Dan Martell - April 18, 2016


How To Improve Your Ability To Sell


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

223.4387

Word Count

966

Sentence Count

49


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.280 Startup sales.
00:00:01.120 In today's video, I'm going to share with you
00:00:02.880 how to sell without feeling like a schemey salesperson.
00:00:05.960 You know, maybe you've got a key employee
00:00:07.400 you need to bring on your team,
00:00:08.480 or you've got a meeting with the bank
00:00:10.200 and you're trying to convince them to lend you some money
00:00:11.920 so you can continue to grow your business,
00:00:13.360 or you're trying to get a partner to integrate with you
00:00:15.720 to really take things to the next level.
00:00:17.880 Regardless of what you're doing,
00:00:19.440 even if you don't want to sell as a founder,
00:00:21.480 as an entrepreneur, as a business owner,
00:00:23.120 you're going to need to learn it.
00:00:24.080 You know, I started off in business as a tech guy.
00:00:26.960 I was like an introverted geek.
00:00:28.440 I was writing code.
00:00:29.520 I didn't want to talk to people, but I realized really quickly,
00:00:32.320 if you want to grow your business,
00:00:34.140 if you want to get bigger customers,
00:00:35.740 you want to get really key employees,
00:00:37.520 you need to learn how to communicate.
00:00:39.300 So that's what I did.
00:00:40.080 I went to the bookstore, and I spent $200 on the best books.
00:00:44.760 Now, I didn't even want to read the books.
00:00:46.580 I bought audiobooks.
00:00:47.780 And here's what I did.
00:00:48.520 Every day, for almost a year, I would
00:00:52.240 work on my business during the day.
00:00:53.580 And every night, I would drive an hour extra commute.
00:00:56.620 And essentially, I guess I would pollute the earth
00:00:58.200 by driving when I didn't need to,
00:00:59.700 but I was listening to these audio books
00:01:01.640 and I read honestly dozens of them
00:01:04.000 and I started to see patterns and approaches
00:01:07.080 and ideas that were kind of consistent
00:01:09.040 amongst all these top sales authors.
00:01:11.180 So what I wanna share with you guys today
00:01:12.640 is the three big areas that I felt like,
00:01:15.920 you know what, if you did nothing else
00:01:17.560 other than do these three steps,
00:01:19.120 you're gonna rock it from a sales point of view.
00:01:21.160 So the first one is to qualify your customers.
00:01:23.160 So many times I've been building companies
00:01:25.220 and I just think everybody's a potential customer.
00:01:27.200 I don't know if you've ever made this mistake of just being
00:01:29.520 like, oh, you know, everybody in the world,
00:01:31.820 it's like, how big's your market?
00:01:33.000 Six billion people.
00:01:33.920 It's like, six billion people is not your ideal customer.
00:01:36.440 So right off the bat, you want to qualify them.
00:01:38.680 Sometimes you want to do that by just asking them
00:01:41.200 if they have a budget to spend on your solution.
00:01:43.940 Ask them if it's an initiative this year
00:01:46.020 to actually fix the problem that you solve in your company.
00:01:49.080 Or maybe it's just try to figure out
00:01:51.160 if they are even the right person to be talking with
00:01:54.300 that's going to make that decision.
00:01:55.380 And that's step one, qualifying your customers.
00:01:57.380 So if you do that, you're gonna reduce a lot of time
00:02:00.060 wasted talking to people that weren't even able
00:02:02.620 or even had the need to make the decision to buy.
00:02:05.220 The second one is to identify their needs.
00:02:08.200 And I do this using questions.
00:02:10.060 I think the most powerful thing you can do
00:02:11.700 is actually sell through questions.
00:02:14.140 So identifying their needs is really trying to say,
00:02:16.600 okay, I need them to feel the pain
00:02:19.400 that they would have for not having my solution.
00:02:21.340 And that's really how it works.
00:02:22.400 It's like, here's a solution that's gonna solve your problem.
00:02:24.780 If you don't feel that there's a pain,
00:02:27.060 then you're not gonna appreciate the solution.
00:02:28.700 So step one might be asking them like,
00:02:31.160 how many customers did you grow last week?
00:02:32.900 Are you on target?
00:02:34.920 You know, what's the current profit for your business?
00:02:38.340 Or whatever it is, you wanna just ask questions
00:02:40.320 to get them thinking about like,
00:02:41.620 man, I really should be a lot further than I am,
00:02:43.640 or you know what, I really need a better way
00:02:45.560 to manage people.
00:02:46.720 Or maybe you have a HR recruiting process,
00:02:48.700 like wow, we really need to grow our team
00:02:50.980 to take advantage of the opportunity in the market.
00:02:53.100 Whatever it is, you ask questions
00:02:55.720 to help them identify their needs.
00:02:58.000 They feel those feelings, and if you do that right,
00:03:00.520 it cues you up for step three,
00:03:02.460 which is present your solution.
00:03:04.480 And this is my favorite part,
00:03:06.020 because one of the things I believe about sales
00:03:07.860 and what I learned listening to those dozen audiobooks
00:03:10.840 is sales is enthusiasm transferred.
00:03:13.220 If you love your product,
00:03:14.540 if you're passionate about what you're doing,
00:03:16.280 if you believe you have the best solution out there,
00:03:19.320 then you do those other parts, right?
00:03:21.420 qualify them, identify their needs,
00:03:23.120 and then when you start presenting your solution,
00:03:25.160 it's gonna be a no-brainer.
00:03:26.260 They're gonna at least make a decision to move forward,
00:03:28.500 maybe into a trial, whatever it is.
00:03:30.500 Now, this transfers also online.
00:03:32.640 You can take all these concepts
00:03:33.960 and actually use your website
00:03:35.400 to walk through the same strategy online,
00:03:38.500 but I'm really talking about in-person, H2H,
00:03:41.680 human-to-human sales because, again,
00:03:44.140 it doesn't matter what you're trying to do.
00:03:45.840 You might have the most amazing SaaS product,
00:03:48.340 you know, that people just sign up,
00:03:49.680 low touch, no sales process,
00:03:51.320 But if you're trying to build a huge business,
00:03:53.120 you're gonna eventually need capital,
00:03:54.560 you're gonna need people,
00:03:55.740 you're gonna need partners to really get more distribution.
00:03:57.880 So those are the three steps.
00:03:59.940 You know, qualify the customer,
00:04:02.940 two is identify their needs,
00:04:04.160 and three is present your solution.
00:04:07.660 If you know somebody that needs to watch this video,
00:04:09.820 feel free to share it with them.
00:04:11.080 I'd invite you to subscribe to my channel.
00:04:13.500 And as per usual, I wanna challenge you
00:04:15.980 to live a bigger life and a bigger business,
00:04:17.960 and I'll see you next Monday.