Any old school players still out there wanna show some love?
Sales, always sales whether b2b, dropshipping, or fronting. Sales.
I started on BHW in 2015 @ 15 years old. I agree, SALES. My journey started with SEO, then paid ads + e-commerce. The past 2 years I've learned sales through finding off-market real estate deals. I wish I started with sales, EVERYTHING is sales!
Once you have the ability to contact a spreadsheet of cold leads and turn them into cash, you can make money on command. There is no better skill. Once you know sales you can get jobs anywhere, if you can't it's because you suck at selling!
How to Learn Sales:
1. Start selling. Phone convo's = reps = EXPERIENCE. If you have no experience, step #2 won't work. (*I can't tell you what to sell, there's lots of opportunities on this forum and through Google. )
2. Look into some kind of sales training such as SANDLER methodology. I learned from Sales Disruptors by Steve Trang, which is a form of SANDLER sales applied to buying houses.
-Which training you choose isn't so important as long as it focuses on learning to listen and ask questions to discover the TRUE MEANING AND INTENT of the person. It's very important that you learn to do this while sounding like an advisor, not a sales person!
-By studying a methodology, you will be introduced to some kind of repeatable "sales process". You will develop your own sales process for your industry/customers that you improve over time.
-Read Sell or Be Sold by Grant Cardone.
-Read Never Split The Difference by Chriss Voss (controlling tonality, mirroring, labeling, etc. are your hand-to-hand combat techniques in sales.)
3. Keep selling. You should adapt the basic understanding of how to run a sales process and keep improving your skills. Sales is a game of incremental advantages. There isn't one thing, but 1000 little things you will pick up.
4. Track your KPIs! New leads, hot leads, contact attempts made, speed to lead, talk time per day,
The money is in the follow up. I can't express how important it is to understand you're building a sales pipeline one brick at a time. Most people will not convert instantly unless you're bringing in very hot leads through inbound, or your offer is so good that you don't need much sales skills. Even for hot leads that don't covert, follow up is even more crucial!
I recommend you have a daily list of hot/warm prospects that you follow up with DAILY until they convert or go cold. At least 15 touches. Phone calls #1. Deals get done on the phone, not email or texts. If they go cold don't give up, keep contacting them 1-2x/week for a few months. I've had leads that were years old convert because I follow up.
Basically as a salesperson, you should have a part of your day that looks like this:
Call through all new leads in pipeline
Call through all hot/warm leads in pipeline (extra tip: double dial/triple dial to double your pickup rates)
Call through cold leads in database
Spend time each day marketing for new leads. This could be outbound or inbound marketing. If you're not getting consistent leads you won't close consistent deals.
If you hire a sales team, expect to check-in with frontline salespeople at the start and end of each shift. You should also hold weekly sales trainings and call reviews with your team. The training should each be drilling one aspect the fundamentals over and over. If you don't do daily check-ins and weekly training your team will stop closing deals. Sales managers do this for you, but you still need to manage them so they can manage the team right. They should also be on top of KPIs, and if they aren't you need to make sure they are. Without KPIs you don't have a sales machine.
There's a lot more to learn, but that's all the foundational pieces you need to succeed. Once you understand sales process & fundamentals it's all about DOING! You learn every day and there is no better way to learn a skill that will feed you for life.
