5 Pieces of Sales Advice Every Salesperson Should Hear
Whenever a sales team gets together, tales from the battlefield are exchanged and advice is shared with newbies by the seasoned veterans to ensure that even if they’re green, they’ll appear like the professionals they’re expected to be.
You’ll normally hear the usual advice that you need to be well-dressed, well-coiffed, and well-spoken.
(And you may hear the best advice, which is to use an AI-Powered CRM, like Spiro to help you reach more prospects and close more deals.)
But besides from those pieces of advice, what else matters? Well, here are the five pieces of sales advice I think every salesperson should know.
1. Know Your Product
The first piece of advice any salesperson should be armed with is to know your product. If you don’t know everything there is to know about the product or service you’re selling, how do you expect to entice the customer into buying it? If you’re selling a physical product, learn the product manual forwards and backwards. Plan to have answers ready for any FAQs your customer might have. (PRO TIP: If you don’t know the answer, don’t fake it. Tell them you’ll find out and get back to them soon with the answer.)
Product knowledge is not only one of the greatest weapons in your sales arsenal, but some retailers believe it’s even more important than the sale itself! While that remains arguable, there is no denying that product knowledge will increase your ability to sell confidently, competently, and completely. Your customers will appreciate that you’ve taken the time to fully know the product you’re presenting, and this will likely result in gaining their business.
2. Share the Passion, Get the Cash-in
Enthusiasm is easy to come by, but the ability to share that enthusiasm with others and get them fired up about something is special. It is a much-coveted skill that only the best salespeople possess. If you share your passion for a product or service with customers, chances are they will be also be passionate about it, or at least interested.
Take a moment and think about when you share your passion for anything you’re a fan of in pop-culture. Fandom is infectious and fans become evangelists for their favorite movies, TV series, music and more. That same concept directly translates into the world of sales.
3. The ABCs of Selling
Quite possibly one of the most shared sales philosophies comes from the magnificent scene in Glengarry Glen Ross where Blake (Alec Baldwin) delivers an expletive-laden tirade to his sales team. He is trying to spark a fire in them and eliminate the weak from the closers. He famously says, “A-B-C. A…Always, B…Be, C…Closing. Always be closing. ALWAYS BE CLOSING.”
This is an important lesson to hammer home with any sales team. In that particular scene, the team was complaining about “weak leads”. The character points out that the leads aren’t “weak”, it’s that there are those who can close and those who can’t. If you’re in sales, you must Always Be Closing!
4. Know Your Competition
This almost goes without saying, but we’d be remiss if I didn’t say something about it. As when you do your business plan, you have to assess your market. One important part of that process is researching your competitors.
Rather than being competitive, you want to learn about (and from) these other businesses and how they fit into the overall local business ecosystem. How prosperous your competition is can be a good indicator for whether your own business can thrive in that same market.
5. Learn from Others’ Mistakes
They say that the definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over and expecting a different result. Let’s be blunt: everyone makes mistakes…often.
But everyone needs to be accountable, especially in sales, which are the backbone of any business. If sales aren’t strong, there goes any chances of holiday bonuses! So, with the idea that everyone makes mistakes, an ideal salesperson will learn not only from his or her own mistakes, but also learn from others’ mistakes. Thus averting the sanity trap that sales can become for so many.
In Conclusion…
If you’re new to sales, I hope that this list can help you get up to speed to find that inner-salesperson. Get out there and work those prospects, follow up on those leads, meet with those customers, and close those sales!
