I had a job right out of high school where I would drive around with a guy, pick a neighborhood, and knock on every door that we thought would be answered. The goal wasn’t bible sales; it was to sell steak, or move meat if you will. We basically swindeled people into buying our “high quality” meat at “rock bottom prices”. Now that I am looking back at it, I have earned the right to drop quotation marks around those words because our meat was neither high quality or sold at rock bottom prices. It was cheap meat that was flash frozen and put into flimsy cardboard boxes, delivered to us and tossed in a giant walk in freezer, then pulled out and put into giant coolers in the back of Nissan Frontier trucks. Actually, these giant coolers were also freezers, but we had no way to plug them in so we packed them full of dry ice.
When I started this job, the owner sent me out with one of his “top guys” (again looking back earns me quotation marks) to learn the pitch and earn some cash. I don’t even remember if we talked the whole way out to the first neighborhood. Immediately upon arrival, I was kicked out of the truck to do the legwork of getting someone’s attention and get my mentor in his front door. Then I was told to shut the fuck up and watch. Almost immediately I was compelled to talk and add my own spin to the sale. We didn’t move any meat on the first house, but I was pumped and ready to go to the next one and try again. I was naive as hell.
As soon as I got back to the truck with this guy, he goes off on me. The one thing that stands out in my mind was that he said,
“Don’t you ever burn a sale for me again”.
With this statement came the very clear message that if I did burn another sale I would probably either be missing teeth or not be able to see with one of my eyes the next day from the punishment I would receive. So, began my career in and observing sales. What is important about this is that I learned a valuable life lesson from one of the least important, least reliable, least trustworthy, and possibly most indecent human beings I have ever met. Oh, and did I mention he was a drug addict? Yeah, seriously. Almost everyone at that place was carrying something; coke, acid, meth, whatever.
The lesson was:
Never burn a sale
This is something that I see sales guys screw up constantly. Whether it is one of the guys standing at a kiosk in the mall or someone on the phone. They do amazing things to burn the sale and don’t even realize it because they made a successful sale once and this is how they did it so they stick with it. Sales guys like baseball players are superstitious. They will remember whatever routine it was they did before a home run and do it every single time after, just in case.
The problem here is that they forget to look at the reason WHY they won the sale, or hit the home run for that matter.
Was it my tenacity? Well, I was tenacious maybe I’ll do that.
Was it my clothes? Well, I did dress like a complete tool; maybe I’ll keep doing that too.
Maybe it was my presentation? Power Point is pretty awesome; I bet that’s what it was.
After all of these questions, we end up with a poorly dressed pushy asshole with a power point presentation. NO ONE wants to see that. We saw that through every class we ever took in school and we see it through every single pitch we sit through at work. It is boring, rude and downright #lame. That’s right, I used the hashtag. That is a perfect illustration of how lame it is.
OK, so now that I have torn apart a large number of sales guys, you probably want to know where I am going with this. From that one sentence, “Never Burn A Sale”, I learned so much about sales from being a part of and observing sales. I noticed a few things and took notes of what worked when I was successful selling steaks off a truck, moving rewards memberships at Blockbuster, selling web development services or when I saw someone else completely sell me. Here is a list of the things I learned:
Believe that your product is the best offering out there
If you believe the product is the best product in your market, you will sell it like it is the best product out there. If you think the product stinks you will sell it with a look on your face like someone you are pitching shit their pants. People read tone of voice, inflection of voice, and body language. This means you have to 100% believe, or you won’t be able to convince anyone to buy a brick of gold for a penny.
If you can get heads nodding and people feeling your excitement about the product, they will be excited too. They will want the product, because essentially every human is looking for that next fix of “feel good” and they want someone to sell it to them. It doesn’t matter what the hell you are selling. If they think it is the best they will hand you their credit card and let you do what you want with it.
Don’t be a sleaze bucket
If you look like a sleaze bucket, smell like a sleaze bucket, and talk like one too… guess what!? You are a sleaze bucket. I don’t care if you donate 75% of your earnings to charity live in a mud house that uses less than $0.20 of electricity and you hand out disease-free-carbon-neutral blow jobs, you are still a sleaze bucket. People make snap judgments the second you walk in the door and before you ever open your mouth or shake a hand. Most people already know whether they will even listen to you before you know what the first word of your presentation will be. This means you have to dress the part, act the part, and talk the part of a normal everyday guy in their environment. This leads me to the next point.
Relate to your customer
If you are the pitchman and you live the pitchman life and you talk the pitchman talk you will push people away. You need to be just like the likable guy who sits in the cubicle next to whomever you are pitching. They need to be able to instantly trust you and want to hang out with you. If you can create this environment of friendship and trust, then you are more likely to close them. Get on their level, understand their problems, and provide a solution. Isn’t that what you set out to do? Why aren’t you doing it?
Relating to your customer does not mean that you are giving them true insider information; you are just making them feel like they are getting true insider information. You still need to remember that the things you hear in the office and talk about with your bosses and coworkers needs to stay in the office. If you forget this, before long you are over promising and under delivering. This pisses people off, and I am not just talking about the customers. When you put unrealistic demands on the producers in your company (developers, mechanics, service providers, etc) and promise these things to your clients, not only will the producers never want to talk to you, they will hate you for giving them extra work that might never be possible to produce.
This means you should know what you can and cannot share, you need to know your customer, and you need to know what their environment is. If they are whiny, you have to be their solution. If they are inquisitive you need to have all the information they need. Do you get my drift?
Only use Power Point as a backdrop
Power Point is a great tool, if you want to bore people to death or make them want to jump out of the conference room window. Can we say “The Happening”? I bet half the people who jumped in that movie weren’t “taken over”, they were stuck in a sales meeting and saw a way out.
Power Point should be the supplement to the presentation, not the presentation. A sales guy needs to exude confidence and charisma. If he is reading off a slide he exudes inexperience, self-doubt, and lack of knowledge about the product. If you go in looking like this, no one will buy your product because even you don’t believe in it enough to be excited and learn what it does or why it is cool.
If you can use Power Point to add information to what you are saying and keep the focus on the product or on you instead of the pretty lights, you will keep people’s heads nodding and their wallets will walk into your hands.
The best presentations I have ever seen had so few slides with so little information I had no choice but to pay attention to the speaker. This meant I got all the information the speaker was giving me, which is why it was the best presentation I ever saw.
Unless you have design team or marketing team who can whip up some freaking fantastic slides for you, your design and layout skills probably suck. So you shouldn’t have ever spent 3 hours putting the slide show together in the first place. You just wasted that time with your family, your spouse, or kept yourself from calling another lead.
Don’t share any information you can’t back up
“Oooh…this sounds like lying.”
It’s misdirection.
“This still sounds like lying.”
It’s not.
A lie is when you tell an untruth to someone and sell it as truth. Misdirection is when you point eyeballs away from something that you either don’t want them to see or can’t explain to them. This may be because you have a bug in your product, you don’t know every feature of your product, or you are just having a bad day. Whatever the excuse, you need to know exactly what you CAN and SHOULD present to the customers. Don’t put yourself in a box where you cannot answer their questions, because that will cast doubt on you and ultimately your product. As soon as they doubt you they stop nodding their heads and their wallets push deeper into their pockets.
If you don’t understand your product or the technology that is underlying, you need to talk about ROI and user experience. If you are not a numbers guy but know the technology, you need to excite them with the amazing features and the reason they are saving so much time. You have to customize your pitch to your audience as much as to yourself. It is nearly impossible to take on the exact pitch from another sales guy and run with it. You have to own it and you dig your own holes.
The problem that I have seen myself and other sales guys in is when they start digging those holes. Some guys will lock up and forget what they are saying, some guys forget how to change the subject and use misdirection, and some guys just outright make shit up about how things work. All of these things will burn your sale, because the client will smell weakness both in you and your product. You are even better off telling the customer that you are not a “tech guy” or a “mechanical guy”, but you would be happy to get them the information they are looking for immediately after the pitch. This is never the best solution, but at least this shows your audience that you have someone at home base that can back you up, which means when they are customers they will have the same sort of experience.
Sales is as much about the product as it is about presenter
I am not going into this much more than to say, “Sex sells for a reason.” If the product is mustard and you see a woman with big breasts, perfect ass and legs that don’t stop eating mustard off a spoon, she is more likely to move product than this guy. Confidence and charisma are very similar to big breasts and a perfect ass when it comes to getting a signed check. (I know, it sounds weird…oh well).
If you don’t believe in the product, don’t present yourself properly, can’t relate to your customer, drown them in power point slides and can’t answer any questions; you might as well be the fat guy caught eating mustard by the hand full because no one will take you seriously. However, if you have the answers, look good, talk on the customer’s level and speak their language, and you can present the information in a way that grabs their attention and keeps it, you will be top dog on the sales wall.
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