So I spent 6 months or so sitting in a room with 3 really good salespeople selling solar power systems to homeowners (anywhere from $20k up). The things I noticed, listening to their phone patter, etc.<p>- Building trust is the most important thing in getting to a close. The buyer has to feel like you're working for them, and that your knowledge is valuable. In the end they should feel that you've done such a great job helping them figure out all the options and pitfalls, that they're very happy to pay you a commission.<p>- Feeding and monitoring the pipeline and allocating your time matters. You get many people with just casual interest. You have to serve them well, but also not misallocate time, as you have to devote the majority of time to people who are closer to the actual sale. So you have to be able to judge how serious people are. CRMs (i.e. Sales Force) are your best friends.<p>- Despite the last point, sometimes big sales appear out of the blue, from customers you thought you lost, or someone you met at a party, or whatever. Network a lot and never burn your bridges.<p>- "Hard" selling doesn't work.<p>- There's no one "salesman" personality. There's traits you need (especially that you enjoy talking to people), but the 3 guys were all over the map.
Spin selling is a great book and the statistical insights are some of the few you'll see in sales literature. However, aggressive closing is usually not the fault of the salesman, but the fault of the sales manager or the CEO. Successful sales teams don't pressure their prospects to buy because their managers understand that "big ticket" sales cycles are long and require multiple steps and multiple parties.<p>Putting a sales executive on difficult quota will lead to high pressure and terrible closes, even winners curse from the buyer.<p>Take the pressure off everyone and deals will close themselves.
I've spent time selling SaaS products to SMBs and I really like the point about helping the customer sell the product to the rest of the organization. It's not enough to dazzle the customer into saying yes - you need to arm them with the tools to convince their boss/accountant/partners that this is the best solution.
This is top notch advise. Noone wants to be sold to. Selling our SaaS products, I found that the best way to close is to ask prospects to educate <i>you</i> about their problems(related to your product, of course). You don't need to lie, tell them you are trying to learn more on a specific use case for your product - and that they are doing you a huge favor by helping you with that! People usually like to help. If you're asking the right questions, they might actually close the deal for you.
The article recommends a sales book based on research rather than war stories. It sounds interesting, but isn't available on Kindle. I really thought Amazon would have enough sway to get the Long tail of books onto their format. Does anyone know the major impediments to this? Is it publisher reluctance? Is it merely an issue with priority and effort doing the work to get older items into Kindle format?
a family member of mine did a lot of freelance work for Huthwaite during the .com boom. they had a huge, luxurious "office park" that was a thousand acres of farmland and old buildings in western loudoun. they basically imploded after .com and I honestly thought they had been pushed out of business (they had to, in fact, sell the farm).<p>everything my family member described about their consulting and business process sounded very BS-full. they would charge tons of money to provide reports of little value to companies that were working with VC money. sound familiar?
This book was one of a small list on an informal sales training class that I took. After reading it, I started to get impatient when people didn't follow it. Every time I'd get a monster slide deck sales presentation on a firm, I would think, "They have an hour of my time, and they're not asking what I want."<p>Great sales really does add value to a customer.