My single, best piece of sales advice?
An old friend called me the other day. We've spoken twice in the last 20 years. Once to talk about two of our friends who died in 2022, and the other day to ask me two questions.
One, how do I think about building wealth. And two, what is my advice on being good at sales. Both questions are monumental in scope. On wealth, much has been written. On sales, less has been written, and much less has been well written.
I'm opposed to "what's your best advice on topic X?" questions, but I wanted to give something useful to my friend.
Much of the sales literature focuses on what you, the seller, want and should do, as opposed to what the buyer needs and wants. This is why sales has a negative reputation. Focusing on what you want leads to a string of self-centered interactions and behaviors. When instead the true puzzle is delivering what the buyer wants and needs. Moreover, genuinely caring about the buyer and focusing relentlessly on that is the path to sales success.
The action you take as a seller matters. But it should be a result of serving the core purpose of understanding your buyer, and giving them what they want and need. Anything you say or do in the sales process that doesn't serve this purpose will undermine trust and your buyer's loyalty to you. Which is to say, if what you're doing doesn't help your buyer get what she needs or wants, don't do it.
You may think of delivering what the buyer wants and needs as your Winning Theme. Condense why they should buy from you into a sentence, and have support for every claim you make. But it must tie back to want the buyer wants.
Trust is the key to your sale. It's possible to complete sales with diminished trust, but it's much harder and results will be worse. If you stay focused on the buyers' needs and wants, trust follows. And staying focused on the buyers' needs and wants means you will occasionally act against your own self interest buy delivering news that your buyer doesn't want to hear. But the meta message when you tell them that you can't or won't do something is important: "If you ask me a question, you can believe the answer because I'll always tell the truth."
There are enormous implications descendent from this idea. A few that come to mind, in no particular order: you need to sell a good product, for a good company; your product must be differentiated from alternatives; you need enough opportunity to confidently endanger any individual sale by telling the truth; execution becomes paramount to ensure you have the volume to meet your revenue goals; if a buyers wants and needs to do not match your product and company approach, you must tell them and move on.
Let's end with an exercise. Who do you want to buy from: the person who has your best interest in mind, or the person who will do anything to close a deal?
Be that person.