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What I’ve learned from sitting next to a pro salesman
- mikestew 11y agoI stuck with it to the end, but man, the lack of proofreading almost had me closing the browser tab. I'm not talking mistakes only a grammar Nazi would care about, but the kind where I read the sentence three times and still ask "what the hell does this mean?" I don't mean to be snarky, but maybe that's why emails to leads wasn't working so well. Bad grammar is my first filter for spam. Other than that, the article was okay. Good point about getting on the phone. Email is easy, but it also makes easy to say "no", or just delete it and say nothing.
- mreiland 11y ago> He then asked this question “How is a typical call with a prospect looks like?” ... I still don't understand what the guy asked, my best guess is he messed up the verb and it was supposed to read "how DOES a typical call with a prospect go?", or similar. It all makes me conclude that someone who is not a native English speaker was paid to write that article and it's bullshit filler flung out on various sites like HN in a cheap attempt to garner attention. If you're going to pay someone to write an article for you, fucking pay for a native speaker. I mean seriously, that little bit of money saved is not worth the risk. edit: not to mention, most of the advice is pretty generic, the sorts of things anyone can get by picking up a book on salesmanship.
- HillRat 11y agoThe author is Israeli; my Hebrew is worse than my Arabic is worse than my Farsi, which is pretty bad, but the grammatical mistakes seem pretty typical of the impedance mismatches between Hebrew and English.
- nugga 11y agoSlightly offtopic, but in English it's called Persian, not Farsi. You probably wouldn't say "my Deutsch is worse than my Francais".
- dasil003 11y agoReally? I worked for an Iranian-American for 2 years, and my aunt 30 years in the state department stationed in various locations in the middle east—both refer colloquially to Farsi. I don't think it's in the same category as French and German.
- nugga 11y agoAccording to this it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_language#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_language#Etymology
- ScottBurson 11y agoRight at the top of that section: "Since the latter decades of the 20th century, for political reasons, in English and French, Farsi has become the name of the Persian language as it is spoken in Iran." And a little farther down: "In English, this language has historically been known as 'Persian', though 'Farsi' has also gained some currency." So I don't think it's as clear as you suggest. I certainly recognize the name "Farsi", though I would not have known "Dari" (the name of the Afghan dialect).
- edanm 11y agoInteresting aside: I'm a native Hebrew speaker, and practically a native English speaker. I tend to notice grammatical mistakes in English. In this case, I didn't notice anything. It's probably because I was speed-reading, but I can't help but feel that it also has something to do with the fact that I've gotten used to the way Hebrew speakers tend to mangle English.
- beachstartup 11y agoare you trying to break the record for how many assumptions you can fit into a single post?
- odedgolan 11y agoI wrote it on my spare time and based on my experience. Nobody proofread it and it's a takeaway for next time. I posted it on HN since I like HN, that's all.
- win_ini 11y agoDon't worry about some asshole picking apart stuff. Your writing is clear enough that if someone has a hard time parsing it - that's their loss. I've been in Saas for over 10 years helping sales and marketing teams convert and close at higher rates. The article hits home for several tech founders who understand customers but don't understand prospects. The post captures some learnings that many other people never ask or dig into - but make all the difference. Thanks for sharing, I've shared it with several people who will not think this is obvious - and they won't need to "pickup a standard book" to learn some snippets. Question: how much better does the salesperson perform compared to your previous attempts? How long will you give him to prove himself? SaasTr is a great sales resource if you're looking.
- odedgolan 11y agoI don't have clear numbers on conversion rates before and after, prospects were from different segments and we kept changing our pricing and offer during that time to find the right fit so it's hard to measure. Before we brought him in we said we'll give him 3 months but it was clear we have a lot to learn and benefit after 3 weeks.
- foobarian 11y agoI used to be more of a grammar nazi but in my old age I came to view with suspicion emails or texts that are written "too perfect." It signals a person who has too much time on their hands or allocates their time poorly, and is insecure about letting a few mistakes through.
- flexie 11y agoI easily understood that sentence first time I read it and so did 'mreiland'. Don't mind these silly comments.
- dang 11y agoThis comment breaks the HN guidelines. Spewing bile is not ok, but especially not to insult someone who simply happened not to be a native speaker. Fortunately, users flagged it, which I hope communicated to the OP that it doesn't represent the community. HN has users from many countries. They all do their best to communicate in English and we owe them respect for that. It's helpful to remember that the non-native speakers on HN command more languages than most of the rest of us do. It's also not ok to rudely accuse someone of having "paid" for an article. If you think an article is spam you are welcome to flag it. If you find substantive criticism more appropriate, you are welcome to contribute some. But you can't use Hacker News as a dumping ground for resentments.
- mreiland 11y agoI don't understand you, my analysis was correct. 1. It was written by a non-native speaker, and 2. It was thrown up on HN in an incomplete state to garner attention (the OP said as much). This is not an informal HN post, this was specifically crafted as marketing and it NEEDS to be done in a professional manner. As far as I'm concerned, if the OP starts getting their posts proofread as a result of my "rude" post, then I've done the OP more good than anyone else here.
- dang 11y agoYour analysis was far from correct. You accused the author of not having written the article. More importantly, your comment was rude and uncivil. And I'm afraid you've done this before. We ban accounts for posting uncivil comments, so please stop doing that. If unsure, simply err on the side of respect—it isn't hard.
- mreiland 11y agowhat specifically was incorrect with respect to my analysis?
- odedgolan 11y agoEmails and everything sent to customers were always proofread by a native english speaker. I wrote this on my spare time but lesson learned for next time.
- seanwilson 11y agoI noticed a couple of grammar mistakes but nothing major. Thanks for the article! I appreciated the tips.
- Fylwind 11y agoHere's a little bit of constructive advice. There are several places where you've made a "comma splice" error. That is, a comma (,) was used when a period (.) or semicolon (;) should have been used (or alternatively, a conjunction could be used). Example: > We’ve interviewed a bunch, during one of the interviews after the candidate was done presenting, he looked at me, I looked at him, he did OK … This should be instead: > We’ve interviewed a bunch. During one of the interviews after the candidate was done presenting, he looked at me, and I looked at him. He did OK …
- totalrobe 11y agoSure, the grammar needs a little work but this sentence is the only glaring issue... > He then asked this question “How is a typical call with a prospect looks like?” Should be "How does a typical call with a prospect look?" Also - great article! I've worked in sales and emails never worked, especially in this day and age of constant spam. Email is great for an info blast, but you will not close with an email.
- johnchristopher 11y agoNote that punctuation applies to other languages as well.
- ohfunkyeah 11y agoMy 2 cents: Fix the major issues on this article sooner than later. It is a great little post and if all goes well it will have a long tail of visitors or will get picked up again for a nice exposure spike. I think that makes it worth your time. Of course that is just my opinion.
- grecy 11y agoThis sounds like a lot of the great advice in How to Win Friends and Influence People [1] I read that book yearly, and learn something every time. [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0671027034/?tag=roadchoseme-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0671027034/?tag=roadchoseme-20
- Fraanco 11y agoAgreed. "Talk to people about themselves and they will listen for hours"
- sean-duffy 11y agoThis is what I was thinking when I read this post - pretty much anything you read online about marketing seems to just be stuff that was already said 80 years ago in that book.
- wtbob 11y agoIf people can get past the poor English (and seriously, his English is much better than my Hebrew!), this is a great little article about salesmanship. I particularly like the bit about concluding with something concrete. That's great advice
- watmough 11y agoI think this pretty much applies to anyone who has to talk to people, and get things done. I do tech support of complex software for a living, and if something is not solved on a call, then the best way to leave the call gracefully is to itemize and describe next steps. This applies anywhere you are driving a process.
- davidgerard 11y agoI'm a Unix sysadmin and I describe my job as 50% public relations. Working with other people is a problem so hard we evolved a human brain to do it better.* * if the social brain hypothesis is true.
- tptacek 11y agoThe bit about cold calls working better than anticipated rings true. I advised a company I help out with not to bother cold calling, because it never works, and was embarrassed to learn a few months later that it had been extremely effective just to have the founder ring random people up. The bit about remembering names, deploying kids names, and talking about football --- that part does not ring true. I've done sales work for my last startup, and before that a as a product manager had a sales-support role where most of the people I talked to every day were account managers, and even though I know this "talk about football" stuff is what salespeople are supposedly doing, I never saw that happen. Taking people out to dinner? Obviously, different story. But on the phone, especially early on? All business. The most important thing I think salespeople do that ordinary people don't do is Ask For The Sale.
- Frondo 11y agoCold calling is great! Well, because it's never absolutely cold--you do know that the person you're calling is at least a little interested in what you're selling. It's not random. As for remembering names, kids' names, etc., you're right, it's hokey to just try and build up a memorandum on a person and play-act at being a friend. What happens, though, when you spend a while talking with someone, is they do mention their wife's trip, or their brother coming to town, or whatever, and after a while, you end up developing a bit of a friendship. Not a "let's go hiking on the weekends" relationship, but a small friendship all the same. You remember their kids' names simply because you take an interest in who they are as people, and in my experience, they do the same for you. It's actually kinda neat.
- enraged_camel 11y ago>>Cold calling is great! Well, because it's never absolutely cold--you do know that the person you're calling is at least a little interested in what you're selling. It's not random. No, that's not cold-calling. Cold-calling refers to picking up the phone and calling people you have never spoken to before and will most likely not be interested -- at least initially -- in what you are selling. But if it's people you have spoken to briefly at a trade show, then you aren't cold-calling. You're following up. Note that cold-calling doesn't have to be "random". In fact, calling companies and people randomly almost never works. You need to have a strategy in place and need to have done what's called "prospecting". For instance, if a construction company just became your client, then calling other construction companies and talking about how that company is using your product or service has a much higher chance of getting you at least one in-person meeting.
- zzalpha 11y agoThis is great advice for anyone working with people, period. Folks are a lot more willing to work with someone who respects them and appears interested in them as a human being. And if you're interested in any kind of leadership position, these skills are absolutely vital, as they are the way you build a rapport with the people you're leading.
- vox_mollis 11y ago> Folks are a lot more willing to work with someone who respects them and appears interested in them as a human being. I suspect you mean "someone who pretends to respect them". You have the "appears" qualifier correct. At the end of the day, the Dale Carnegie routine is simply mimicry of the mores of friendship as a means to an end. Salespeople are charlatan middlemen social engineers, and do not add value except to organizations whose products cannot stand on their own merits, in which case they are not actually adding societal value at all.
- andersonmvd 11y agoThank you. I sure learned something read your article. Please keep posting :)
- borplk 11y agoMy problem with these tips is that there's some hidden underlying assumption baked in it that you think you are so smart and other people are so driven by their emotions that oh just because you mentioned them by name now they are going to behave so differently. I don't know about everyone but it sure as hell wont work on me.
- benbrownww 11y agoGreat advice for all start ups - from experience at many companies, quite a few career salespeople miss a number of the points mentioned here. The value is so easy to extract - we should all be able to let the grammar pass for a man that is taking the time to share - especially where his first language is not English.
- snowwrestler 11y agoThese tactics work. I purchase technology for an "enterprisey" type company and these definitely help make sales to me. However, they do not work on their own. There still needs to be a strong value proposition, good fit between the product and the need, lots of technical info to satisfy suspicion and curiosity, a reasonable contract, etc. What these tactics do is help get the conversation to a place where it can be substantive. I'm busy, you're busy, we're all busy. I'm going to say no, reflexively, to any conversation I'm not initiating or continuing--to anyone I don't recognize. If someone sounds tentative or scared, if they don't seem to know a thing about me or my employer, if they can't just hold a normal human conversation, I don't know why I would want to talk to them. Any product or service that is sold by a person is going to involve a relationship. Services and products need training, support, and improvements. The sales person is almost always going to be my champion in that relationship, because they want an easy renewal or upgrade. So if I don't trust the salesperson, it's hard to trust that I will get the support and service I'm sure I will need at some point.
- hesdeadjim 11y agoAt this point I don't answer a call that isn't in my contacts. I sign up for a trial of some cloud service and it is like clockwork, 2-3 days afterwards I get a cold call from someone in sales. It's like they are all following the same playbook at this point and it's ruined the effectiveness of the strategy, at least on me...
- ddingus 11y agoIt still works. One of the hard parts about sales is understanding that people don't like to be pitched, or intruded on, and balancing that with the fact that the product or service may well be to their benefit! If you had a good friend struggling somehow, and you knew you could save them a lot of money, time and effort would you not strongly desire to communicate that to them? And when you are struggling, don't you want answers? What about when you don't know you are struggling? That's why the strategy works. Good people will not make the call painful. I have similar experiences to yours with cloud services. Honestly, I'm not sure they always have the best people attempting those phone calls... One thing highlighted in the article, but not completely expressed is the concept of adding value to the phone call. All the charm and basic human communication is needed to get somebody talking. From there, being able to help them, or give them something of value can often make the phone call higher value. This could be a stat or metric they can consider, or a qualifier. "Are you... ?" Doing this is important as a few "check in" calls over an extended period of time are actually welcome things in more cases, and when that's true, the sales person experiences a much higher close rate and more happy customers and better relationships. In the example of the qualifier, they make think on it, and realize "Yes! That's us." When you call back, they share it, and a sale begins. They (better sales people) get that, because they took the time to understand something of who they are talking to and that gives them the ability to make good use of that understanding, which is seen by the person being talked to as a reasonable, valuable thing. I did this in my past, and reached a point where I would make a quick call, and they were nearly always, "catch up" calls. Take 5 minutes and find out what is new on both sides, exchange some news, etc... and then get to it, whatever it is. Over time, increasing numbers of those people would actually call me when it became time for them to buy. They remembered the nice person who didn't just pitch them, instead expressing meaningful interest and understanding. Begin the week, "catching up on the people who seem like they could benefit from whatever it is", follow up on anything resulting from that, and contact "new" or "cold" people to fill in gaps. This kind of cadence brings you a growing list of familiar and increasingly well qualified people, which is what you need to build sales. Some people flip it too. Begin the week with all the follow ups, do new calls, interleave with familiar "catch up" or "check in" type calls to ease the pain of new calls, etc... Doesn't matter. What does is the regular, meaningful and consistent contact. Done well, that interest and understanding IS THE PITCH, because the product of it is a rational conclusion that a purchase, or no purchase makes sense. That bit is missing from this quick write up.
- narrator 11y agoI know some great commercial real estate brokers. The very successful ones are the ones that you want to talk with when they call because they are extremely funny and entertaining. That's the mark of a great salesman. They are so much fun to be around that you want to take their calls, drive around and look at property with them, etc.
- pandaman 11y agoI get a lot of recruiters insisting on calling me instead of e-mailing their vacancies. I figure they aim for the same effect as with sales techniques described in this article. However, I am not a native English speaker and these calls end even faster than an e-mail conversation. It's much easier to decline in a foreign language than in your own. All the emotional cues get filtered through the language barrier and even if I understand them perfectly they do not bear any direct impact. I suspect I am not the only one so I'd advise people to adjust their cold calling strategies accordingly. It might be worth to have sales calls in your target's native tongue even if you are not fluent or switch to e-mail in such a case.
- hackuser 11y ago> I asked him after what it was about and he told me this dude’s kid was sick this week. Why would I care? Why would our salesman care? This is the fundemental principle in a way. People naturally care about each other and want to be cared about. It doesn't always work out in practice because many things can get in the way: Time, stress, competing concerns, fear, etc. But we're social animals, down to the biological level. Understanding that about others and about yourself can help you with sales and with many more important human relations.
- jhwhite 11y agoI really don't like the small talk bit. I don't want to chat about football, the weather, or necessarily my kid. I love him to death and I think he's awesome, but I'm usually busy at work. I want to get information, find out what's actionable, and get back to work.
- JabavuAdams 11y agoYeah, you need to know your audience. If I get a phone call that starts with "Hi Mr. Adams, how are you?" My instinctive response is "busy, get to the point."
- IndoJacco 11y agoTraining over 1,000s of sales people of SaaS Start-ups by sitting next to them making the call, I like to share some insights on this topic: This is a great story BUT: + This was a professional, there are few of them left, also there are fewer and fewer people who like to "talk to a stranger on the phone" + This does not scale for many reasons, you simply can't train this + This only applies to a certain kind of sale So how do you cold call in a scalable and trainable way - in todays always on economy: COLD + Never make it COLD - but you can do plenty of other things before you call, visit their LI profile, retweet something, share their post, etc. CALL + There are many ways to CALL - make it based on their behavior/role, calling an IT manager on the phone is not going to be appreciated, but calling an HR person may be. When you call make sure you do something along the following lines - this can be copied: 1) Make this about them 2) Show them you have done the research (have LI profile open) 3) Give straight answers if they ask straight questions 4) Do NOT pitch, instead share how others have benefited 5) Offer them value... 6) Follow the conversation, ask, listen, summarize what they said... 7) Try to ask a handful of questions to diagnose their problem, NOT to sell them something You can find more via this article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-sales-teams-need-trade-pitches-online-jacco-van-der-kooij https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-sales-teams-need-trade-pi... Hope this helps. Jacco.