The gift of the gab and snake oil salesmen

To bootstrap you need to sell- it’s as simple as that. There is no alternative option as you have to put food on the table. If you haven’t sold before this can seem daunting. Even if you have plenty of experience it’s a different ball game and actually a lot of the techniques you will  have learnt don’t apply here.  If anything, it can give you a misplaced sense of confidence and the rude shock of reality will soon hit. The good news for all founders is that you have a huge amount of what’s required to sell well, simply by being a founder: excitement, passion and belief in what you offer. Without these you cannot sell anything. As @ josh Frith says in our upcoming podcast episode – blind faith will get you a long way 😊

The other good news is that there is no such thing as the gift of the gab. You hear all the time about ‘natural born sales people’ and how about this person can ‘ talk the birds out of the trees’ or ‘ has the gift of the gab.’ This is all absolute rubbish. Sales is about psychology. It is not about talking. It is about listening and listening hard. It is about persistence, determination and grit. One book I recommend any founder or salesperson is ‘Grit’ by @ Angela Duckworth ( Angela Duckworth) – a brilliant life guide on understanding how to dig deep to succeed. A sales conversation is a study in psychology. You make certain statements in order to communicate specific key messages and to elicit certain responses. This enables you to start to build a relationship and guide your prospect towards buying your product.  You must understand that you do not sell a product, but instead you convince  a person to buy a product. The way you do all of this is by telling a story.

In the age of data and performance metrics telling a story is even more vital. As humans we are conditioned to listen to stories. Since first sitting around campfires to oral histories being passed down through generations, human brains retain stories. Any memory champion uses story creation techniques to memorise certain facts and numbers. Less than ten people have ever memorised the mathematical Pi to over 50,000 decimal places in sequence. However, hundreds of thousands of people have memorised the role of Shakespeare’s Hamlet which consists of more than 50,000 letters in sequence. Stories work because they are easy for the human brain to remember and they also drive emotion which is another key part of any sale.

To sell you need the four E’s – energy, emotion, expertise and excitement. Whatever level of excitement you have, your prosect will always have slightly less. So, if you are only vaguely enthused, then don’t expect them to be wildly excited. At the end of the day if you’re not super excited about your product how can you expect anyone else to be? You need to communicate, transmit and engender in your prospect that same level of excitement. Your passion and belief will give you energy. Your story will create emotion and start to build the emotional connection which underpins any relationship and finally your expertise will start to build trust.

Trust is at the root of any sale.  The word credit in banking ( the riskier form of buying) comes from the Latin – credo – which means I believe you.  There is a good reason that the mythical bogeyman of the snake oil salesperson exists. If someone doesn’t trust you or believe you then they won’t buy from you. If you go to buy a car, an apartment or even just an item of clothing  and the salesperson makes any outlandish claims or says anything that you don’t think is true then you will walk away because you don’t trust them.

The four Es are intertwined and you need them in combination. Telling a story with energy, excitement and expertise will start to build an emotional connection which underpins trust and enhances the chances of the prospect remembering what you are offering, your key messages and why it is a good thing to consider.

Finally, you must get use to rejection. Selling anything means you will face a huge amount of rejection. There is no way to avoid this and this is why persistence, grit and determination are so key. However that alone is not enough- you can’t just repeat yourself endlessly expecting a different outcome. That is the definition of stupidity and won’t lead anywhere.

You have to learn from each interaction. What worked and what didn’t? What objections did you get?  Every single objection that you get will be based on some thing that you have said so you are effectively creating your own objections. What are you saying that is causing this objection? In order to understand this and be able to answer it you need a script to work from. Once you have a script and you start to see what works an what doesn't, you can start to refine and adapt it. But before you can have a script you need use cases or vertical targets or customer personas that you can specifically target and that you can build each script to match, all of which I’ll discuss in next week’s blog.

The good news is that for any founder you should have the four E’s in abundance- energy, excitement, enthusiasm and expertise- it’s all about your product and your business! By applying psychology to build an effective working script and by telling a good story you can start to sell. Then it just comes down to doing the hard yards- in no other industry is it more true that practice makes perfect - so get out there and start selling 😊