Stocking our sales arsenal

Summary: To commit to a career in sales is to head into battle every day — it’s not for the faint of heart, as I’ve mentioned here before. To succeed, you need the right weapons. They are not especially complicated, but they are critical, and it’s worth your investment of time and effort to build them properly, and get comfortable using them. They are: your sales story, your prospect list, networking & referral partners, social media, email, the phone, and digital marketing tools. Get the details below.

Preparing for battle

Having the right tools is crucial to doing any job well. Doctor… dentist… hairdresser… hockey player… they simply can’t work without their scalpel/drill/shears/stick.

The same applies to sales: When we have the right tools — and in sales, I prefer to use “weapons” — we’re more confident heading into battle, and we’re more successful achieving our goals.

So what are the most important weapons for hitting those goals?

The sales story

In the last Scorecard, we covered the notion of using stories to build our attack plan. The most important component of that plan is our sales story. The sales story is foundational to everything we do in sales; we use bits and pieces of it to hone all the weapons in our arsenal.

The prospect list

The next most important weapon is our prospect list. The prospect list is where we take aim. While it’s best to use a CRM tool for list management, Excel can also be effective. The size of your list is important: You’ll want a number that’s manageable. In my experience, 35 prospective companies is a good starting point each week.

Networking & referral partners

Networking and building a solid group of referral partners is essential for anyone in business and particularly in sales, where the work is so relationship-based. Of course, relationships tend to be hard to build when you need them. The best time to cultivate them is when you don’t need them. That’s because prospects and partners are often more attracted to you when they feel no sense of “need” in you. These relationships will collect serious compound interest over time, so you should always be meeting new people. These connections will contribute significantly to your success in winning the sales battle.

The first objective of any sales process is getting the meeting. The most deadly and accurate weapon for scoring a face-to-face meeting with a target prospect is the telephone.

Social media

While certain aspects of the internet have made selling more challenging, tools like LinkedIn and Twitter are highly versatile enablers (read: weapons) that provide information and ways of connecting with prospects that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

These platforms are invaluable for driving awareness, and awareness is the first step in the buyer's journey. Posting regularly and consistently can provide you with the reach and distribution you need to build awareness at scale. You can manufacture reach simply by creating and sharing content, once again helping you build relationship capital before you need it.

Email

Email remains a marketing workhorse, and it has become the primary weapon of choice for many sales hunters when building initial relationships with prospects. Yes, it’s ubiquitous — people’s inboxes are full these days — but email is less disruptive to the potential customer and less reliant on our ability to execute than the phone.

The telephone

I am working with a client right now who wants to grow their 2023 revenue by a million dollars. Since they have only one salesperson, other team members (non-sellers) are going to have to pitch in. Everyone was on board until we got to the part of the process where we talked about having to make phone calls to prospects. Right then you could see the fear in their eyes.

The first objective of any sales process is getting the meeting. The most deadly and accurate weapon for scoring a face-to-face meeting with a target prospect is the telephone. Success in sales is directly attributable to the quantity and quality of proactive telephone conversations you have.

Using the phone, however, raises the question of voicemail: It’s one of the more controversial elements of making sales calls. I have heard folks say you should never leave a voicemail. The truth is, if you are going to use the telephone, you are going to encounter voicemail 50 – 75% of the time. And if you think simply leaving your name and number will result in someone calling you back, you’ll end up disappointed. But with practice and patience, you can learn how to leave tempting tidbits of your sales story in a voicemail to kick-start the relationship-building process.

Digital marketing tools

Blogs… podcasts… online videos… webinars… These are among the powerful digital weapons that allow you as a seller to showcase your know-how and expertise. A prospect can see and hear you in action. Done well, these tools can fast-track the building of trust. Best of all, you are now selling 1: many vs limiting your efforts to selling 1:1.

The importance of practice

So, now you know what weapons you need. You start to build them: your story, your bio, prospect list, email scripts… You have the sales story for email and phone… the bio to pitch to podcasts… you get the idea.

Now it’s time to practice. And practice. And practice. Until you’ve mastered them. I hate the tired old adage practice makes perfect (notice I didn’t use it in my subhead above), but I will give it a quick nod here because it truly does apply: You need to practice this behaviour to be good at it, just as the doctor or dentist — or Leafs right winger — needs to rinse and repeat until they get it just right.

In the next Scorecard I explore how we take our sales story and our loaded arsenal and launch our attack. See you back here in two weeks!

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