I am seeking mentors with Sales Experience. I've read many sales books and listened to audiobooks, and I'm now a fervent believer in the noble art of selling. I need help learning the craft through selling.
An innovative custom software solution provider has given me a once-in-a-lifetime sales opportunity, but I don't know where to start. They don't have a sales program that I can follow. I need a plan or method to identify qualified prospects, interact with leads, and develop a Sales pitch. I know that I will become a good salesman because I believe in the product, and I've seen it increase companies ROI by +400% in one year.
Becoming a successful salesman will help me financially with funding and give me the critical skills for my entrepreneurship endeavors. I am ready to learn and unleash something that I feel is latent in me.
Please forgive me if this is not appropriate to post here. I need help.
Answers
Hello Fabien. First of all, your question is very appropriate for this forum, and thank you for your service.
I have worked closely with all levels of sales people in business, though I am not a salesman myself. Hopefully a sales person will jump in!
From your description, you are interested in business to business sales and you would be working for a fairly small company. This discussion is predicated on these assumptions.
It sounds as though they do not have a marketing strategy, so you might need to develop that yourself too. Find out what trade shows, conferences, and publications are relevant to your target audience. Do some advertising in the relevant publications, have a booth at trade shows, go to some conferences. Make sure your website and social media platforms are helping get messages out too. This will start generating leads and contacts. Seeing what the competition is doing, should also give you some guidance. Lastly, if you have good knowledge of your target customers already, you can do cold calls.
The ‘pitch’ usually starts with a brief background of the company, its founders, size, number of developers, # of employees, and possibly customers and sales growth. This leads into the products. Give an overview of products, followed by the specific products, you think the customer might be interested in. This is followed by general discussion. This assumes a formal presentation to a customer in a conference room setting. A preliminary phone conversation, or trade show introduction would follow the same format, but be much shorter and concise. An overarching theme of your presentations should be how your product is able to help the customer, by solving their problem(s). It may be faster, easier, cheaper, flexible, etc.
You must have a good understanding of your product, the competition and the industry. Be prepared to discuss the advantages of your product versus the competition, preferably with examples of how your product helped a company, when a competing product could not.
Hope these ideas help.
As an ACP AdvisorNet staff member, I assist in monitoring and building the ACP AdvisorNet community.
Hello Fabien,
You can use the community tab at the top to search for Mentors by career and level of experience. You can also enter your zip code if you want to further refine your results! Here is the link to the search I completed for Mentors who work in sales: https://acp-advisornet.org/community/advisors
Thank you @ Mr. Joe Engle.
Thank you Mr. Richard Byrne. I will explore all these options and learn as much as possible from them.
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