How To Start Your Sales Career With A Bang
Every week I search for the top sales professionals to bring you their top tips for success – this week we prove that age ain’t nothing but a number.
I caught up with a rising star in the software industry, Sara Sophia of LogMeIn. Sara is an account executive for their product join.me, which is a great collaboration tool that is widely used across the globe (and by yours truly). Despite her relative new comer status, she was quickly recognized for her skills and was asked to share her wisdom at LogMeIn’s 2015 global Sales And Marketing Kickoff.
Sara is currently prepping for a move to London to hang out with the royals and help join.me’s EU sales team crush it, but found the time to sit with me to talk about her top three tips for success.
If you take Sara’s top three tips in order, they read almost like a nicely packaged sales methodology that can help you start your sales career with a bang.
Qualify Quality With Questions Quickly, or Quit*
Knowing when to quit and move on is something that’s hard to have a feel for (especially in sales and relationships). So how do savvy sales professionals such as Sara handle it? They attack it head on, and qualify an opportunity right away to assess a fit.
And how does one qualify the best opportunities? By taking a consultative approach and asking the right questions. Taking a proactive approach and identifying the decision makers. Ask about the timing, budget, and fit. Fit is especially important – trying to force a solution to make a sale will only hurt you in the long term.
*If you can send me a recording of you saying this 3 times in a row fast, without messing up, I will send you a $10 iTunes gift card. No joke. justin@SpiroHQ.com.
Persist, Persist, and…Persist
Being persistent seems obvious, but you’d be surprised at how scared some sales professionals can be of smothering a potential customer. Sara has a personal rule about contact – an opportunity must get some love once every three days (and she uses Spiro’s sales automation CRM to help remind her to do this)!
This ‘love’ isn’t just checking in however – every contact has a clear goal and purpose. We’re not here to waste any time – have an end date in mind for your goals and organize your meetings so that every time you converse you have an opportunity to advance further along that time frame.
One way that Sara keeps things fresh with her clients is that she will change up her methods of contact. A phone call one day will net you an email the next time. Sara even goes as far as to make sure she keeps her subject headers new and interesting. This change up in communication channel keeps things fresh with the customer and helps to keep that overly attached girlfriend feeling at minimum.
What’s The Worst They Can Say? No?
Sara was clear that while her first two tips helped to put her in the best possible situation to close a deal, expanding her opportunities is what really helped her crush her quota. How did she go about expanding her deals? By being fearless.
Sara stressed to not be afraid of simply asking customers about the potential for more business or needs in other departments. A go-to of hers is to ask about company growth (who isn’t trying to grow?). You’re not likely going to lose a sale by simply asking, and what’s the worst that can happen? They say no? It never hurts to ask the question.
In Conclusion
Sara’s been able to follow these tips for a quick way to start your sales career with a bang. So, as a thank you to Sara, here are some of my own tried and true London tips:
- Shrimp = Prawns
- Elevator = Lift
- Apartment = Flat
- They don’t really mean it when they call something “brilliant”
- If you’re not going to walk up the escalator, stand to the right!
Photos courtesy of Flickr user Chris Chabot.
