Ask HN: How to learn to sell?

I was not very successful myself, but just pick up the phone and talk with them would be already a big step.

After the first couple of calls you stop being afraid of it and it just go much smoother. But following up and make sure everything is aligned takes much more time that I expected.

Often it is not a yes or no answer straight away, but it is more a chasing, communicate, listen, learn, plan, follow up, etc...

But again maybe I was doing something wrong myself.

My 2 cents... you need to start doing cold sales and it'll be very difficult as you'll get flat-out rejected 95/100 times.

Learning about sales will feel more productive and in your comfort zone but you should start by going out there and talking to customers. Get out of your comfort zone.

I'd start by going door-to-door so you can start gathering feedback from SMBs and get a sense of the true ICP. Once you've closed ~10 clients this way then you should consider using a sales engagement platform like Outreach, Hubspot or Salesloft which will automate the cold email to call. If it's a 1-call close type sale, then you can use something like https://www.mojosells.com/. You can buy lists from Zoominfo or otherwise.

That all said, any type of human-centered sales motion in North America will require a minimum annual contract value of $10,000/yr to scale up.

More of a passive idea, but you could add potential customers on linkedin and wait until they mention anything related to what you do, then reach out via linkedin. Less pushy (you will need to still be doing the pushy kind of sales), more thoughtful, and has worked for a number of sales people I know in different industries.

I actually just saved a tweet this weekend that lays it out really simply: https://twitter.com/janvmusscher/status/1581254065274892289?...

“Huge clarity if you structure your sales call like this:

> Uncover where they are now (A)

> Uncover where they want to go (B)

> Uncover what's stopping them (C)

Then pitch your offer as the solution to C”

Here is a good book that was suggested to me; and I have suggested to quite a few founders. I found some topics to be dated but the overall content is simple to digest and easy to follow.

Also, Marketing and Sales are two different beast.

Founding Sales, https://www.foundingsales.com by Pete Kazanjy (I think he is here on HN too.)

What is more valuable to you right now? Sales, or feedback that will help you improve your product and its positioning?

Don't let anything (e.g. lack of the right approach) keep you from listening to people.

Only after you've spoken with 10-20 people will the advice in sales books (Founding Sales, SPIN Selling etc.) be valuable.

If, after hearing what those 10-20 people have to say, you've decided to focus on changing your product instead of selling what you have, you might try to implement the steps in "The Mom Test".

Disclaimer: random advice on the internet. Take it with a pinch of salt!

* > I believe the key to success here will be "Cold Sales" *

100% correct.

1. Get a demo ready that you can show on a laptop. Focus on features.

2. Smile and dial. Set a meeting with the business owner or manager to show the demo.

3. Listen. The things they say (mostly objections) will guide your product development.

4. Accept rejection. You will get meetings from 10% of your calls. You will make sales on 2% of your meetings if the customer even needs the product.

Reading is a good way to forestall the heartache of actual sales, but that's it. Everything you need to know you'll learn in meetings.

There are multiple ways to approach this but here's the core you should integrate: sales is a quantitative discipline. Be quantitative about it.

This means building a sales pipeline and tracking the effectiveness of whatever channels you use. How many leads do you get for $X in ad spend? How many of those become customers? What (ultimately) is the value of those customers?

Whatever you read, you will have to try different things. Some of them work. Many will not. Get in the mindset that you will fail more than you will succeed and don't just assume that you will get organic sales with sufficient reach. Sales is an active discipline. You will need to go out of your way to make potential customers aware of you and you will have to work to find a problem of theirs you can solve.

Be prepared to make a financial case for why they should buy from you vs [alternatives].

You need to deeply understand who your potential clients are.

By that I mean where they "hangout". How you can reach them.

How? Talk to them. Build relationships. Maybe online if there are specialized forums, or maybe at the bar, or maybe by first visiting them physically. Not with an hidden agenda but with the sincere goal of helping them to solve their problems. Then you will see if your product is a great solution to their problems and if it can leads to a business relationship or if you need to iterate on your MVP.

Selling a new product is all about doing things that don't scale in order to get as much sincere feedback as possible.

Finally learn to not take rejection personally but as feedback.

Random advice, perhaps, but purchase Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port and do the work therein (there's a workbook and such). It will help with the cold sales as well.

There's a difference between marketing and sales. You're building a solution to a problem. Marketing is about getting people who have the problem to know your solution exists. Sales is about convincing them to pay money to solve the problem.

If you built the MVP but don't have customers yet, you should already have some people in mind who suffer from the problem your solution is supposed to solve. Selling is then just a conversation that loosely follows the following steps:

  (a) Ask if they still have the problem
  (b) Ask if your proposed solution solves their problem
  (c) Ask them to spend money to buy your solution

Note that every step starts with "ask". This means that you need to listen to their response. If they don't still have the problem, walk away. If your proposed solution doesn't solve their problem, listen to why not, and focus on improving your product until it does solve their problem (hopefully in a generic way such that your improvements will help you sell to other customers in the future). If they aren't willing to spend the price you're asking to buy a solution that they consider to be a solution to a problem they have, then find a way to add more value so that they will be willing to pay that price.

I highly recommend the Dale Carnegie Sales course which is once a week for IIRC six or eight weeks.

When I took it long ago the class included me (enterprise SW sales for my startup), a woman selling chip fab equipment for KLA-Tencor (24-36 month sales cycle with ASP above $100MM), a woman selling ADT home alarm systems, and two guys who had opened a T-shirt stand on the beach (sales cycle <10 min with ASP of $20). We all got the same lesson and all learned a lot from each other. A very hands on class and you bring to each class how you used the lessons during the preceding week. One of the best investments I ever made.

The stages a customer goes through (whether over 5 minutes or 25 months) are “attention, interest, conviction, desire and close”. The first time I met one of the best sales guys I have ever known, when he changed PowerPoints during a presentation displayed this desktop, and his wallpaper was just those words. Even at his high level he lived them.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this movie:

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/glengarry_glen_ross

Get ready to work 100 times harder than you think you need to, to land that first big client. But it can be done. It's how it's always been done.

Good luck. Small businesses run on tight margins and there's already a massive amount of people trying to extract more out of them.

I'm willing to bet you don't add any value whatsoever to their business (tech people typically don't "get" small business with physical stores) and I don't think sales techniques will help you do anything except maybe convince unsophisticated business owners...

As someone who's run a few restaurants before, if you don't have my cell number, you're not talking to me period.

Some ideas:

Take a look at how Grub Hub and similar services reached out to get restaurants to sign up for their service.

Read the book Influence: Science and Practice by Cialdini

Get some type of CRM system in place so you can keep track of who you talked to and who you need to follow up with. It doesn't have to be fancy--even note cards will work, but just come up with a way to manage that information.

I’m no entrepreneur but from the media I’ve seen around recently (podcasts, articles, think pieces) you should be selling before you code, that is, eliciting problems from clients.

Intuitively it seems harder to sell a piece of software which exists concretely, than to sell a solution/maintenance to a problem which can evolve constantly. Would you rather buy a shoe that may or may not fit, or retain a shoe maker to build a custom shoe for you?

If you want to sell an existing piece of software though, I’d probably do it through an App Store and focus efforts on optimizing it’s visibility there. That way you can leverage the existing ecosystem (and let them take a cut) instead of sinking time/money into creating your own.

Very good question.

I’ve been programming for just about 30 years in one shape or another and the 2 skills I wish I had learned from an early age are sales and copywriting.

What I can say (as an amateur of both disciplines now) is that yes, find the books and courses etc.

But, the most important thing is to start selling and writing right now.

It’s the absolute best way to learn. The books and courses will accelerate your practical efforts.

Don’t wait.

My wife had a startup which didn't get traction, because she didn't like selling. Then she learned selling, grew her startup and sold it successfully to a competitor.

The book "How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling" got her started.

I learned to sell… by selling.

I read how to win friends and influence people and made up prompts based on that knowledge. Went out there and sucked hard for two months. And then it clicked and my business took off.

So I faced/facing the same issue.

In general before you do any sale you need leads. I.e. you problem is not selling, but prospecting. I.e. you need prospects at the top of the funnel.

There is very good book - "fanatical prospecting" :

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=fanatical+prospecting

So your first step is to raise awareness of your product.

To do that there are two way - inbound (blogs,etc) and outbound(cold call / cold email). For inbound, you need to provide value to customers which are not related to your product. I.e. first earn trust and give value.

For outbound, the key is lead filtering, I.e. looks for signals that would qualify your leads (e.g. sector, traffic). But in general outbound is a numbers game.

I would actually say that you have gone about the process in the wrong order. That is to say, you should start off by talking to your clients /first/. Figure out what their problems are. Collect all of that.

Then, come up with a concept tailored directly to their problems. You probably need no more than a 1-3 slide deck to show this to them and figure out whether the concept is desired by your end customer.

Finally, and only once you've validated that the concept is desired by your end customer, you build the product.

The problem with doing it in the order you've mentioned, is what happens when you go and show your product to a customer and they say "Nope, I don't actually have an issue which your product solves. Thanks but no thanks."

Sales is the beginning, middle and end of your journey as a founder. Building the product only comes in over time once you've found something worth selling.

Hi there - one of the few pro sellers on HN here.

You're planning on prospecting into one of the most rejection-heavy domains out there with small physical business. These people get dozens of calls per day from companies they've never heard of - many of whom are trying to rip them off - and even the best ones (Groupon, Yelp, google ads, etc.) are basically just rent-seeking. Oh, and most have gatekeepers who don't care the slightest bit about your pitch.

Because of that I'd stay away from all this "smile and dial" advice. You'll have no chance. Go out there and hit the pavement and meet these people at their establishments at off hours. If you catch the owner in there at a good time - do your best to inform them of your products benefits and come up with a really good offer to get started (something that loses you money and time). Free Trial, free month of services, whatever makes sense based on the context of your business. The goal is NOT to make money or build a book of business at this point - it's to get a person happy with your software to sell to later.

If the owner is too busy or whatever - have some stuff printed out for them to read later that you can drop off. Ideally with a small gift (coffee, food, candy, etc.) and come back in a few weeks to see if you catch them at a better time (again with a gift, until they talk).

A solid entry level book would be Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount.

Good Luck.

*edit to fix book name

Sales is three things:

  - Sourcing. Figuring out where your customers' hangout so you can reach them there.
  - Prospecting. Reaching out to your potential customer base.
  - Closing. Going through with a deal including sales collateral, proposals, and contracts.

The entire process should be a system that is tweaked as you execute it. Great books I’ve read are:

  - Ultimate Sales Machine
  - Sales EQ
  - Fanatical prospecting
  - Challenger sale. For the actual closing process
  - The Close.com blog is pretty great.