The 7 Laws of Sales Success
The 7 Laws of Sales Success: Violate any one of these and your toil will be in vain...
1. Sales is a lot like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible or you can simply walk up and hit the ball. My advice is to walk up and hit the ball.
2. Sales is about people and problem solving. Not technology or solutions.
3. People buy 4 things and 4 things only: time, money, sex, and approval/peace of mind. If you are selling anything else, you will fail.
4. People buy aspirin always. They buy vitamins only occasionally and at unpredictable times. Sell aspirin.
5. All things being equal, people buy from their friends. So make everything else equal then go make a lot of friends.
6. Being valuable and useful is all you ever need to do to sell things. Help people out. Send interesting posts. Write birthday cards. Record videos sharing your ideas for growing their business. Introduce people who would benefit from knowing each other then get out of the way, expecting nothing in return. Do this consistently and authentically and people will find ways to give you money. I promise.
7. No one cares about your quota, your payroll, your opex, your burn rate, etc. No one. They care about the problem you are solving for them.
If you are sending cold emails, you should know that approx 3% of prospects are in the buying window. 3 out of 100 where your timing is good. But even then your message and offer have to be compelling enough to get a response.
At the same time another 30% could be convinced to enter the buying window. We've focused on promoting more of that 30% into the buying window by offering something valuable and useful proactively. A video made just for them showing how the SAAS we offer will solve their problems. An Accessibility report at no cost. Competitor keyword analysis report. A mockup of their website. We dont ask, we just do it and send it over.
"But that takes time/work/energy!" Yes it does. Think of it as the CAC (Cost of Acquisition). You can send 200 cold template emails and hope for 2 to 6 meetings b/c you randomly happened upon that 3%. Or you can send 100 things of value, get 10 to 15 meetings and realize you are valuable, your work has worth, and you are not a SPAMMER.
There is more than 100 trillion dollars in the global economy just waiting for you to breathe it in. Good luck.
Initially posted on Hacker News discussion and re-published here with the author's permission.
by Colin Dowling, Founder RainCloud
