| Since I don't know anything about what you are selling, other than it being software, the advice is going to be generic. I work as the technical counterpart to a bunch of sales reps, so I can't speak to #1, but I can help with #2, I've seen what makes good reps and bad reps and have gone through lots of training with them. When you're just getting started in a new industry, it's important to understand how your customers buy software. Based on your price point things are going to be drastically different. Can a solo engineer pay for and expense the software or are you going to have to work your way up the chain to get the C-level involved in the purchasing decisions? The sales cycle in these two cases will be on complete opposite ends of the spectrum. If it is B2B, what types of companies are you targeting? 10 person startups or 100,000 person massive corporations? It is important to understand your landscape. From the personal side, it is ideal to be empathetic towards your prospects. Understand that (at least initially), the people you are selling to don't care about you and are only talking to you because they are interested in a solution to a problem they are facing. Far too many people try selling before they understand what the prospect is actually trying to solve. Rather than jumping on to a call with a prospect and demoing your tool and every feature under the sun, don't try to sell them at all on your initial conversation. Instead, spend your initial call with a prospect on understanding their problem and what they are currently doing. Try to understand how this problem actually affects them. If this is purely a nice to have, you probably aren't going to have any luck with the sale. But if you can discern that this is a $100k problem for them and your software is $10k then you'll know this is worth pursuing. You may get pushback that they just want to see a demo, but if your product is like many enterprise tools, it has a lot of features to check all the boxes. Just showing up and throwing up all the features in a demo is the way to ensure that nobody is enjoying it. You would have to give a boring generic demo and the prospect would have to hear about a bunch of features that aren't relevant to them. Instead, when you spend the first call understanding their problems, when you present your own solutions in future conversations you can actually target their specific needs. It's a much more compelling story when you are demoing to their exact needs rather than your assumptions about what people want to hear since everyone is different. There is a whole lot to sales, and I could go on for a long time about tips I've learned. But I think most important of all is to build relationships with people. Genuinely try to help them solve their challenges and you'll gain trust and respect from your prospects and customers. |