Let’s say it’s your first day on a new job, in a new industry, selling a new product, that you’re completely uneducated on. You not only have to learn how to sell the product, you gotta learn what the product is and what it does.
Most salespeople rely solely on their sales skills to hopefully work their way into closing some sales. If you’re a killer closer this may work, but many people will need help.
The normal sales manager or boss tells the salesperson to smile and dial. They say, “Keep hitting the phones until you knock a sale out,” but that KO never comes for a lot of salespeople.
Here’s a much faster way to learn how to sell anything.
I’m giving you a better process to educate yourself that will make the company’s current clients feel good about doing business, too.
First, ask your manager or boss for a list of 100-200 current clients. They don’t have to be the best clients. Hell, some of them need to be bad clients. You definitely want to hear from all types.
Then make a survey of questions to ask each current customer. Questions like:
“What made you decide to become a client?”
“How has our product benefited you?”
“Do you recommend our product to your friends and family?”
And so on…
Make a list of about 6-10 questions to ask the clients. You don’t want to wing this. But have the same questions ready for each customer to answer.
Once you make the list of questions, start calling and surveying the clients your manager gave you. This is how you can quickly educate yourself on why people buy and what the benefits are.
Take notes on each client and update them in the CRM. This also lets the company know how the customers feel. It’s good feedback for everyone and puts you in good standing with HR and the other sales staff.
The average sales guy smiles and dials, sells and fails over and over again. This can be a really tough way to start a new sales job. It’s tough on you mentally as well. All those “no’s” without any idea of how to answer questions is frustrating for even the most elite sales guy.
When you use this process you’ll get good feedback from people who have already paid and who are shooting you straight. It’s the best way to learn what to sell that I know of.
Every time we start a new salesperson off in my companies we use this exact process to onboard them. We let them gather surveys and feedback for training on week one. And we don’t turn them loose on new prospects until they have done 200 surveys.
It works.
Our sales staff feels secure about our products, and they even get referrals from some of the clients they survey—always a nice bonus for the new guy.
If you want to learn how to better train your sales staff or want to get better at sales yourself, check out our inbound lead selling system at www.inboundleadcloser.com
