When we set out Brian Tracy’s 22 commandments for being a good salesperson, we argued in point two that becoming an excellent salesperson is more of an inner task than anything else. You can learn hundreds of sales techniques, and yes, you’ll probably improve somewhat, but it isn’t enough. That’s why today we’re going to give a few starter tips for salespeople.
Sales is a field where copying a good salesperson’s techniques doesn’t always work either. In fact, many sales reps copy the techniques and pitches of the best, and they don’t get the same results. That’s down to other factors that have more to do with the salesperson’s own personality, beliefs and confidence. And while you need to be efficient, effectiveness gets better results, but excellent results come from tenacity.
Tips for being a good salesperson
1. Manage your time properly
Every salesperson has the same number of hours in the day to achieve their goal. Nobody enjoys a competitive advantage when it comes to time.
Time is the most valuable resource we have, and most sales reps waste most of theirs in unproductive, unrewarding ways. Which brings us to the next point…
2. Focus
It seems logical to think that even if you’re wasting time at the office or in a café, on the phone sorting out a personal problem or wondering who you’re going to visit, the moment you’re in front of a customer you’ll be at 100% of your capacity. It may sound like nonsense, but the brain doesn’t work quite like that. Even elite athletes isolate themselves before an important competition, when their event may be more physical than psychological. When you get distracted, your brain has to reboot.
Those of us from the old school used the time between visits to analyse where we had gone wrong with the customer and what other ways we could have countered their objections. We even used our time in the café to reread the summary of tips we had picked up from some book. That way, we got our motivation back.
I always saw working in sales as a university with paid practical classes: work + learning.
And yes, the old school was more efficient than the generation of sales reps who “chat on WhatsApp between one customer and the next”.
At times you’ll think you’re tired of visiting so many customers
But visiting customers, or learning from the experience of those visits, is probably what you’ve spent the least time on all day. And that brings us, once again, to the next point…
(See: Why you should know your PER as a salesperson)
3. Spend 5 or 10 minutes prioritising the next day
One way to avoid having to think about what you’re going to do today, where you’re going to go, which customer you’re going to call… is as simple as planning your priorities the day before. Doing it this way saves time and mental energy when you start the day. Don’t waste effort, time and energy on unimportant things. Good salespeople devote them only to what really matters.
4. Put all your focus on one thing, both at work and in your free time
Just as the usual advice is to leave your personal life outside working hours and devote yourself solely to your job, we also recommend forgetting about work in your free time. In other words, if you’re with your family or on a date, switch off your phone for work matters. Don’t mix the two. Enjoy your work, and enjoy your free time too.
Live everything you do intensely, whatever it is. You need to be productive both in your job and in your personal life, because if looking after work ruins your relationships, when those people tell you to get lost, I can tell you right now that you’ll sell a lot less.
(See: 14 secrets and truths about selling)
5. Don’t worry about something until it’s time to worry about it
This tip came from Tim Ferriss in The 4-Hour Workweek. If it’s Friday and you can’t do anything to fix a problem until Monday, don’t even open your email, because there could be a serious problem with a customer (which you couldn’t do anything about until Monday) and you’d spend the whole weekend worrying about it.
So worries should come in their own time, and one way to avoid them is not to look at them until we can do something about them.
6. When you’re rejected, take the lesson and let go of the negative emotion of the “no”
Nobody likes being turned down, rejected or even spoken to rudely, but that’s part of the job in sales, so excellent salespeople have their minds well prepared so that it doesn’t affect them in the same way. A refusal or a curt reply is nothing personal between you and the customer, because they don’t know you. So don’t make so much of it.
Get used to rejection, and to putting it out of your mind once you’ve drawn the lesson from it. And if you had a bad day yesterday, don’t carry it around in your head today. Every day should be a new day where you start from zero, not from “minus ten”. This piece of advice, linked to positive thinking, is very obvious. Everyone in sales knows it, but hardly anyone manages to apply it. That’s what we mean by the need to work on our inner selves, thoughts included.
7. Always go after the best
When you look for role models, always look for the best. Don’t compare yourself with salespeople who get mediocre results to console yourself about your own mediocre results. Compare yourself with the best. That should be your goal. Learn from them, stick close to them, try to spend as much time with them as you can.
Needless to say, avoid surrounding yourself with negative people who always make excuses to explain their dismal results.
Remember: when you’re in a group, always try to be the dumbest person in it, not the smartest.
“The incompetent look for a group of fools so they can stand out among them, while successful people look for a group of people smarter than themselves so they can learn.”
8. Help others
I’ve known good salespeople who sadly fell into arrogance. That’s probably why they never became excellent. Don’t see your colleagues as competition. If you can help them and encourage them along the way, do it. That behaviour creates synergies and satisfaction for everyone involved, and it also shows leadership skills.
As we’ve said before, an excellent way to learn is also to teach others. Sales is like other areas of life: today you’re helping and supporting someone who needs it, and tomorrow you might need support yourself. Try to have everyone remember you as “the excellent salesperson who helped anyone who needed it”, not as “that arrogant guy who was very good at sales”.
Even so, take it for granted that along the way you’ll make enemies simply because you get good results. But that’s their problem, not yours.
9. Drop the salesman’s patter
Many things that worked in the past look ridiculous today. I still see some hopelessly outdated sales techniques being taught. Nowadays nobody believes that “you’ve been selected as one of five lucky people in the city to get the product or service at half price”. “I’m one of the lucky ones? How lucky am I!!! Now get lost.” Which brings us to the next point…
10. Keep learning
Knowledge has come a long way since Brian Tracy. Today, thanks to neuroscience applied to sales, we know that it’s more effective to teach a salesperson how a customer’s brain works than to teach them hundreds of sales techniques. And not only the customer’s brain, but the salesperson’s own brain as well.
We gave an example in 10 psychological techniques to sell more.
See also: “Donald Trump is the best salesman I’ve ever met” – Barbara Corcoran
In fact, these days when I want to train professional salespeople, rather than sales books (although those too), I advise them to extract the main ideas from the books Influence by Robert Cialdini, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink, and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. The last of these is very focused on psychology, but it’s a gold mine for salespeople, professionals, investors and business owners.
11. Follow up with your customers
Many salespeople forget this part of the sales business. Before they are financial figures, customers are people, and if we treat them as such, our financial figures will grow and so will our personal satisfaction.
When we looked at the cases of the best and the second-best car salesman in the world, following up with customers was part of the formula for success.
The secret of success lay in “paying a fair price and getting the customer to like you”. And if you also followed up with the customer, they would recommend you to their friends without your having to ask.
(See: The formula for being an excellent salesperson, according to the world’s best car salesman)
12. Always strive to achieve more
Tom Hopkins, author of Selling for Dummies, sums up perfectly the philosophy of success in sales and in any area of life:
If you learn more,
you’ll help more,
so you’ll build more,
and so you’ll earn more,
so you’ll save more,
and you can keep on helping more.
13. Take responsibility for your actions
Here’s Brian Tracy:
The difference between winners and losers in sales is very clear. Winners always accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Losers never do; instead, they always have a good excuse to explain why they aren’t selling. Winners know that if they don’t sell, it isn’t because of bad luck, a bad patch, the customer and so on… they know that the sale depends solely and exclusively on their skills as salespeople.
The first step to learning from a mistake is knowing that we are the ones responsible for the mistake and the cause of the result. There is no other way to improve in sales.
And I’ll finish with another line from Brian Tracy: the biggest difference between a successful salesperson and a mediocre one is that the first works harder than the second. That’s all there is to it. The average salesperson wastes 50% of their useful selling time.
See also: 10 tips and strategies for negotiating successfully
Featured image: James Tissot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
