Ask HN: How to learn sales?

About wolf og wall street: if you look at some john belfort material online in reality (or what he chose to put online) he does what you suggest. (Of course not in phone cold call selling)

> Yes, you need to listen. But you'll never sell anything if you can't articulate a destination, lay out the path and showcase to the customer how what you're representing will benefit them more-so than the products you're trying to displace or something new that will bring with it a myriad of gains for said customer. IYes, you need to listen. But you'll never sell anything if you can't articulate a destination, lay out the path and showcase to the customer how what you're representing will benefit them more-so than the products you're trying to displace or something new that will bring with it a myriad of gains for said customer.

But you don't know where the customer is trying to go...you don't know their pain...you don't know their priorities...

Without listening.

Jordan Belford. Don’t waste your time on non customers, and don’t lie. Help your customers, even if it means referring them to a competitor.

Cultivate a following, and they will follow.

And don’t lie, when they ask you to sell you a pen, ask if you are in the market for a pen, and what company you represent and what pens you have to offer. Never lie about the pen being in space, everyone knows scummy sales people lie.

While there are very technical elements to sales (prospecting, funnel management, pipeline review, sales compensation design) that can be measured and tracked, they are relevant for managing salespeople but not for the sale itself.

A sale happening or not depends almost exclusively on whether you can get your counterparty to trust and like you.

The first thing you should focus on is improving your emotional intelligence as this is pretty much the only skill that matters for a successful sale.

Although tons of people believe that you are either born with it or not, I think that EI is highly trainable (unlike IQ) and progress in learning it is scientifically measurable. (except if mental conditions are present like autism or psychopathy)

You probably want to start with doing the EQ-i test to find out where your gaps are. Specifically the metric on personal relationships is highly relevant to improve as soon as possible.

Then you can read great negotiation books like never split the difference and books on sales like the challenger sale.

The theory is not really useful until you've mastered the basic EQ to understand how to execute them.

I realize this. Which is exactly why I said that "Yes, you need to listen". The parent comment responded to implied that was the only way.

If you don't listen you can't do what I stated above. And if you can't do what I stated above then you're not going to be able to help the customer and, ultimately, not be all that successful in sales.

Case in point... I had a customer years ago about to spend roughly a million dollars on a remote site upgrade architecture we had been jointly working on for about 6 months. In the background I was tracking a new product that would make their initiative cheaper and had both better ROI and performance specs due to refreshed hardware.

I made sure to present this, get all the information in front of the customer, engage in discussions using our PM and derive a strategic deal that would save them money over the three year term for buying a new product early.

They didn't do it. My counterpart appreciated the option even though it would have slipped their project by 2 months. Him and I are still friends even though I've moved on since then, but the moral of the story is he still brings that up because, in hindsight, he said he should have trusted our proposal. They spent more, got less and had to upgrade earlier due to unforeseen circumstances. Part of it was bad luck, the other part was a cognizant decision he made against the sales team better judgement.

I listened. I knew the customer very well, in fact. But I had knowledge and experience with the products that outstripped his for navigating this situation. That's how a good sales team operates.