What I’ve learned from sitting next to a pro salesman

The bit about cold calls working better than anticipated rings true. I advised a company I help out with not to bother cold calling, because it never works, and was embarrassed to learn a few months later that it had been extremely effective just to have the founder ring random people up.<p>The bit about remembering names, deploying kids names, and talking about football --- that part does not ring true. I&#x27;ve done sales work for my last startup, and before that a as a product manager had a sales-support role where most of the people I talked to every day were account managers, and even though I know this &quot;talk about football&quot; stuff is what salespeople are supposedly doing, I never saw that happen.<p>Taking people out to dinner? Obviously, different story. But on the phone, especially early on? All business.<p>The most important thing I think salespeople do that ordinary people don&#x27;t do is Ask For The Sale.

This sounds like a lot of the great advice in How to Win Friends and Influence People [1]<p>I read that book yearly, and learn something every time.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0671027034&#x2F;?tag=roadchoseme-20" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0671027034&#x2F;?tag=roadchoseme-20</a>

These tactics work. I purchase technology for an &quot;enterprisey&quot; type company and these definitely help make sales to me.<p><i>However</i>, they do not work on their own. There still needs to be a strong value proposition, good fit between the product and the need, lots of technical info to satisfy suspicion and curiosity, a reasonable contract, etc.<p>What these tactics do is help get the conversation to a place where it can be substantive. I&#x27;m busy, you&#x27;re busy, we&#x27;re all busy. I&#x27;m going to say no, reflexively, to any conversation I&#x27;m not initiating or continuing--to anyone I don&#x27;t recognize.<p>If someone sounds tentative or scared, if they don&#x27;t seem to know a thing about me or my employer, if they can&#x27;t just hold a normal human conversation, I don&#x27;t know why I would want to talk to them.<p>Any product or service that is sold by a person is going to involve a relationship. Services and products need training, support, and improvements. The sales person is almost always going to be my champion in that relationship, because they want an easy renewal or upgrade. So if I don&#x27;t trust the salesperson, it&#x27;s hard to trust that I will get the support and service I&#x27;m sure I will need at some point.

At this point I don&#x27;t answer a call that isn&#x27;t in my contacts. I sign up for a trial of some cloud service and it is like clockwork, 2-3 days afterwards I get a cold call from someone in sales. It&#x27;s like they are all following the same playbook at this point and it&#x27;s ruined the effectiveness of the strategy, at least on me...

Training over 1,000s of sales people of SaaS Start-ups by sitting next to them making the call, I like to share some insights on this topic:<p>This is a great story BUT: + This was a professional, there are few of them left, also there are fewer and fewer people who like to &quot;talk to a stranger on the phone&quot; + This does not scale for many reasons, you simply can&#x27;t train this + This only applies to a certain kind of sale<p>So how do you cold call in a scalable and trainable way - in todays always on economy:<p>COLD + Never make it COLD - but you can do plenty of other things before you call, visit their LI profile, retweet something, share their post, etc.<p>CALL + There are many ways to CALL - make it based on their behavior&#x2F;role, calling an IT manager on the phone is not going to be appreciated, but calling an HR person may be. When you call make sure you do something along the following lines - this can be copied:<p>1) Make this about them 2) Show them you have done the research (have LI profile open) 3) Give straight answers if they ask straight questions 4) Do NOT pitch, instead share how others have benefited 5) Offer them value... 6) Follow the conversation, ask, listen, summarize what they said... 7) Try to ask a handful of questions to diagnose their problem, NOT to sell them something<p>You can find more via this article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;pulse&#x2F;why-sales-teams-need-trade-pitches-online-jacco-van-der-kooij" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;pulse&#x2F;why-sales-teams-need-trade-pi...</a><p>Hope this helps. Jacco.

I really don&#x27;t like the small talk bit. I don&#x27;t want to chat about football, the weather, or necessarily my kid. I love him to death and I think he&#x27;s awesome, but I&#x27;m usually busy at work. I want to get information, find out what&#x27;s actionable, and get back to work.

I get a lot of recruiters insisting on calling me instead of e-mailing their vacancies. I figure they aim for the same effect as with sales techniques described in this article. However, I am not a native English speaker and these calls end even faster than an e-mail conversation.<p>It&#x27;s much easier to decline in a foreign language than in your own. All the emotional cues get filtered through the language barrier and even if I understand them perfectly they do not bear any direct impact.<p>I suspect I am not the only one so I&#x27;d advise people to adjust their cold calling strategies accordingly. It might be worth to have sales calls in your target&#x27;s native tongue even if you are not fluent or switch to e-mail in such a case.

I know some great commercial real estate brokers. The very successful ones are the ones that you want to talk with when they call because they are extremely funny and entertaining. That&#x27;s the mark of a great salesman. They are so much fun to be around that you want to take their calls, drive around and look at property with them, etc.

&gt; I asked him after what it was about and he told me this dude’s kid was sick this week. Why would I care? Why would our salesman care?<p>This is the fundemental principle in a way. People naturally care about each other and want to be cared about. It doesn&#x27;t always work out in practice because many things can get in the way: Time, stress, competing concerns, fear, etc. But we&#x27;re social animals, down to the biological level. Understanding that about others and about yourself can help you with sales and with many more important human relations.

This is great advice for anyone working with people, period. Folks are a lot more willing to work with someone who respects them and appears interested in them as a human being.<p>And if you&#x27;re interested in any kind of leadership position, these skills are absolutely vital, as they are the way you build a rapport with the people you&#x27;re leading.

Great advice for all start ups - from experience at many companies, quite a few career salespeople miss a number of the points mentioned here. The value is so easy to extract - we should all be able to let the grammar pass for a man that is taking the time to share - especially where his first language is not English.

If people can get past the poor English (and seriously, his English is much better than my Hebrew!), this is a great little article about salesmanship.<p>I particularly like the bit about concluding with something concrete. That&#x27;s great advice

Thank you. I sure learned something read your article. Please keep posting :)

I stuck with it to the end, but man, the lack of proofreading almost had me closing the browser tab. I&#x27;m not talking mistakes only a grammar Nazi would care about, but the kind where I read the sentence three times and still ask &quot;what the hell does this mean?&quot; I don&#x27;t mean to be snarky, but maybe that&#x27;s why emails to leads wasn&#x27;t working so well. Bad grammar is my first filter for spam.<p>Other than that, the article was okay. Good point about getting on the phone. Email is easy, but it also makes easy to say &quot;no&quot;, or just delete it and say nothing.

My problem with these tips is that there&#x27;s some hidden underlying assumption baked in it that you think you are so smart and other people are so driven by their emotions that oh just because you mentioned them by name now they are going to behave so differently. I don&#x27;t know about everyone but it sure as hell wont work on me.