Ask HN: How to learn sales?

The audible book: The Psychology of Selling - The Art of Closing Sales, by Brian Tracy, is very good in helping overcome the fear that some of us might have before the sales call/meeting, handling the rejections, and moulding your approach/attitude towards selling. There are many more great tips in this book. Recommend the audible, not the print.

I am a software engineer who is learning sales. The one, perhaps most important thing I can share is this:

Practice Sales. Do not just read about it.

It is just like software engineering, if you only read and do not type, you will not be able to connect the dots. The brain has a way to learn and it is through doing. Remember, there are way more people you can sell to (assuming even a few are willing to buy) than you think. Even if the first 500 people have super low conversation rates, do not worry. There are perhaps 50K more people for a niche idea.

It does not matter what strategies you apply - but be persistent, and measure the results. Keep making small experiments and see for yourself. Put them in a Spreadsheet if you have to. Everything from timing of a message or email to the description of the person (on Twitter) you are reaching out to matters. And do not feel SHY or awkward to sell. Engineers really suffer from this. Do not push, be when you know your solution can really help, then ask them to try it out.

Cheers!

You should definitely hit me up. Google me my name is Vlad Mkrtumyan, we’re learning the opposite skill sets. currently I’m on my 3rd bootstrapped startup and I wanna learn programming to make my CTOs life easier.

I’ve sold everything from $500 a month CRMs (our 2nd venture) to 120k website projects, marketing campaigns, consulting, etc.

I’ve generated over 500k of revenue in my life, not a top 1% salesperson, but decent and on track. Next I’m trying to learn how to manage a sales team.

If you wanna get traction read: Traction by Gabriel Weinberg. If you wanna learn sales the easiest thing I would say to do is just start. Practice, go find something you believe in and do it. Get good at learning common problems on what you’re selling and showing people the Solutions as well as how to listen to them.

Make no mistake it’s definitely a skill like coding that anyone can learn if they tried it just takes a lot of patient and effort, but once you get past being emotional and caring so much on every detail it can be fun.

In terms of what to track it all depends on what you’re selling -but the basics would be: 1. Calls made 2. Where clients are in the pipeline 3. Revenue generated this month.

In terms of books you can google those, I think you should simply pick 5 and dive in, those 5 will help you find the next 5.

What I don’t like about Sandler is I feel if their coaches are so good at sales then they really shouldn’t work on Sandler. Essentially Sandler shouldn’t be a sales company, but something else instead, if they’re so good they should for instance be a car dealership.

both.

this is 4 years ago, the market we were going after were the cloud warehouses like Redshift, BigQuery and Snowflake.

In the beginning, we just had an idea for a specific product / service. but we knew that the customer would be the lonely data engineer in charge of building the analytics stack.

I started with cold outreach via my network and linkedin. I would use pretty broad language around data warehouse usage, to cast a wide net with terms like "usage, performance, metadata, etc.", and cover all potential use cases. Engineers are always short on time, so you need to be affirmative, authoritative and present a clear ask that shows what you want and how the engineer will get value out of spending 30 min with you.

Of course I pulled the founder card, and that does help. I made it clear that we don't have a product, but working on building one. Turns out that most people are helpful, and want you to win!

The first signal that you're onto something is when they reply to your message, and are intrigued.

we built our first product around that feedback. Companies like Postmates, WeWork and Udemy bought version 0.5!

I made a point out of keeping in touch with every customer, and do a quarterly check-in. What's changed? What are your plans? For this coming week, month, quarter and year. Where do you want to be in 2 years? What problems are you trying to solve for your company? What are the expectations for you and your team? What tools are you using to solve that problem? What tools have you looked at and decided to not use them, and why? Etc., etc.

I rolled around in THEIR situation, trying to walk in their shoes. We'd talk for sometimes 90 minutes, often in person here in SF, over lunch. We'd often not cover our product until the final 5 minutes.

Of course, that's a huge chunk of time out of your calendar. Huge opportunity cost, in particular for a founder.

So here's actually something I'd do different. We hired our first sales reps after our first 10 customers. That was a mistake. Our product was very technical, it's not like selling email software. So you need a technical rep. Our first rep was a class act, but let me tell you, it was a goat rodeo for him.

Rather, I should have hired a customer success person, and have them do the quarterly check-ins. That way I could have kept selling. Then let the customer success rep also write (technical) blog post, customer stories / case studies, and documentation. You're building out (credible) marketing materials that build the top of your funnel.