Ask HN: How to learn how to sell?
I've become convinced that "sales" is a pivotal skill that everyone should learn. You constantly have to sell: sell yourself, sell your ideas, sell your product, sell your vision.
However I see no easy way to learn how to sell. For sure the direct way seems preferable (learning by doing), but having a job already + living abroad makes it a bit hard.
Any tips would appreciated.
131 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadThe number 1 thing I learned from this book was you have to learn that selling is basically helping people and #2 that your product is the best thing for your customer, i.e. you should be convinced that there is nothing better in the world at the moment to help your customer.
When you truly and honestly believe that selling becomes easy.
Could it be not possible that a product can actually help a person get what s/he wants? Or be the best thing to suit their needs. Do you have an objection to that statement?
I actually believe my product is the best fit for my target (not everybody but a very small niche of few thousand people in this world). When I find those persons it indeed feels very easy to sell my product to them and also get repeat business.
I’m happy to lose a sale when there’s a genuinely better solution for the customer problem. I’ve had conversations with prospects on multiple occasions where I’ve directed them to a company with better solutions.
I’ve found that the people I’ve had those conversations with actually will come back when there is another issue that our products can help with.
https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Teach-Ride-Bike-Seminar/dp/09671...
The gist is, no one cares about the thing you're trying to sell.
anyone considering your offering is trying to get something done. Help them get their job done so well that they feel awesome about it.
The book is not fluff. Highly recommended.
Also look into the job at o be done framework.
Selling is especially important if you are in any kind of B2B business where the user doesn't necessarily make the buying decision. For example, if a company is buying a Customer Support software, the executive making the decision won't probably be using the software on day to day basis.
All of which is to say, it's not always enough to look at a person's tasks and work to find high-value "pain points". Often you need to look more closely and a bit obliquely what their actual ambitions might be, and sell to that.
How will your product help the buyer? Why is your vision superior to others'? Where do your ideas plug into the prospect's work? How would you make that difference in the new employer's setup?
Or: Focus on the "why". Why should someone buy whatever you are selling. Not the "what" - as in, dont focus initially on "what are the features".
Why first, what later. And when talking about the "what" - more of a couple of key Unique Selling Propositions and then the checklist of features.
[Exceptions will apply where it is purely technical sales and features / standards / compliance carry more weight than the 'story'. The narrative then shifts to "being compliant"]
So the whole framing of product and market, and communication media is way more interesting (IMHO) than 'selling' as an explicit skill. (And yes, I do "sell", but I'm not "good at selling", because my skillset is tied to a tiny handful of niches where I have this framing figured out)
edit: there's another bit that annoyed me about this post, and it's the idea of explicit 'selling' before having a solution to sell. It's something akin to putting the cart before the horse. Any selling opportunities I've discovered have always been in the pursuit of solving some other problem. I suppose basically if you have a genuinely good solution to any problem, selling is barely a skill worth worrying about. This is as true in interviews as in product marketing
More to the point, it's also about listening to what your sales prospect is actually looking for and helping explain to them how what you're selling fits their needs or wants, so that they'll make a decision to commit to the solution you're offering.
If you have no sales prospects, then you have a marketing problem, not a sales problem. Marketing is about explaining why your solution is desirable to as many people in the first place, ideally people who the arcane-black-magic-practicioners tell you are totally going to become sales prospects, if only they knew you existed. But leave aside reaching your audience - if you can't explain why you're hot stuff to somebody who is naturally inclined to want what you're selling, then you have a confidence problem, not a marketing problem.
I've had the fortune of being in a tech role where I got to join plenty of sales calls. And I've observed that when selling large deal to large companies, selling is both a skill and a process and the difference between a good salesperson and a mediocre one is literally millions of dollars a year.
If you're looking to close large deals with good clients who you aren't currently in contact with (but who really, truly have a need for what you offer), it's worth looking at selling as a discrete set of skills including prospecting, nurturing leads, getting meetings, and closing deals. Closing can be an adventure even after a prospect said they want to buy. Shepherding a deal through an enterprise onboarding and procurement process is no walk in the park.
A lot of people see this kind of formal selling process as distasteful. I used to feel that way, too. But when I observed it in action it didn't seem like enterprise decision makers viewed the process negatively. They expected to be sold to and were generally receptive to it because the product met a need.
So as I mentioned, it's highly dependent on what you sell and who you're selling it to, but I think a wholesale dismissal of selling as a useful skill would be a mistake.
I'd go so far as to say that once you hit a certain deal size, it's impossible to compete without treating sales as its own specialized field just like you would management in a large organization. The number of independent variables and people involved grows superlinearly with the amount of money involved and managing that process is its own skill, one that's extremely valuable because it can only learned in a trial by fire. As they grow bigger, they get even more specialized - a friend of mine who was the rockstar salesman at a big CRO that made 8-9 figure deals to run clinical trials for pharma had a lot of trouble moving into commercial jet sales, for example, which might see 10-11 figure deals delivered over a decade.
I've had trouble getting big companies to buy startup product because a) nobody wants to be the first big name and b) they're worried you'll be out of business in 2 years and integration effort will have been for nothing.
Of course these are self-fulfilling prophesies unless you can get the "engine" running.
Also if your product overlaps with features or products of a large vendor who already has a relationship with your customer (this is common) you have to fight the incumbent - and they have home team advantage even if their product sucks.
Here's the thing both your and the parent's comment are missing: sales isn't about persuasion or communication, it's about listening.
Making people feel heard, and then specifically responding to their pain is the real answer. Yours and many other comments on this page make the same mistake, which is based on a widely-prevalent flawed assumption that is almost universal among the general population.
He is an independent repair technician/youtuber/right to repair activist, and not a guru of some sort, and he's speaking from his experience here.
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Salesmanship part 1 - Don't present without knowing the priorities of the customer
Salesmanship part 2 - Don't be NEEDY just because you're a salesman!
Salesmanship part 3 - Focus on the PAIN & MISERY of your customer!
Salesmanship part 4 - Give people MULTIPLE CHANCES to SAY NO to what you are offering.
Salesmanship part 5 - The customer is rarely RIGHT, but ARGUING always makes you WRONG!
Craigslist.
I really enjoying flipping instruments or anything else I know I can make a profit off of. It allows me to "rent" something I want to check out for a while, but still probably make a profit off of. Take a topic you know about or enjoy, find cheaper-than-usual examples of that thing (especially lightly-broken things that just need a bit of TLC), and then flip for a profit. You'll deal with all sorts of weird personalities, as is tradition with Craigslist, but doing just doing it on a regular basis really pushes you quite quickly to get your sales skills up to snuff. It's hard for me to even point to specific aspects of those skills in particular -- it's more a general mindset, an understanding of people's psychology, etc. You just get a feel for it -- or at least I did.
Even project-based courses don't really give students 'real' feedback: paying customers (or users paying with attention) tinkering with creations, asking for things, breaking it, etc.
This online sales dynamic you described feels 1) 'real' in that the interactions occur outside the course with customers and 2) scoped and digital-first as to make it easy to curate or coach the student (inputs/outputs seem easy to gather/parse as they are chats/emails/prices/copy/etc).
I'd imagine something like:
Would be awesome to streamline like a guided tutorial/checklist as you see more and more cases and can solidify best practices with data from student's results.His process applies to more than just sales. Some of his techniques are great for persuasion and negotiation. Everyone should learn some sales techniques. You are smart to do this.
it's easier to sell whatever you're trying to sell if it's of high quality
The investments that came later probably didn't need as much selling skills.
For me it removed a lot of the sleazyness feeling I had associated with selling.
- have customers to sell to
- remember that you don't sell, customers buy
- it's easier to sell something people both need & want
Personally I find cost effective lead generation is the harder problem to solve. So get good at lead generation (aka having customers to talk to) & then you can practice converting them into paying customers. Trying practice selling to customers you don't have is like trying to be good at washing a car you haven't purchased yet.
Low pressure. Fast past. You’ll get used to rejection quickly.
Rich dad poor dad book had a whole chapter on it.
https://venturehacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Pitching...
If you can't afford it? Read The Challenger Sale, a data-backed look at the most effective techniques.
Maybe start selling something that fits your schedule. This is a skill you learn by doing rather than by reading. Do note that selling has a lot to do with how you think of yourself. Best of luck
There is a great deal of advice already in this thread. If you have any specific questions, ask and I will answer if I can.
How do you sell something when you yourself might have doubts about the product? not because it's not good, but because you know it can be improved?
Obviously you can't wait until the product is "perfect" because that will never happen and there will always be things that are slightly broken or unpolished, etc. so how do you get those first sales that might give you the push you need to keep going (financially, emotionally, etc) with an "unfinishd" product?
I would say one of the strengths of the product is that there is a clear path to improving it. Maybe just present the "roadmap" to the customer.
I guess that if the customer wants a feature further down the roadmap then it really isn't solving their problem yet so perhaps I should wait.
Second, develop a more positive focus.
More specifically: get out of your head about some ideal that may never be real. Look at the product in terms of what it can actually do, NOW, and the benefits people will get from it, NOW.
Focus on how it will help them, in its current form, and communicate that.
When you do this, it is easy to be up front about what it will NOT do. In fact, in most of my sales calls, there is at least one point where the prospect expresses an expectation that it will do something for them that it doesn't. I immediately, directly, almost forcefully call that out. "Let me clarify, it will not do X. That is not what it is for. It will instead do Y for you, which lets you do Z." (This is just me being my normal, brutally-honest self, but from a sales-tactic perspective it builds credibility and trust.)
Focus on how the product can benefit them, in your thinking and your communication, and then it's easy to be up front about the rest. Otherwise you can never help people who need what you are selling more than they need that money.
It seems obvious but I guess I've seen too many salespeople tell the customer whatever they want to hear and I loathe that as it's definitely dishonest, so I felt like I would need to do the same to be able to sell, but apparently that's just a misconception on my part.
Thanks for the advice!
My observation is Sales success is about understanding someone’s needs, more than pushing a product. As such, listening is much more important than speaking.
Selling is about solving someone else's problem.
Some of the answers here say to start with benefits, not features. Those are missing the first step. If someone comes into a car dealership and the salesperson starts selling them on the benefits of a sportscar (you'll feel young and will get places quickly), they're going to lose the customer who came in with a problem of having six kids and four dogs and no way to get them all places. The salesperson who finds that out will be able to help get them into a minivan or SUV that's a good fit.
The same is true of selling yourself - it's not about showing them you're great, it's about showing them how you can solve their problem. Find out why they're hiring for this position as well as what they expect the person they hire to do when they start. Once you know those things, you can explain how you'll be able to get in and do what they need, as opposed to just telling them that you're a great employee.
1) Understand what you're trying to communicate. What are you selling, what are the benefits? Why should the audience care?
2) Understand who you're communicating with. Their desires, their constraints, their knowledge level, do they trust you, how much do they care?
One thing I've learned over the years is that any single particular sales approach/tactic/strategy will not be suitable across all markets and situations. Sometimes it's best to coldly list features. Other times it's best to develop a personal rapport. And yet other times it's best to focus on customer problems/product benefits. Pay attention to your audience and adjust how you approach them based on who they are.
TLDR: to learn how to sell better, learn how to communicate more effectively.