[deepGem]

Having shadowed some great sales execs in my earlier career and having done some enterprise sales as a startup founder here are my pointers to get started and what perhaps matters the most. I'll address what matters most first:

1. The ability to take a NO without getting burnt out. Try to keep the emotion out of a sale as much as possible, even though it's your company and product. 2. The ability to have a sense of humour and make conversations enjoyable. No one wants to talk to a sales guy who is boring. 3. The ability to understand when have you earned the trust of your customer. Essentially your customer has to be comfortable talking to you and one of the best signals for earning positive trust is how much your customer makes casual funny comments or small talk. 4. Once you've earned your customer's trust - a sale is more or less guaranteed. Once you've learned how to earn trust - I mean once you've cracked that algorithm it's rinse and repeat.

To get started: 1. Make random conversations with people of your customer's persona either at events, through cold calling or cold emailing and be very very sensitive to the pulse of people you talk to. Do they engage in conversation, are the conversations ending with one words rather than continuations. 2. Have a very precise pitch of what you are selling. Pitch the customer once they are relatively in their comfort zone. 3. You won't be able to sell to busy execs SVPs and above - no matter how good you think you are. So it's better to reach out to someone in the lower rungs of the ladder. 4. If you play golf or some sport where decision makers hangout it'll certainly help to make conversation. 5. Sales is typically a male dominated field unfortunately. So you have to be conversant in sports/politics of that region to make some headway.

To summarise, sales is all about making conversations and earning someone's trust. It has very little to do with 'what' you are selling.