Noob School - Episode 50: Top 6 Sales Picks with John Sterling

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

In this episode of the Noob School podcast, John Sterling talks about six things that you can do to ensure a successful sales career. From taking care of your health to always writing things down, John’s advice is sound, practical, and deceptively simple. Ultimately, they focus on the things that you can do now so that you can see results fast. Take these six tips to heart, and sooner than later, you’ll be reaping the fruits of your own labor.  HIGHLIGHTSYou need to get healthy to succeed in sales Stop chasing the elusive 'more' without a specific goal Work on your craft everydayProspect for at least an hour a dayMake the calls Always have a written checklist with you QUOTESWhy you have to be healthy to be successful in sales, says John: "I have managed over a hundred salespeople, and anyone who is kind of out of shape or not taking care of themselves, they just don't last. They can't sustain what you have to do everyday to be consistent and to have results year after year."John on working on your craft everyday: "In sales, believe me, I have seen so many salespeople that actually did fine. They did good. But how good could they do if they really took it seriously and said, 'I'm gonna devote an hour a day to my craft. Studying, practicing, working with a colleague, trying to make my skills better so I'm ready to be the best salesperson I can be.'"John on why you need to be making calls: "Your job is to constantly be talking to somebody about trying to find where the opportunities are. And if you're just looking at your computer, they're not gonna be coming to you." Connect with Noob School and John by visiting the following links:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsterling1/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnsterlingsalesInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnsterling_/Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnsterling_TikTok: https://twitter.com/johnsterling_Website: http://salestrainingfornoobs.com/

Welcome back to Noob School. This is where we interview sales pros that can help you get off to a great start in sales. Hey, welcome back to Noob School. John Sterling here. We all know it's football season and some folks, I'm sure, are starting to gamble a little bit on the game. So I was thinking, you know, maybe I'd give you, I don't gamble anymore, but maybe I'll give you my top six picks of the week for things that you can do to be successful at sales. So particularly if you're just starting out, these are some practices you can,

You can start with, I guarantee you, will make you successful in sales. Even if you've been doing it for a while, these are things you can do that will help you sell more. So I'll give them to you in order, okay? You do them in order. Number one is to get healthy. If you read my book, Sales for Noobs, I think it's Chapter 2, we talk a lot about getting healthy. I have managed over 100 salespeople, and anyone who's kind of out of shape or not taking care of themselves, they just don't last. They can't sustain, you know, what you have to do every day to be consistent and to have results year after year.

So let's just say you start when you're, you know, 21 years old, you're starting a sales role. And your goal is to maybe, let's say, be a sales manager by the time you're 30 and maybe by the time you're 40, you've learned enough where you can have your own business and make some real money. Well, to do that, that's 20 years of sustained effort, of not getting in trouble, of content. to learn, and can you do that if you're not really taking care of yourself? In my experience, no. So you don't have to be an Ironman. You don't have to run triathlons.

In fact, I recommend against it. But I think just some sustained effort to stay healthy and exercise a little bit every day will be good for your sales. So that's number one. Number one pick. Number two pick. It's really got nothing to do with sales, but your financial mindset. All right. What is it you're trying to do? Why are you in sales? Why is unlimited commission important to you? What goal do you have financially and what's it going to get for you? I've seen countless salespeople just want the elusive more, right? We always want more. And what's our budget for that more? What are we going to do with the money? And most people, let's give the old 80-20 rule, at least 80% don't know why they're

They want more money. They don't know what they're going to do if they get it. If they got, let's say, a $100,000 commission check one month, what would they do with it? And to what end? So to really be able to sustain something over a long period of time, you should know very specifically what you're trying to do. For example, you can say, gosh, I'm just a year out of school. I'm starting a career in sales. I'm going to work really hard and get really good at my craft, be very consistent.

And by the time I'm 35, I will have amassed enough commissions that are making money in index funds, let's say, or in real estate, that I'm going to be able to buy my own business. Or maybe I'm going to have enough money coming in from rental income or from dividends that I don't have to work anymore if I don't want to. Or maybe I want to buy my parents a house or, you know, whatever it is. but something that says, I'm trying to earn this much money by this state so I can do this with it. And the people who have that kind of motivation typically, you know, get there a lot faster. So get your financial head space working before you just jump into sales and start the kind of the flywheel or the hamster wheel of I just want more. I want more. I want more. It's no good. It doesn't work.

Number three, again, this is one of my top picks, and it's got nothing to do with you actually selling something. Okay, this is more preparation. But train. If you will exercise every day under number one, and on number three, if you will practice your craft every day, whether it's studying, looking up YouTube's on sales, studying your competition, looking at, you know, doing some practice, maybe, with one of your colleagues about a presentation or maybe some public speaking, but something where you're practicing or learning about your craft. Imagine if you were, you know, a doctor. Well, doctors have to go back and get trained a certain amount every year to stay certified.

Same with an airline pilot. Or if you were an NBA basketball player, how much time do you spend not in the game doing something related to basketball? A lot, okay? Let's just say you might play three games a week, maybe four. that's eight hours, you're probably spending 40 plus hours watching film, you know, icing, icing your injuries, stretching out, practicing your shot, et cetera, et cetera. So they've probably got a five-to-one ratio of how much they work off the court versus on the

court. And, you know, in sales, believe me, I have seen so many salespeople that actually did fine. Okay, they did good. But how good could they do if they really took it seriously and said, I'm going to devote an hour a day to my craft, you know, studying, practicing, working with the colleague, trying to make my skills better so I'm ready to be the best salesperson I can be. Zig Zigler, most of you don't know who that is, look him up. He was the original, I would say he was the dean of sales coaching. And in one of his books, I remember reading. or maybe I heard it, he said he spent three hours a day working on his craft.

He would do it at the end of the day. You know, he would do it. I think he did it maybe before or after supper. I can't remember, but his wife would let him go back to his office, and he would read everyone in the industry. He'd read all about it. He'd read all the trade magazines. He would practice his presentation.

He would tape them. You know, he became a great speaker, probably one of the best speakers ever. So practicing your... craft instead of just kind of showing up doing the best you can and doing the sales training when they make you. That's kind of default. So if you really want to be good, practice it. And the difference between pretty good and people who make a million dollars a year is a lot.

There's a lot. So that's number three. Number four, same kind of vein is to prospect. Now, back in the day, prospecting kind of meant cold calling. It meant picking up the phone, calling up a complete stranger, trying to bully your way through to start a conversation. You know, hey, just give me 30 seconds and we can stop, you know, that kind of thing. It was very uncomfortable, really, for both sides of the equation. I got to tell you, I was never very good at it, nor did I do very much of it.

And I can see why others don't, too. But today, there's lots of ways to do it, right? You can ask your good customers for a referral. They can actually introduce you by email. You can start up kind of a warm conversation. That way, you can meet people through LinkedIn. There's a lot of ways to do it. But the point here is I have seen the people who take it seriously,

who block off an hour a day, an hour, let's just say an hour a weekday, five hours a week, same time every day, where they're doing some form of effective prospecting. The difference in what they make versus the people who don't do that is at least double. at least double. Okay, those are the people that I've seen make the monster commission checks year after year.

They make a lot more money. And it's very simple. It's just five hours a week of trying to find those opportunities that you can put in your pipeline and make your pipeline of prospects you're dealing with huge, huge. You've got so many of men there. Think about it. There's so many. If we could only know in our territory how many people actually need our product.

If we actually knew that, there would be so many more than we could ever even call on. The problem is finding them, right? And our advertising and marketing and word of mouth only can find so many. So prospecting is our way of finding those and making our opportunities big. So prospecting for an hour a day, that's four. And these are all things so far that you can do simply if you choose to, right? It's a little more work, but you can do these things. These are not magical fairy dust type things.

You can do all these. You can also do this one. Number five. Number five is simply to make the calls. And I know that sounds simple, but I got to tell you, I see more reps, particularly young ones that aren't completely comfortable yet,

and maybe they don't have a lot of people like comfortable people to call yet. But they just look at their computer sometimes like a deer in the headlight. They're just looking. I'll see them. They'll just be looking. They'll be tapping.

They'll be looking. They'll be tapping. And there's lots of reasons people do that. I'm sure I did it too when I was just starting out. You don't quite know who to call. You don't quite know what to say or what your script is yet. But I can tell you, a way through that zone is to make the calls, right? Make them anyway.

Call people that aren't even, there may be fringe prospects. or maybe it's a customer, maybe it's a potential partner. Anybody in your space, in your zone, just so you're on the phone, headset on, talking, trying to learn, getting your comfort on the phone. You should be on the phone, if you're particularly in the inside sales, you should be on the phone pretty much all the time, talking to somebody, you know, or maybe you're communicating over email or DM or whatever. but your job is to constantly be talking to somebody about trying to find where the opportunities are. And if you're just looking at your computer, you know, they're not going to be coming to you. So make the calls is number five.

And, you know, I would say, you know, every industry is a little bit different. But if you're not at least talking to, you know, 15, 20 people a day if you're an inside sales, you know, you're shortchanging yourself. So make the calls. Number six is, and again, I hear this all the time too, but have a checklist, a written checklist with you. And when you're on the inside sales, there's no excuse not to have it. And even if you're an outside sales, I mean, I consider myself an outside sales now because I'll go call on people and we'll have lunch and we'll talk about maybe doing business. I'll always have a note card with me. And I'll say, you don't mind if I look at my notes, do you?

I want to make sure, I'll tell them. I want to make sure I don't, you know, miss anything to do it. today. While we're at lunch, I don't want to have to call you back and say, I forgot to ask you something. And they actually kind of like that. It means I've done a little preparation to get ready for this lunch, like this is important to me. But again, to me, it's a cheat sheet. I want to make sure that, you know, if you're an inside sales, you find out a little bit about them at the beginning of the call, so you start to get to know them a little bit, but you want to find out what their pain is, you know, what is their problem? I want to make sure you ask that

question. You want to figure out what the return investment is, if they solve the problem, how much money will they save or how much will they make? You want to figure out how they make a decision at that company. You want to figure out what they want to see from you. You know, what do they need to see from you to be comfortable that you have

a good solution? And then by all means, the last checkmark is what do we do next? We don't want to just walk away and say, well, I'll call you later. We want to say, as long as we've decided to keep talking to each other, let's pull our phones out now and let's put it on the calendar when we're going to have a call or a Zoom or a team or a meeting or whatever we're going to do. But get it on there right now.

I think that's one of your main jobs on a sales call is to go ahead and set the next thing up. And as long as you're still talking about solving this problem, you know, it's not over. And, you know, many people, when they finally get through, they might have that first call and then, you know, it just kind of disappears. as you start playing phone tag and you move on to something else. So that's the last thing, is to make sure you have that cheat sheet with you and that you make darn sure that you set the next call before you finish this one. So those are my top six of the week, and I hope they work for you.