Learn Sales the Right Way: Simple Steps

Cutting Through the Noise: A Realistic Guide to Learning Sales

I am pretty sure you are here because you want a quick answer to learn sales in the shortest time frame possible. That’s like wanting to learn how to do brain surgery and asking chatgpt how do I do it, just give me 5 steps. Sounds ridiculous right? That’s hysterical. Because learning sales takes time. Lots of it. Not to mention dedication and a boat load of NO’s. So if you are serious about learning sales it would make sense to forget a lot about what you may have read about sales in the past and continue reading so you can get a proper understanding of what this monumental task entails.

I'm sure you've been searching high and low all over the internet, searching many AI's, trying to get the answer to your burning questions about sales strategies and techniques, but I'm sure you keep coming up short. And there is so much information out there regarding who has the correct information and which advise should you take. It can be overwhelming and confusing to sift through it all. Imagine taking sales advise from an AI that has never sold anything to a human. That would be super weird. Though in some cases it can be super effective if you know what to look for, but chances are you don't hence the reason you are here. So, in this article I will give you actionable steps you can put into practice to learn sales.

1. In Order to Learn Sales, do this First

Ask yourself: What does the sales process look like, and what are the fundamental elements of my intended outcome:

Lead Generation
Prospecting
Qualifying Leads
Appointment Making
Presentation
Handling Objections
Closing the deal

2. Lead Generation is the initial Phase of Learning about Sales

Lead generation is the process of generating leads from a segmented target audience within a market that you have identified and think has a need for a service or product you are offering. An example of generating leads could involve providing free trials of your product or service in return for the lead's contact information.

Then, when you are ready to do your marketing and sales outreach, you have a direct connection to someone who you know has shown interest in or demand for your offering. The way I like to think about lead generation from a sales perspective is like a school of tuna.

The first part requires you to locate the tuna schools. Then you need to attract them and catch them as much as you can. Though, in the process of catching them, it is critical that you meticulously count, tag, and track each one of them. Even the ones you might not keep.

3. Prospecting is the Second Phase of Learning Sales

So, you want to learn sales and you have a lead generation process to follow. Since you have that you might also want to begin prospecting, so here are some effective strategies:

Fisrt let me just say that I am certain you already used an AI and looked for the definition of prospecting so I will skip the definition and get to the strategies from experience:

1: Content marketing is a great way to create helpful content that engages your audience, such as blogs, webinars, eBooks, or whitepapers. You can put them behind a gate, so a prospect would need to give you their email address before they can access them.

2: Content gating may deter some prospects who are wary of providing their email address, especially in industries like legal or healthcare. Alternative lead generation strategies, like networking events or direct outreach, may be more effective. Content marketing may not guarantee high-quality leads and limit the diversity of leads compared to other strategies.

3: Account-based marketing targets high-value, warm prospects and companies with personalized campaigns and tailored messaging. Industry events are an important channel for building relationships, generating topical authority, and collecting contacts simultaneously. To learn sales in an effective way, it entails becoming a student of all the available channels at every stage.

4. Qualifying leads is Critical if you want to Learn Sales

If you want to be seriously efficient at sales qualification, you need to look at your closing ratios. Focusing on the buyer's challenges can help you learn sales effectively. Engaging in qualification also gives you a higher caliber of clients relative to buyer interest. This type of lead is probably going to buy a product similar to yours, even if you would have never interacted with them in the first place. In order to do this successfully, a lot of calls have to be made. And a lot of pitches have to be given.

Instead of randomly speaking with a bunch of leads without prioritizing, you can find yourself wasting a lot of time. Hence, this is why you should use a simple A, B, and C system to place all of your hot leads in the A column, warm leads in the B column, and all of your cold leads in the C column. This would allow you to systematically call or present your offering in a chronological manner.

5. Appointment Making: Learn Sales with this Follow-up Phase

This is a section I find too often many sales courses and guides leave out. I am sure that I am one of the first to bake it into the sales process and give it the highlight it deserves. This area is actually where I have realized most salespeople fail and/or hinder the sales process all together.

Your job requires that you learn sales, yet a lot of organizations don’t ensure that the learning process is ongoing, that's why so many salesperson gets dissatisfied and begin hating sales, but it doesn't have to be that way.

If your appointment setting is done by:

identifying yourself professionally and authoritatively,
quickly stating the purpose of the call, and
quickly asking for a small portion of the lead's time to show them what you have to offer.

The trick is that the time you are asking for has already been prepared, so you could offer the time slots you think might be far out into the following days or weeks, and they most likely won't say no. It works for me 90% of the time.

This stage is about contacting the leads in order of priority. Most likely, you are going to start with the A column. Then you are going to use your template script to communicate with the contact to set the appointment. This in itself is the hurdle. You have to have a well crafted call script that encourages and motivates the contact to want to meet with you to get information about what you have to offer.

Though there can also be situations where you may have to close sales over the call itself, that is more of a transactional nature, which is outside the scope of this article. Here, we must focus more complex products and services with longer sales cycles and procedures.

6. Presentation: Learn Sales and Create an Awesome Pitch

For some reason you usually hear about people who want to learn sales, but presentations is an area most salespeople don't practice from my experience. To practice, you should look at as many presentations as possible. The large and the small, down to the one-on-one presentation. You need exposure to see how it should be done correctly.

This is very hard to teach in a classroom setting because the pressures are just not the same. Presenting to a class or a training group has nowhere near the level of pressure you'd have presenting or pitching to a business group where a big check is riding on it. This is where being a good chaperone will allow you to witness from your "sales coach" or "senior salesperson" how it is done. And hopefully, you soak it all in.

The other thing is, it would be self-sabotage to have the capability to perform in your presentation but not actually have a well-designed presentation to begin with. Taking the time to craft your brand's colors, wording, images, audio, video, website snapshots, product snap shots, customer reviews (if you have them), and whatever else you believe the lead needs to see.

Here are a few items you must have and perfect to be successful at this stage. Don't forget to practice your presentation skills in front of a mirror or with a friend to ensure you come across confidently. It's also important to tailor your presentation to the specific needs and interests of your audience for maximum impact. Additionally, make sure to have a clear call to action at the end of your presentation so that potential leads know what steps to take next.

7. Handling Objections

To learn sales is to learn how to handle objections. This is something that is inevitable. Most salespeople hate it, but I love it. It tells me that I can begin selling because you haven't up until that point where they have an objection, concern, or flat out tell you, "No, I don't want it." Though when you segment your market correctly, target the right leads, qualify them effectively, and set your appointments appropriately, I've found that you rarely get an outright "no." If you were to get a "no," it would have happened earlier in the process, but either way, you should be prepared for the concerns your leads have in your niche.

Here are some tips:

1. Investigate the industry you are in thoroughly to gather as much information about what methods of purchase and payment options they prefer and what processes they usually follow.

2. Always have questions you know by heart to ask leads and prospects at the stages of lead generation and prospecting (this is where you should be collecting and filtering your no's and testing whether you can turn them into yeses.).

3. Always have a mini presentation prepared (in the event you have the opportunity to qualify then and there and move through to presenting if you are seeing strong buying signals from the lead).

8. Closing the Deal

This phase is where we would like to be the most successful, of course, yet it is an elusive beast. But you must master at least a few closing scripts for your targeted niche. There are so many different closing concepts and techniques that it can be very intimidating for salespeople to learn them all. The question is, do you really need to know them all? I strongly think not. This is because your niche is your niche, and buying behaviours are not going to be far apart amongst your leads. The will be very similar and depending on the industry it might actually be exactly the same. What it will come down to a few things:

Personality
Position at the company
Authority at the company
Level of risk aversion
How painful their problem is
Do they have the budget?
How many people are involved in making purchase decisions?
Planned buying cycles of the company they are with

There are a few more but as a starting point you have more than enough fledgling information here for you to get off on a good foot in front of either your peers or competitors. Just remember that this is a starting point condensed into a very short article. Everyone of these phases has entire books written about them, so this is just a guide for you to follow and help you navigate with certainty.

Eric G. Charles

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