Starting out in sales – 5 habits to accelerate success
Developing a career in sales can be one of the most rewarding and diverse career paths anyone can venture on, whether it's your first career out of university or a conscious re-adjustment after years of development in another field. That said, the educational and financial rewards are reaped through the many stressful and challenging experiences every successful salesperson endures.
To be successful you'll need to develop the right skills, attitude and mentality quickly, ensuring you consistently evaluate and enhance them to keep up with changes in the industry. Building the right habits and keeping to them will accelerate your development and set you up to be a top-performer. Here's 5 key habits to develop that will get you there.
Read daily
As a profession, sales has been around for centuries in various shapes and forms. Core concepts of effective selling (e.g. rapport building, questioning, listening etc.) have developed through the ages and many renowned salespeople of the last 100+ years have documented their habits, values and methods in easy to access articles, books and audio. This means you can quickly learn from experts every day on both general and specific concepts in sales.
Regularly reading and listening to the wisdom of sales experts will provide you with more ideas, tips and methods than any formal sales training can. The beauty is that, with so many books on sales (with more coming out every year), you can read ones that focus on specific concepts/skills so you can build those as and when you need to do so. For example, if you start out as a BDR, focus on reading prospecting and rapport building books – like those from Tony Hughes, Jeb Blount and Anthony Iannarino. For farmers, read books focusing on relationship management and account management – see Dale Carnegie, Brian Tracey and Diana Woodburn. If you're struggling to close deals, read books on how negotiate and close.
Most people (in the UK and USA at least) stop reading regularly once they leave school and even fewer of those that continue doing so read non-fiction, educational books every day. This is a sure-fire way to become stagnant. Your learning and success as a salesperson will grow at an exponential rate when you feed your brain ideas and proven methods on a regular basis.
Prospect daily
In B2B sales, paradise is a place where your pipeline is consistently filled with 3-5x your quota of genuine, qualified opportunities which is regularly topped up with hot leads through marketing channels. This amount of coverage enables protection from the natural amount you'll lose or that will drop out, as well as those that will slip. However, for the vast majority, this paradise is a dream and you must work hard, day in-day-out to ensure your pipeline is as healthy.
Dedicating (and protecting) time every day for prospecting ensures you have the highest chance to build quality pipeline and maintain it as your other activities grow. Tony Hughes recommends 50 combos per day (1 combo = a call, LinkedIn message and email to one prospect) and Jeb Blount recommends dedicating time early in the morning and just before you leave the office – make one more call is his motto.
Making this a habit will ensure the effort you do in any given 30-day period, builds opportunities in the following 60 – 90 days. Therefore, slipping up at any point will have consequences on your future pipeline.
Measure & adapt
Measuring your activity and its corresponding results enables you to spot trends, identify strengths/weaknesses and consistently evaluate where you should be focusing time and effort.
Just like you'd expect your customers to measure the success of whatever good/service you sold them and then adapt usage or amount used in order to maximise value; you too should take this approach to your sales activity.
Common metrics include:
Number of prospect outreaches per day.
Win rate (there are a few angles to this but, for you as an individual, you should measure the number of opportunities won VS the number lost in each period).
Pipeline coverage (total pipeline in a period divided by quota for that period).
For more metrics and how to measure them, check out this Hubspot article.
Adapt your approach and develop your skills according to what you, your manager and team interpret from the analysis.
Think and be positive
This habit should be adopted in every aspect of your life, not just your professional career.
Adopting a positive mindset and attitude will have an astounding impact on your sales activity, results and career – driving you to be more resilient, build stronger relationships and have more productive meetings & calls, resulting in more sales and higher value sales. That said, a negative mindset with an inverse impact on your sales (if it’s consistent and not a temporary phase which we all experience from time to time) – prospects & customers will feel your negative energy and delay or stop buying, fewer customers are likely to refer new business to you and it will be harder to get new meetings.
Brian Tracy, Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill write extensively about this topic, having collated knowledge, tips and experiences from some of the most successful people over the last 100+ years. There are some common tips across their works when it comes to how to create a positive mindset, including:
Positive affirmations
Write down your chief goal and say it to yourself in the mirror each day. Saying it out loud ingrains your goals into your subconscious, which, in turn will alert you to ideas and opportunities to make your goals a reality.
Create and nurture a positive self-image
The way you perceive the world and others is a reflection of your self-image. In addition, how others perceive and treat you is impacted by the way you shape your appearance and behaviour. Expect the best of people and build an image of yourself that exudes confidence, professionalism and positivity.
Write down your goals
Effectively organising your time and working to get the most out of everyday will build a positive can-do attitude and you'll continually impress yourself with how much you get done. Write down your daily, monthly and yearly goals to help shape your activity and keep you positively moving forward.
Think and plan for the future
Lao Tzu was right when he said “If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present” but that's not to say you shouldn't plan for the future and work hard in the present to make your ideal future a reality. Having a clear image of where you're going will make finding ways to get there easier.
Think twice when judging people
Humans judge one another incredibly quickly. We make hundreds of judgements about people every day at lightning speed, based on things as simple as dress, body language, use of words, tone of voice etc. This includes your prospects and customers. Take time in getting know someone's behaviour and motivations, so you can align your efforts and maximise the work you do together, rather than judging too quickly and acting irrationally.
Practice mental well-being
Given the peaks and troughs in sales and the impact this has on your emotions, there will be times that you're elated, fearless and super confident and other times where you'll want to cry, quit and pull your hair out – possibly all at once too. In addition to cultivating a positive mindset, you'll need to develop habits to keep your mind and body healthy. This is key as the effort you can put into your sales is built on the health of your mind and body. If you treat your mind and body poorly, your results will be poor and vice versa.
The following habits are proven to improve your mental and physical well-being when practiced regularly:
Meditate
Meditation doesn't have to be you sitting silently in a room for hours on end. You can meditate for only a few minutes per day and it'll help. Sitting and reflecting on your success so far, your goals or simply clearing your mind of all thoughts will all contribute to your mental health. There's plenty of apps that'll help get you started too.
Exercise
Daily exercise, even if it's a brisk 30 minute walk, is crucial for your overall health. No matter your age, moving your body and breaking a sweat will get your endorphins flowing and boost your health.
Pursue a passion
Don't let work consume your life and abandon all your passions and hobbies in pursuit of a successful career. Pursuing a passion and having hobbies will make you happy, thereby accelerating your success and contributing to a healthy work-life balance.
Eat a balanced diet
This is drummed into us from an early age but it's easy to neglect as you grow older and work long-hours. You are what you eat.
Develop a solid work-life balance
When you're at work, work 100%. When you're out of work, do what makes you and your loved ones happy.