Ask HN: How to learn sales?

Has jumped into that boat with the identical background a couple month ago.

Here some resources I found useful to do first B2B sales and get a general understanding of the process.

1. Peter Levine course of sales for tech entrepreneurs https://a16z.com/2018/09/02/sales-startups-technical-founder...

2. Steve Blank's 4 steps to the epiphany https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/09...

3. Close.io SaaS Sales Book https://close.com/resources/saas-sales-book/

4. The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million by Mark Roberge https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1119047072

Also I advice you to fasten you educational feedback loop as mush as you can. The last boo can help you with metrics as well.

Sales is a psychological game.

Try selling a product, it doesn't have to be related to your current concern. If you're willing to put in the work, canvassing door to door might be the best way to learn. You can see your audience's reaction immediately. There are subtle details you'll miss when selling in other mediums. Nothing will help you understand consumers better than talking to them in person.

After going door to door, writing sales copy and understanding your funnel will be much simpler. From there you can use your technical mind to optimize the process with multivariate testing etc.

Sounds very interesting, but if I cannot buy a PDF of it, I am not going to bother.

Learning the technicalities of a domain or sell cycle is not that complicated if you already in this domain and indeed you can either learn it by reading a bit or from others in the field. But the art of selling itself is indeed more about putting yourself into it and doing it. It is a bit like the difference between someone who reads pick up lines and apply them to someone who just go out and try to pick up women. At the end of the day putting yourself out there will teach you more and will give you the confidence and natural capabilities.

Having shadowed some great sales execs in my earlier career and having done some enterprise sales as a startup founder here are my pointers to get started and what perhaps matters the most. I'll address what matters most first:

1. The ability to take a NO without getting burnt out. Try to keep the emotion out of a sale as much as possible, even though it's your company and product. 2. The ability to have a sense of humour and make conversations enjoyable. No one wants to talk to a sales guy who is boring. 3. The ability to understand when have you earned the trust of your customer. Essentially your customer has to be comfortable talking to you and one of the best signals for earning positive trust is how much your customer makes casual funny comments or small talk. 4. Once you've earned your customer's trust - a sale is more or less guaranteed. Once you've learned how to earn trust - I mean once you've cracked that algorithm it's rinse and repeat.

To get started: 1. Make random conversations with people of your customer's persona either at events, through cold calling or cold emailing and be very very sensitive to the pulse of people you talk to. Do they engage in conversation, are the conversations ending with one words rather than continuations. 2. Have a very precise pitch of what you are selling. Pitch the customer once they are relatively in their comfort zone. 3. You won't be able to sell to busy execs SVPs and above - no matter how good you think you are. So it's better to reach out to someone in the lower rungs of the ladder. 4. If you play golf or some sport where decision makers hangout it'll certainly help to make conversation. 5. Sales is typically a male dominated field unfortunately. So you have to be conversant in sports/politics of that region to make some headway.

To summarise, sales is all about making conversations and earning someone's trust. It has very little to do with 'what' you are selling.