What great salespeople do

Salespeople are responsible for the sales funnel. Effective salespeople manage the funnel in a few specific ways that set them apart.

The sales funnel begins the moment a salesperson engages with a prospect. The salesperson owns–really owns–the relationship with that prospect and the success of that sales process. While other people (marketing, operation, product, etc.) might play roles, the salesperson takes responsibility.

For great salespeople, responsibility extends to making sure the prospects they are engaging with are quality prospects. While most prospects will come directly from your marketing top of funnel, some will be either self-generated, meaning the salesperson found the prospect on his or her own, or from another source that leads directly into sales (perhaps, a referral to a salesperson outside of digital channels–country club friend perhaps–or maybe biking friend, because isn’t cycling the new golf?). 

In today’s market, some salespeople are very active on LinkedIn, building relationships within their industry that lead to sales conversation. If this leads to qualified prospects, encourage it. Make sure this is a good use of time, not a distraction. Just being on social media is not the same as being intentional about using social media to find and close new business.

Every purchase is a journey for the prospective customer, beginning with awareness and ending with advocacy, and the salesperson is the sherpa on that journey. The journey begins with awareness, which means simply knowing your product exists, and (for new products) being aware of the pain that exists that your problem solves. Generally creating awareness is the responsibility of marketing, as doing this 1:1 as a salesperson doesn’t scale well.

Great salespeople will create advocates out of their customers. Advocacy means promoting your service to others because they like it so much. For example, think of those early Tesla owners, talking about how great the acceleration is and how great it is to never go to gas stations. A few months before, they had never heard of Tesla, and now they’re telling all their friends to buy one. That’s what you want your salespeople to create. 

Some people think advocacy depends on product. This is not true! Yes, product has a role to play. But the expectations set by a great salesperson can make the buyer of a provably inferior product into an advocate. Take Tesla–the early cars were prone to many, many issues, later low-priced cars like the Model 3 and Y lacked basics like instrument clusters–and still their early customers were rabid advocates. Some customers came in expecting to get an instrument cluster with their $50k purchase; they left without it–and still were advocates.

Tesla is unique. For all companies, the salesperson’s job is to be the future customer’s guide on this journey, putting a structure to it, and helping them make good decisions along the way.

Good salespeople do this in several ways: 

1. Effective salespeople position themselves as experts and peers to their buyers. People climbing Mount Everest respect their sherpas. You can be rich, successful, Type-A, etc. but your sherpas deserve respect. The climbers who don’t respect them risk death quite literally. The salesperson is the sherpa for the buying journey; like a sherpa, there are times where flexibility is best and times where a firm hand is best. To do either, respect is required.

2. Effective salespeople learn the customers’ needs without making assumptions.  By staying curious and asking lots of questions, the salesperson gets the prospect to give voice to their pains. The best questions are rooted in curiosity and yet demonstrate expertise. 

3. Effective salespeople take responsibility for the buying process. Sometimes a prospect doesn’t know how his or her company buys a product or service (these can be a great demographic to sell to, by the way–new hires who want to make an impact but don’t know their way around yet!). The salesperson takes responsibility for helping navigate this process, ensuring expectations are set, budget is available, the product solves the pains, and the right decision makers are involved. If the prospect is off track, the salesperson as expert and peer is comfortable challenging the prospect to ensure deadlines are met. 

4. Effective salespeople deliver results. They are ultimately responsible for closing the sale, and setting the expectations so that the product or service can be successfully implemented or delivered, and the client can be retained and even expanded. 

5. Effective salespeople get referrals. The sale doesn’t end with just one sale–great salespeople ask for referrals, building on their relationship to bring in more customers or clients.

Of course, an ineffective salesperson can appear to be effective in certain environments. Big companies like Google or Salesforce, with lots of brand value, leads, and lock-in, employ lots of salespeople who are effective in that environment–but would predictably not be effective at a startup. In an earlier stage company, there is a dramatic difference in performance between effective and ineffective salespeople. Ownership is the difference.

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