Dan Martell - April 18, 2016


How To Improve Your Ability To Sell

Hosted by
Dan Martell
How To Increase Revenue In Your Business How To Get Out Of The Entrepreneurial Funk

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

223.44

Word count

966

Sentence count

54


Summary

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

In today's episode, I'm going to share with you how to sell without feeling like a schemey salesperson. You know, maybe you've got a key employee you need to bring on your team, or you're trying to convince them to lend you some money so you can continue to grow your business, or maybe you re trying to get a partner to integrate with you to really take things to the next level. Regardless of what you're doing, even if you don't want to sell as a founder, as an entrepreneur, or as a business owner, you're going to need to learn it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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.