How to learn sales?

[tieubao]

• You need to separate sales from marketing. Sales is a conversation, marketing is a broadcast. Marketing gets the phone to ring, sales takes the call and closes the deal.
• For B2B sales resembles project management: the goal is not to convince everyone to buy your product or service but to diagnose their needs and only engage with firms that will benefit.
• For larger deals you "sell with your ears" as much as you talk.

[tieubao]

Marketing is the brand, the image, points of differentiation, etc. It's the message. Advertising is the broadcast. It's how the message is communicated. It's the medium. Marketing + advertising = prospects and leads. Sales is the last mile. It takes the results of marketing + advertising (i.e., leads and prospects) and guides those to closing. Contrary to myth, successful sales is about listening, not talking.

[tieubao]

Whenever you deal with someone, try to conceptualize yourself as a consultant and not a salesperson. Great sales people are more like matchmakers, people have some kind of problem and you have some kind of solution. People are pretty sensitive to in situations where they could be persuaded. Conversations should have the feelIng like you are trying to convince a friend to watch a really cool movie rather than high pressure, ultra confident wolf of Wall Street closing.

Two, if you really want to learn the actual craft of it then put yourself in more situations where you can talk to a salesperson and put them through their paces. Start taking calls from telemarketers and instead of hanging up tell them you would rather they send you an email. Go to a car dealership and tell them the car you want is too expensive. This is a decent way to get experience.

[tieubao]

How I did it:

• you interview as many prospects and customers as possible
• you understand what keeps them up at night, what specific pain points they have, the language they use to describe their situation
• you shape your messaging to solve those specific pain points, using their own language
• wrap your messaging into a story - the worst you can do is "problem / solution". people don't buy that way. people buy change, and you use the story to communicate that change.