Sales Fundamentals for Veterans

Summary: what sales fundamentals are critical to success and how do your sales resources compare to what we recently shared with entrepreneurial war wounded veterans who are brand new to the sales profession? A marketers viewpoint...

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Sales/Selling is a critical survival skill for anyone in this global economy and it's only getting more challenging. 6.8 people are involved in a complex B2B sale, up from 5.4 people last year according to CEB.

As you may have read one of my prior posts, one of the causes my company supports is to help teach wounded veterans how to start their own businesses. My goal for my portion of this week's Veteran certificate program was to offer sales fundamentals, sales best practices, and valuable sales resources that my team and I have run across during our careers to help get these twenty-four Veterans off to a running start in their new business ventures.

The two categories we focused on in my class discussion are sales lessons learned from valuable books/training and other important sales resources. I carefully 'vet' a number of sales resources including training before presenting content to this audience for the twin benefit of presenting the most relevant sales content possible and to sharpen my own understanding of sales as a profession. As a lifelong digital marketing leader, I always seek to understand how buyers are changing how they buy, study how sales people think, and figure out how to best apply the selling concepts to our own digital best practice business.

1. Regarding books and training for our program this year and in times past, we've been extremely fortunate and grateful for donors like Daniel Pink, Anita Zinsmeister  from Dale Carnegie, Anthony Iannarino, Juliana Crispo, Joanne Black, and Jill Konrath among others; each of which have enabled these veterans on how to sell using their training course work and books. We leveraged Anthony's book The Only Sales Guide You'll Ever Need (pictured above) as a framework for this session's sales fundamentals discussion; the sections on asking for and obtaining commitments, prospecting and objection handling in his book are exceptional relative to other resources I've reviewed and worth a deeper look by any student of the sales game.
2. In addition to this, we outlined some valuable prospecting resources for a new business to consider (some are free!) - Jeb Blount's Sales Gravy Podcast, the Advanced Selling Podcast, and Dale Carnegie Podcast. Other valuable resources - Nancy Nardin, how to prospect via LinkedIn (Navigator, LI profile, LI Groups), when to use Hubspot Sales, and how to use tools like Salesloft for emailing, etc. We also suggested reading sales blogs as well as other books like Grant Cardone's Be Obsessed book, The Challenger Sale, and The Little Red Book of Sales.

Our closing statement in my portion of this last class is to have a mindset of continuous improvement and providing value on each prospect/customer interaction - sales is an art and science that can only be learned by doing, experimenting, iterating, and improving (just like Marketing). It's not something that can be read only about or trained on and the process of rejection gets you closer to success. Success is defined as a repeatable process, customers are happy to provide referrals/testimonials on your great work, and money or ideas are exchanged.

In that spirit of continuous improvement for our next veterans sales class and exchanging value, what sales fundamentals, sales people, or sales resources have you come across that have been valuable for you to learn how to sell or apply selling skills to? There are a bunch of best in class tools and methodologies out there. Please comment below!

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Today’s blog contribution comes from Jon Russo, founder of B2B Fusion, a sales and marketing performance firm focused on connecting marketing investment to new revenue.  Enterprise clients include Anthem, Ricoh, Thomson Reuters, and Level 3 among others.  Prior to founding B2B Fusion, Jon held global CMO roles for 10 years in private and public technology companies in Silicon Valley, NYC, and Luxembourg. A former active duty Army Officer, Jon earned his Masters degree from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley and undergraduate degree from the University of Connecticut.