New to sales? Stepping into the world of sales can feel like stepping into a foreign country, with all the unique terminology and procedures others take as common knowledge. Even the most beginner-friendly sales guides seem to expect you to know the basics!
If you’re truly starting your sales career from the bottom, we’ve got you covered. This guide will walk you through the most essential terms and steps to give you a solid foundation from which to launch your sales career.
There are two primary things to know before your first day in a sales position: your customers and your company’s sales funnel. Below, let’s take a look at each of them in turn.
Let’s start off simple. The most important part word to know in sales is “leads,” which refers to potential customers or clients for your business.
If your company is a business-to-business (B2B) company, your leads will be other companies that you sell wholesale to. On the other hand, if your company is a business-to-consumer (B2C) company, your leads will be the end consumers of your product.
Leads take on different names depending on how close they are to a sale. Though any potential customer can be called a lead, leads can also be called “prospects” if they’ve been deemed a good fit for your business and “sales opportunities” if they’ve expressed an intention to purchase on top of that.
Knowing the difference between your types of leads helps you easily communicate a sale’s viability with your sales team, so it’s important to at least know these three terms.
The next most important thing to know is your business’s sales funnel, a crucial component of optimizing your customer journey from beginning to end is incorporating the best customer feedback tools to gauge how many leads are in each stage of the process effectively.
Though your company might start with a hundred leads, most of them will gradually drop out or be removed during their purchasing journey until only a handful come out the other side of the funnel as paying customers.
Each company’s sales funnels will look slightly different based on its industry, product, capabilities, methodologies, and more, but most sales funnels can typically be broken into three stages: top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel. Let’s take a look at each of these stages in turn.
In the TOFU, consumers first become aware of your company. This might be due to marketing, lead generation (lead gen), or sales prospecting.
Generally, marketing works to advertise your business to the masses and improve your public image. On the other hand, lead gen techniques deal with one-on-one communications with individual leads.
Furthermore, there are two types of lead gen. Inbound lead gen is when your lead reaches out to you first, such as if they interact with an ad, social media post, website SEO, or content marketing. On the other hand, outbound lead gen utilizing sales automation tools like Clevenio for emailing and social media is when your company reaches out to leads first, such as through cold calling, emailing, and social media.
Finally, we have sales prospecting, where a sales representative goes out, researches, and contacts a lead individually, seeding them for a sale. Because these Quality leads are hand-picked by the sales rep, they’re deemed “prospects” right off the bat.
In the MOFU, the consumer considers your company’s product and evaluates whether it matches their need. Consequently, the MOFU stages are the most critical to a business, as it’s the sales rep’s job to convince customers that the product is perfect for them.
To do so, sales reps ask qualifying questions to determine whether the lead meets the company’s vision of their ideal customer, called ideal customer profile (ICP). To go one step further, a company might even adapt their ICP into a buyer persona, a semi-fictional personification of the ICP given a name and backstory, to help sales reps remember the ICP.
There are four main lines of questioning that sales reps inquire about, referred to as the BANT criteria. In order, BANT stands for:
Depending on your business’s unique sales processes, you may also schedule consultation meetings, demonstrations, and presentations to further build a rapport with your lead and move them closer to a sale. Ensuring these interactions are structured as effective business meetings can significantly increase the chances of converting leads into customers by clearly communicating the value proposition and addressing any concerns they may have. Additionally, implementing effective sales engagement solutions can enhance these interactions by streamlining communication and providing valuable insights into customer behavior.
Finally, the BOFU is where a lead makes their purchase and graduates to a full-fledged customer. Generally, this involves using a closing technique, signing a contract, and following up with the customer to ensure their satisfaction.
Closing is one of the most crucial sales terms, as it refers to the act of completing a sale and signing a contract.
There are generally two ways for a sales rep to approach the close: using a hard closing technique that baldly asks yes-or-no if a deal has been made, or a soft closing technique that indirectly and smoothly checks to see if the lead is ready to close. Of course, you’ll want to research and implement a soft closing technique.
Additionally, “closed opportunities” refers to the total number of deals a salesperson has processed, whether it was closed-won (a sale was made) or close-lost (a sale wasn’t made). This is represented by the closing ratio, which is the ratio of total closed opportunities to the number of closed-won sales.
Once the contract is signed, though, you’re not done with the customer yet: you can either cross-sell a customer by encouraging them to buy a complementary product to their previous purchase or up-sell them by encouraging them to upgrade their current product to a better version.
By cross-selling and up-selling, you can send your customer all the way back to the top of the sales funnel to become a lead again, starting the sales process anew.
With this, you’ve hopefully learned the basics of how to properly identify, discuss, and nurture a lead into a customer. Though there’s plenty of sales knowledge that you’ll have to pick up on the job, this guide is enough to give you some stable footing on the first day of your sales career.