The Beginner's Guide to Sales

http://strideapp.com/beginners-guide-to-sales/

by andrewdumont • 13 years ago

123 19 13 years ago

Really wish this were on a single page so I could Instapaper it.

I'm not sure about Instapaper (haven't used it for a long time), but Pocket has great support for multi-page stuff, and handled this like a champ.

Full disclosure: I'm a big Pocket fan, and a big Instapaper anti-fan.

38252• 13 years ago

I know this question is going a little off-topic but what do you dislike about Instapaper? Is there something they can do something to that will help you change your mind?

doneallison• 13 years ago

The Instapaper bookmarklet in Chrome captured all 9 chapters in one Instapaper entry for me.

jemka• 13 years ago

One page from readability:

http://www.readability.com/articles/9tjb0hdo

acomms• 13 years ago

Nice! Thanks for sharing this. You should include some more sales anecdotes if you have any to add. They're a really useful way of communicating a sales strategy being applied to a unique scenario.

dpolaske• 13 years ago

Great post, alot of good stuff here. Its all about understanding your customer and bringing them True Value!

manishsharan2• 13 years ago

As an engineer, the most soul crushing aspect of sales process is when people simply ignore your calls and emails. I hesitate to follow up because I do not want to seen spamming people and eventually all hope inside of me just shrivels up and just dies.I find rejections to be emotionally devastating.

I would gladly pay for a sales guru/therapist who would listen to what I have been upto and tell me what I am doing wrong , what I am doing right and what I should be doing more.

analyst74• 13 years ago

If you are devastated by rejection, you are not getting enough of it.

It's very hard to get devastated by rejections when you follow 20~30 leads any given moment and getting rejected every day.

manishsharan2• 13 years ago

Upvoted you because that was a very good advice. I will keep that in mind.

mindcrime2• 13 years ago

I have some concerns about some of the advice they are giving, especially in "Chapter One". This idea of making compensation for sales people so commission driven, and having the big "leader-board" and everything, seems so "Glengarry Glen Ross" and 1990's to me. At least a few firms are starting to experiment with paying sales people a flat salary, combined with regional and company-wide bonuses (or something along those lines) to try and align the incentives the the sales-person with the company as a whole. Because, as we all know, not every sale is a Good Thing.

That older model also risks creating a situation where your sales people are competing with each other and not acting in concert as part of a team. I can't help but wonder if there isn't a better way.

pyrocat• 13 years ago

Yeah I quit reading at "salespeople are competitive by nature"

SatvikBeri• 13 years ago

Do you know any successful salespeople who aren't intensely competitive? (I'm just curious, because I haven't met one.)

larrys• 13 years ago

"least a few firms are starting to experiment with paying sales people a flat salary"

An "experiment" is all that will end up being.

I've been involved in selling and dealing with sales people (as a buyer) for a very very long time.

Simply not going to work at any scale. Goes against the psychological motivations of people and how they respond to rewards. Why not pay people for more effort? When you don't (say with a union) you end up with the postal system. [1]

Even with respect to sports people care about their individual performance greatly in addition to the team winning obviously.

Back to selling - Not that you aren't going to find a few people who don't fit the typical mold just not as many as you will need.

There is nothing wrong to tying compensation to performance and it actually works quite well. One of the things that I notice even when selling things is that if a customer paid me for 3 years in advance it more or less took the fun out of things and providing service that you have been paid for that way becomes much more of a drag than if you are earning it as you go along.

Money is a powerful carrot and for the right reasons.

Don't lump all selling and compensation into the mold of the abusive assholes portrayed in Glengarry.

[1] I was just at a high quality hotel where I noticed that the maids seemed a bit surly and uninterested when I asked them to make my room up or for extra towels. Seemed odd to me. Turned out that there is a room charge daily and that you don't leave tips.

mindcrime2• 13 years ago

Goes against the psychological motivations of people and how they respond to rewards. Why not pay people for more effort? When you don't (say with a union) you end up with the postal system.

I don't have a problem with tying compensation to performance, but I do question the alignment of interests. When every salesperson has this "it's me or them, every man for himself" mentality, I doubt that's best for everyone in the long-run. A commission heavy structure also seems like it will encourage short-term thinking - that is, the classic "get the sale at any cost, no matter what downstream damage ti does" mentality. Now maybe the commission based structure can be tweaked to account for that... I'm just saying that I think there may be room for some new models here.

Anyway, if you do multiple levels of bonuses, tied to the performance of the company as a whole, you are still hooking compensation to performance, albeit with a bit of indirection.

Also, there has been plenty of psychology research that suggest that not all people are motivated mainly by extrinsic rewards (ie, money). Maybe compensating sales-people differently just means hiring a different kind of sales-person? Just food for thought...

jonaldomo• 13 years ago

This reminds me of Daniel Pink's To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. Worth a read if you like this.

na85• 13 years ago

Ugh, I hate the attitude on display in this article.

The idea that everybody will benefit from your product, and that you just have to help them see the light is false and patronizing.

I would not benefit from a new iphone because my current phone does everything I want my smartphone to do.

"Uncovering problems for your customers" is newspeak for "selling a solution in search of a problem"

The Beginner's Guide to Sales

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