jen B, was consistently #1 for months at a time and she routinely made more calls and sent more emails than anyone else on the team by a long shot. A ‘free man is a routined man’ and a great salesperson follows a routine.
They Reflect, what you Project
We would often say, “the best time to make a sale is after you make a sale.” The confidence you exude is through the roof after a sale and it comes through in your tone. It’s not just after a sale though, it’s in the pursuit of new business or when pitching. Your tone and attitude are reflected back to the customer and if you’re confident, trusting and sincere, the client will often mirror that back. If your bubbly and somewhat fake, the customer will often times respond in a similarly dubious way. If you’re naturally confident and it comes off positively, great! If you’re in a bad mood then mentally trick yourself and find something positive in your life so that when you’re in a selling motion you come off favorably.
Define your deadlines and set input goals
There was always a deadline looming at Singleplatform and that aided in the urgency to perform right now! It was always LDOM (Last day of the Month), LDOW (Week), LDOQ (Quarter) and I would set personal goals of my inputs like “I’m going to make 50 cold calls today” or “I’m going to do all my follow up before 9am” on specific days. Regardless of the outcome, that helped me prove that I could reach personal goals that were intermittent on the road to my number and those deadlines were rocket juice on my efforts.
Objection handling
When objection handling you should always deliver an easy answer followed by a closing question. The client asks “How does the warranty work?” I answer “5 year warranty, longest in the industry…So when can we set up your install date?” Also, when a customer pushes back or starts to share their desire to choose a competitor, never respond with a defensive answer, but rather with confusion and a seek-to-understand mentality. You might be surprised how quickly that garners trust and actually reopens the door to the discussion when you thought the deal was dead.
Playing Buyer and Tailoring the pitch
When presenting a premium solution you have to be selective with your clients. Tire kickers want to waste your time so you have to weed them out quickly and find your ideal customer profiles. Even if you are a quota carrying sales rep, you still have to know when to flip the script and play buyer yourself. Tell your prospective customer that they’re not a good fit for you or share that you’re busy with large projects and that while you’d love to work with them, you need to see them lean in a bit more before you’d spend time with them. It’s a tactic that works as all people want scarce resources - so make your time a scarce resource. When you do spend time with a client, make sure to tailor their experience - bring in relevant examples, share the names of the peers in their market that you work with and garner a level of trust based on relevancy.
Singleplatform is where I cut my teeth
I’ll never forget the training and coaching from Bress, Grady and Adam when I arrived in Battery Park in 2013 and the ensuing months rapping on our call sheet and ‘smiling and dialing.’
While the selling motion was incredibly transactional in nature (‘one call closes’ and ‘sign up or hang up’ monikers), the lessons still apply for any sales motion and I’m excited to continue to preach these strategies - but maybe without a water satchel on my back this time.