So you want to smash your sales targets and make great money this year?
World class salespeople are focused, resilient, and committed to improving their sales techniques, skills & methods.
Achieving better sales performance demands that you improve mindsets, beliefs, habits, behaviors, and skills, every single day.
I have been a high-performing salesperson for over 20 years. I know exactly what it takes to thrive in sales and I want to help you have your highest-earning year ever in 2023.
Here is my list of sales techniques, sales tips, and sales tactics to help you start crushing it now!
What Are My Best Sales Techniques?
I’m sharing these sales techniques to help you improve your sales performance quickly. I’ve broken these tips down into 7 key sections:
- Underlying Motivations & Desires
- The S3 Framework
- Beliefs & Values
- Operating Principles
- Behaviors & Habits
- Sales Skills
- Ongoing Learning & Growth
Each section plays an important role in the level of success you will achieve as a salesperson, so review and consider all of these valuable sales techniques.
How To Use These Sales Techniques
If you are a sales professional or considering becoming one, these sales techniques will help you level up fast.
I recommend starting at the top and reading down. Follow my system for creating a solid career and behavioral foundation, followed by my best sales habits and skills.
A. Underlying Motivations & Desires
1. Define What You Want
Your career and life will unfold one way or another. Invest effort to define what you really want.
Be the type of person that plans their outcomes instead of reacting to developments.
2. List Every Desire & Motivation
You must be motivated to persevere when times are tough. Only your truest desires and motivations will work.
Deeply consider this question and create a comprehensive list.
3. Organize Your Desires & Motivations
Organize your list into 3 broad categories:
- Basic needs (food, clothing & shelter)
- Psychological motivations (feeling competent, being respected)
- Self-fulfillment desires (achieving major goals, mastery, self-actualization)
4. Understand the 4 Success Pitfalls
The first 2 pitfalls are “External Influence” and the “Achiever Ego”. These pitfalls will lead you to a type of success or short-term pleasure, but true satisfaction will be fleeting.
The next 2 pitfalls are “Victimhood” and “Fear”. These pitfalls are performance killers that will hold you back from maximizing career success and life satisfaction.
How much are your desires and motivations influenced by the pitfalls?
5. Reflect on Pitfall #1: External Influence
More than ever we are influenced by external factors.
Are your motivations & desires your own or have they been influenced?
Some outside influence is healthy but too much will lead you to pursue false goals.
6. Reflect on Pitfall #2: Achiever Ego
A healthy ego looks to fulfill your needs and wants, and is mandatory for success in sales.
Too much achiever ego will lead you to behave selfishly, act unethically, and pursue BS goals you don’t actually care about.
7. Reflect on Pitfall #3: Victimhood
Great salespeople avoid excuse-making.
Even legitimate excuses must be avoided, and you need to become fully accountable.
Only when you take complete responsibility for your outcomes and avoid blaming external factors will you be empowered to rise.
8. Reflect on Pitfall #4: Fear
Fear is more than an emotion, it’s a deep instinct that exists to protect us.
All of us fear the unknown, fear change, fear rejection, and fear failure.
Success in sales demands the courage to face your fears and persevere anyway, knowing you will be uncomfortable but that it’s worth it.
9. Listen to Your Conscience
Your conscience won’t ever lie to you.
It will help you overcome the pitfalls. It will help you identify your truest desires.
If you ignore it, your conscience will speak to you in the form of regret. Your conscience is always guiding you, so learn to listen.
This isn’t just a sales technique, it’s a life hack.
10. Experience Your Desires Fulfilled
Sit in a quiet place and imagine in great detail how you will feel with each desire fulfilled. Ask yourself “why do I want this feeling?”.
Keep refining your list.
11. Be Honest With Yourself
It’s time to get honest regarding Pitfalls 3 & 4.
Will you take full responsibility for your performance and results? Are you prepared to be uncomfortable and face fear in order to grow?
You need a firm “yes” to both questions.
12. Review Your List Often
Regularly review and obsess over your list of desires and motivations so they stay top of mind.
B. The S3 Framework
13. Understand the “Secret to Sales Success” (S3)
The S3 framework outlines the steps you must follow to get good at sales. There is no shortcut to success, only this proven formula.
Continuously move through these steps to build your expertise.
14. Secret #1: Learn
It always starts with exposure to new information. You won’t retain most new information so have a plan for reinforcement or exposure to related content.
15. Secret #2: Try
Practice is where the magic happens.
Practicing something new is always stressful, so expect to feel avoidance kicking in (i.e. procrastinating making sales calls).
16. Secret #3: Fail
The most challenging step is accepting failure and its critical role in your growth. Avoiding failure is ingrained in us from an early age through schooling.
In sales though, your most effective teacher is real-world experience and in particular your L’s.
Embrace failure as a fact of growth, especially early on.
17. Secret #4: Reflect Intentionally
Failure is painful but reflection reveals the answers.
First, accept responsibility for your failure. Once you are over any excuses, think it through and find the lessons.
Write down your failures as they happen each day and then pick a few to reflect on later.
18. Secret #5: Adapt Purposefully
With your lessons in hand from the pain of real-world experience, be intentional about applying what you have learned next time.
19. Secret #6: Repeat
If you want to be a true professional, you must remain a committed student.
Get back on the horse each day and incorporate lessons learned through your failures, no matter what career stage you are at.
20. Grow Confidence Through Failure
Paradoxically, the more you fail the better you will become.
Train yourself to accept failure, move through all negative emotions, and follow secrets 4, 5 & 6 to capture the benefits. Keep it up and watch your confidence grow.
21. Develop Mature Insight
Over time your baseline of sales competence will wind upwards, eventually leading to expertise. The more committed you are to S3, the faster you will improve.
The beauty of aging is that for the patient and committed student, mature insight is inevitable. This is when months and years of effort lead to incredible results and insights.
C. Beliefs & Values
22. Acknowledge the 2 Types of Beliefs
Beliefs either hinder or support you.
They are at the foundation of who you are and were created by your nature, how you were nurtured as a child, life’s inputs (and your interpretations), and how you nurture yourself today.
Importantly, you have the power to change hindering beliefs into supporting ones.
23. List Your Hindering Beliefs
Before you can change hindering beliefs you must identify them. Here is a list to get you started:
- Salespeople are disliked
- People hate receiving cold calls
- I can’t handle rejection
Dig deep and build your list. Start with sales and expand to personal hindering beliefs also.
24. Replace Your Hindering Beliefs
Hindering beliefs are not objective truths, they are your perspectives. With these beliefs identified it’s time to replace them.
Here are some alternatives to the previous list:
- The best salespeople are respected
- People enjoy buying things
- Rejection (failure) leads to growth
Even if there is some truth to a hindering belief, list an alternative.
25. Overcome Your Hindering Beliefs
Try and catch yourself anytime you are dwelling on a hindering belief or letting it impact you.
Once you consistently are doing this, start replacing the hindering belief with a supporting one right then and there. Do this by reciting the supporting belief to yourself.
26. Be Vigilant with Hindering Beliefs
Regularly review your list, adding new ones as you catch them.
Record voice memos stating key supporting beliefs and then listen a few times per day.
27. List Your Values
Values are the standards that govern your actions. Your values are mostly unwavering and are your behavioral anchor. They are the foundation for how you operate in sales and life.
Make an exhaustive list of all the values that resonate for you.
Here are a few of mine to give you some ideas; optimistic, energized, present, curious, proactive, prepared, organized, resilient, hardworking, and healthy.
28. Reinforce Your Values
Review your list of values regularly to ensure they are embedded in your psyche.
Visualize a day unfolding positively as you embody your values.
Most people don’t take the time to identify their values. They never experience the satisfaction that comes with intentionally living what they believe, deep down inside.
D. Operating Principles
29. List Your Operating Principles
Operating principles are descriptions of how you translate values into daily action.
Make a list of your operating principles. Here are a few to get you started:
- I actively foster energy, excitement, and a positive attitude in myself.
- I endeavor to understand people and help solve their problems.
- I maintain a high level of organization across all areas of my life.
30. Beware Zombie Operating Principles
Zombies are bad habits that continuously pull you away from success.
Zombies infect you, and they keep coming back even when you think they are dead.
Make a list of all the zombies that consistently appear for you.
Here are a few to get you started; low-energy, distraction, procrastination, passivity, avoidance, overwhelm, addiction, frustration, and fear.
31. Kill the Zombies!
Killing zombies requires vigilance in spotting them, and clarity on what to do when they show up.
For each zombie you contend with regularly, outline how you will defeat it. For example:
- When my phone distracts me, I put it out of reach.
- When I sense I am avoiding important work, I take immediate action on the item.
- When I feel overwhelmed, I write and prioritize my list of tasks, then take immediate action on item #1.
E. Behaviors & Habits
32. Appreciate the Impact of Your Habits
You can have all the talent in the world, but without good habits, you won’t get close to your true potential.
Define your operating principles, hold yourself accountable, and good habits will take root quickly.
I recommend the book Atomic Habits by James Clear for more guidance.
33. List Your Habits
Start with sales habits and move on to broader lifestyle habits.
Much like beliefs, habits are either hindering or supportive so list them accordingly.
Changing bad habits is tough initially, but momentum builds quickly when you follow tip #34.
34. Make Good Habits Non-Negotiable
Today’s habits generate tomorrow’s outcomes.
The definition of “grind” is executing good habits every day regardless of your mood.
Make your positive daily habits non-negotiable and watch your performance soar.
35. Time-Block Your Calendar
Schedule your critical work with time-blocks.
Afford periods for reactionary work that arises.
Be malleable to urgent developments, but do your best to stick to your calendar every day by following sales techniques #36 & #37.
36. Harness Your Focus
This may be the most important habit of all. Beyond regular life distractions, in sales, you also deal with constant new developments.
The best sales technique to harness focus is to remove distractions and emphasize getting started. For example, when it’s time to prospect, put distractions aside and make your first call.
37. Enter Into Flow States
Achieving flow states happens organically when you harness focus and build momentum.
The pull of distraction will be most apparent when you first start a task, so fight hard to get going and resist the urge to drop focus. Stick to the task at hand and you will enter into flow soon.
38. Schedule Breaks
Time-blocking is tough because it looks and feels like hard labor. To avoid burnout, take short breaks after intense periods.
Hold yourself accountable to return to your work after each break.
39. Increase Work Quality
As you refine the habits of calendar management, focus, and flow states, the quality of your work will steadily improve.
Rely on good habits to get into focused work periods, and then demand greater quality from yourself.
40. Increase Work Velocity
The more you do something the better and faster you will get.
Push yourself to get more done while ensuring quality is never compromised.
41. Structure Your Daily Work
How you structure your work tasks will depend in part on personal preference.
I start each day with high energy so focus on creative, critical, and challenging work first, saving admin tasks for later.
Discover what works for you and keep refining until you are optimized.
42. Become a Professional Prioritizer
New developments are an ongoing challenge. You must become effective at handling them and reprioritizing on the fly.
Tasks should generally be prioritized as follows:
- High value + high priority
- High value + lower priority
- Low value + high priority
- Low value + lower priority
Multiple times throughout the day, assess and reprioritize so you are focused on the right things.
43. Prioritize What’s Closest to Money
Your highest value, highest priority tasks will usually be closest-to-money.
However, the job requires that you complete tasks that are very far from money, like industry research for example.
Be money motivated but tackle other important work consistently.
44. Review Your Performance
Assess your work effort, focus, and accomplishments honestly at the end of each day and week.
Look at broader performance indicators at the end of each month, quarter, and year.
Goals don’t just happen, they are achieved.
45. Schedule Dedicated Planning
Early in your career focus on overcoming internal resistance, and improving your skills via S3. As you gain experience your progress will accelerate dramatically.
Create a daily game plan that is ready when you get to work each morning. Plan your objectives for each week, month, quarter, and even year in advance.
F. Selling Skills
46. Ensure You Are in the Right Place
You must be convinced about your product or service. Sell something you know will help customers. Sell something the market wants.
Develop a passion for your industry, company, and product.
These feelings will help you bring the necessary belief, enthusiasm, and resilience into each day.
47. Deepen Product Knowledge
Become deeply interested in your products & services. Make efforts each week to learn more and master your positioning and sales pitch.
Gain awareness of how existing customers are achieving results, and share relevant stories when you sell.
48. Deepen Competitor Intelligence
Know your main competitors and gain insights into what separates your offerings. Know how they are priced and their strengths and weaknesses.
Never talk negatively about a competitor, but train yourself to effectively sell against them by better understanding them.
49. Deepen Market Knowledge
Increase your knowledge about the industries you are selling in to, including business challenges and how your products address them. Use market-appropriate terminology.
Maintain broad awareness of the overall business climate and stock market.
50. Do More Prospect Research
If you need to generate leads, learn about your target markets, and develop lists of potential customers.
For each, know their size, product areas, and the geographic markets they operate in. Review news releases and quarterly/annual reports, and know how your offerings can help.
Identify multiple individuals at each company to approach.
51. Learn From Your Sales Team Colleagues
Every successful salesperson has something to teach you. Pay attention to what’s working for your sales team colleagues and learn from them.
52. Prospect Regularly
Most companies don’t generate enough inbound leads to support the entire sales organization. If this is the case you must generate leads yourself.
Ask customers and contacts for referrals.
Cold approach suitable targets in a variety of ways.
Prospecting is a critical sales technique that must be done consistently.
53. Cold Call Effectively
Cold calling is simple. You need the courage to call and talk when someone answers, plus a helpful sales technique or two.
Script the first 30 seconds so you can follow a simple process. Here’s an example:
- Open by saying “hi <name> it’s <your name> from <company>, how’s your day going?” or something like that.
- Often some small talk will ensue, but sometimes you’ll get an impatient response like “how can I help you?” Don’t worry about it, just proceed.
- Next, be genuine and ask the person if they would mind giving you some help. Most people will usually answer “sure” when you ask this properly.
- Next, deliver your persuasive 15-30 second elevator pitch (what you sell, how you help) and then ask for a few more minutes to explore if this may be a good fit for them.
- Boom, you have transitioned from soliciting to conversing. Often the person will agree to chat with you, sometimes they won’t, and sometimes they’ll refer you to someone else.
54. Cold Email Effectively
Your cold emails should feature an intriguing subject line.
The body should lead with a clear question, followed by what you offer, how it helps, and close with a meeting request.
Business communication should be cordial, professional, and concise. Remember that humor can be misinterpreted in written form.
55. Employ a Sales Methodology
There are many sales methodologies including SPIN, SNAP, Challenger, Solution Selling, Customer Centric, MEDDIC, and more.
Most established sales organizations have a process in place, or you can pick one that fits or even develop your own. To do that, consider the steps a prospect must take to make a buying decision and then walk them through that process.
56. Effectively Manage Your Pipeline
Your sales funnel or pipeline includes all active, qualified opportunities.
The pipeline is wide initially to accommodate all your early-stage deals, and narrower later on as some deals are disqualified or lost.
The key to success when working your pipeline is to give enough love to your early and mid-stage deals.
Late-stage deals are always the highest priority but don’t neglect the rest.
57. Embrace the CRM
It’s a running joke that salespeople hate customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
If you feel this way, change your hindering belief and use this powerful tool to better track your interactions.
Remember that part of effective selling is leveraging previously captured information.
58. Tackle Admin Work Consistently
Complete administrative work in the flow of your day. This means taking notes during calls or meetings, and updating the CRM as you go.
Delay elaborate emails and proposals for a dedicated time block.
Avoid letting your admin work become a burden.
59. Be a Content Hub
Be helpful to your prospects by sharing useful content whenever possible. Reaching out with content is a great sales strategy to stay close while providing real value.
Share anything that can help your prospect in their role of assessing their needs, your solutions, and the market.
60. Demonstrate Genuine Interest & Empathy
Every call or meeting is an opportunity to learn about your prospect and their problems.
Repeat key information back, ask questions to dig deeper, and show you care and are taking their situation seriously.
61. Be Present
The most considerate thing you can do for another person is offer your undivided attention.
Be present with any person you are talking with. Even on a call, don’t be tempted to check your email or phone.
By focusing you will pick up on little queues that will help you better understand, relate, and articulate how you can help.
62. Avoid The Matrix
In a sales context, The Matrix is an optimistic place where we hear what we want to hear, not what is being communicated.
You need a degree of optimism to thrive in sales, but don’t let that lead to hopeful expectations that aren’t warranted.
The best way to understand how a prospect feels is to observe their behavior after the meeting.
63. Read the Room
Pay close attention to what is happening with any group you are meeting with.
Observe mannerisms and micro-expressions. Assess tonality when people are talking. Listen to your intuition.
Identify and address unspoken issues as you notice them. Oftentimes concerns or flat-out objections will not be clearly stated.
64. Ask Questions to Learn, Steer and Build Trust
Regardless of deal stage, identify the right questions and their order. Advance your understanding and lead the prospect forward.
Determine needs, and identify pain points and challenges.
Use tonality and expression to steer conversations, resolve issues, and build trust.
65. Don’t Be Awkward
Sometimes it’s useful to introduce strategic tension, pressure, and discomfort to advance a sale.
People feel awkward when you come off as unsure or uncomfortable, and it’s a massive turn-off.
Your job is to commandeer the sales call and make it a positive and enjoyable buying process.
66. Master Influence & Persuasion
A critical sales technique you must improve is the ability to influence and persuade others.
Persuasiveness means confidence, leadership, and knowledge of your solutions and their benefits.
It requires comfort in your sales pitch, relevant stories, and a genuine belief that you are helping prospects address their pain points.
67. Lead Your Prospect
Once you have an interested prospect, gently exert control over the journey toward a buying decision.
Share a recommendation for how the sales process should unfold. Secure buy-in, and identify if other steps are important for your prospect.
68. Learn, Educate, and Challenge
Meetings should always follow a similar path. Start by connect at a personal level with the people you are meeting.
Begin asking open-ended questions. Learn, explore, share insights, and even challenge what you are hearing.
Trust will develop quickly when you allow prospects to share their problems, learn about possible solutions, and reconsider beliefs or assumptions they may hold.
69. Tell Stories and Create a Vision
Human beings love narratives so begin sharing stories early on.
Stories serve 2 purposes; they build trust through your well-timed referencing of satisfied customers, and they help prospects envision success through you.
Share stories and start painting a vision of success.
70. Secure Micro-Commitments
This is a psychology hack but it works. Securing micro-commitments builds trust and sets a tone of agreeability.
Examples include “Would you like to learn more?” or “Do you think this could help with x?”.
Other examples include asking prospects to share something after a meeting or securing their buy-in for you to follow up with something.
71. Ruthlessly Identify Objections
Never avoid or skip over objections, instead you must actively identify and address them. Remember that avoidance means you are living in The Matrix (tip #62).
Overcoming objections is a trust-building exercise because you are helping prospects move toward valuable solutions.
There are many techniques for specific objections, but a handy rule of thumb is to identify, question, explore and then diffuse.
After identifying an objection, ask more probing questions to understand the underlying issue. Get to the heart of the concern. Now you are working together to address and overcome the real issue, which rarely has anything to do with your solution.
72. Always Be Qualifying
Unless you are closing first-call sales, an important sales technique is to constantly requalify your deals.
Circumstances change, so temperature-check deals regularly.
Does your prospect keep you in the loop? Are you uncovering potential issues & objections and dealing with them properly?
Remove emotion and requalify deals in or out so that you preserve your valuable time.
73. Don’t People Please
People are wary of over-the-top niceness because it seems dishonest. This concern is heightened in sales because prospects know you are motivated by commissions.
A good strategy is to be positive and curious with a healthy dose of pragmatism and willingness to challenge.
It seems counterintuitive but introducing a bit of discomfort and friction will deepen trust.
74. Generate Urgency
Sometimes there will be a clear pain point your prospect needs to address quickly. Often though, you will have to help generate some urgency.
One of the most effective sales techniques is to highlight the cost of inaction, but there are others including time-limited special offers, discounts, or impending price increases.
Consider what will light a fire under your prospect.
75. Set Expectations
People generally enjoy being led through a sales process/sales cycle, if you do a good job of making the journey clear and comfortable.
This means summarizing follow-up items, outlining next steps, and gaining commitments.
76. Be Concise
When people talk to us we secretly want them to keep it relevant and brief.
Ensure your verbal contributions are valuable, impactful, and to the point.
Deliver appropriate tonality for the moment, and a comfortable flow or cadence.
When you catch yourself talking for more than a minute, look around and be sure your audience is still captive. If not, pause and ask a question.
77. Identify All Stakeholders
During discovery make sure to ask about all stakeholders that will be involved, and the degree of their interest.
Always identify the budget owner or decision maker.
Before group meetings, ask for a list of attendees and schedule a call with your main contact/champion to discuss unique needs and interests.
78. Build Relationships
It sounds cliché but it’s important. View each new prospect as a relationship that must be nurtured.
What makes a good relationship? Your curiosity, empathy, understanding, commitment, support, and dependability.
See if you can identify some personal interests to chat about also.
79. Meet Often
Relationships and trust are deepened through investment, so meet your prospects more than may seem necessary.
Ask to meet again to share updates, pose questions, clarify requirements, or for any other plausible reason.
80. Master Your Presentation
This is one of the most important sales techniques in your arsenal, so commit to mastering it over time.
Optimize your delivery and be extremely observant of the reactions you get.
Iterate over time so your sales presentations are field tested.
Take it a step further by sharing your presentation plan with your main contact/champion in advance, and then customize it to better serve their unique needs.
81. Write Winning Proposals
Ideally, your organization has proposal templates you can customize. If not then build your own.
Proposals should feature standard elements like a cover page and brief information about your company.
The most important elements are the summary of your prospects’ needs, and then persuasive information about how you will satisfy those needs. You never know who may read the proposal, so be clear, professional and persuasive.
82. Use Negotiation Hacks
There are a ton of books and courses on human psychology and decision-making science that you should become interested in.
These techniques are marketed for a reason.
Tools like anchoring a high price, assuming the close, asking for concessions when you offer them in kind, and creating false urgency (among many other hacks) should be learned and practiced with S3.
83. Make Closing a Byproduct
Closing a sale is the ultimate goal of all your hard work. It’s certainly on the Mount Rushmore of critical sales techniques.
However, closing isn’t always a flashy event. More often than not, it’s a gradual progression that you steer towards.
As the sales cycle proceeds it will become obvious that it’s leading to a close. By asking for micro-commitments and requalifying regularly, there should be a moment where the outcome becomes clear.
If your prospect is being covert, ask if you are interpreting the situation correctly.
Closing can be quite casual. I’ve been known to say “so, are we doing this?”.
Remember to spot and address 11th hour objections, and avoid awkwardness at all costs.
84. How To Win
When you win, commend and thank your prospect. Schedule a call to preface the onboarding process, and ask why they chose you and not the competition.
Be sure to seed with your prospect that you would like referrals and a reference once they have experienced the desired results with your solution.
85. How To Lose
Losing always hurts. Remember that win or lose it’s your responsibility so resist the urge to blame your prospect or other outside factors.
Express your disappointment and thank them for the opportunity. Ask your contact for a debriefing so you can learn the specifics of where you came up short.
Know that a loss today can lead to a win tomorrow if you handle things correctly. I once lost a $50k deal and then won a $200k deal with the same prospect 6 months later.
86. Stay Classy
Never compromise your positive and professional attitude and behavior regardless of the situation.
Successful people embrace challenge and failure as part of growth and success, so take it on the chin and stay classy anyways.
G. Ongoing Learning & Growth Habits
87. Zombies Never Die
Negative beliefs, actions and self-talk never stop attacking. Be vigilant in spotting and crushing negativity and resistance every day.
If you develop correct habits, when zombies appear you will blast them and get back to work.
88. Commit to Consistency
The results in your career and life today are due to yesterday’s habits.
Identify your good and bad habits and the outcomes they are delivering.
Push yourself to maintain the right habits that will guarantee tomorrow’s success. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.
Remember that Atomic Habits by James Clear is an excellent resource.
89. Commit to Clarity & Focus
Lack of clarity & focus is impacting your results more than you think.
Ensure daily awareness of all your responsibilities, plus clarity on how that work is prioritized. Then, harness your focus on the current task.
90. Become Hyper-Organized
Disorganization leads to a gnawing sense that something important is being overlooked, and that feeling will rob your focus.
Being hyper-organized is a critical sales strategy.
Organize every aspect of your life so you can be clear-minded in the current moment, and deliberate about what you are doing.
I recommend David Allen’s Getting Things Done for an iron-clad personal organization system.
91. Commit to Physical Health
Most sales jobs involve lots of sitting, typing, and talking.
Offset those behaviors with healthy physical habits.
Take a walk every day, break up sedentary stretches with movement, buy a sit/stand desk, and stand or pace when you are on calls.
Exercise regularly, eat a healthy diet, reduce or eliminate unhealthy vices, and get enough sleep.
92. Commit to Mental & Emotional Health
Unlike physical health, mental & emotional health can be tougher to measure.
Learn ways of building a strong and resilient mind. Foster healthy relationships and remove toxic ones. Support and love yourself. Listen to your conscience. Set high personal standards.
If you feel overwhelmed, talk to a friend or consider professional help.
93. Dress the Part
True sales professionals always dress the part. That will mean different things based on your company, industry, and prospects.
If you are selling to major banks you’ll need some good suits. If you sell to manufacturers perhaps a good blazer and safety boots.
Beyond clothing ensure you have professional items like overcoats, briefcases, and planners. Good grooming is standard.
94. Act the Part
Good manners are mandatory. Open the door for others and allow other people to step in or out of elevators first.
If you are dining with prospects, eat slowly and ensure your table manners are on point. If someone joins the group then stand up to greet them.
Bad manners have an unspoken negative impact on how you are perceived by others, so be courteous at all times.
95. Develop Your Charisma
Charisma is the ability to attract positive curiosity from others.
It’s a fact that some people are naturally good at this, however, everyone can improve this important sales technique.
Charismatic qualities include self-acceptance, confidence, optimism, happiness, consideration, humility, and a calibrated sense of humor.
Charismatic behavior includes good posture, smiling, laughing, eye contact, warmth, politeness, emotional intelligence, and open body language.
96. Be a Student of the Game
A core sales strategy you must commit to is non-stop growth.
Every single week, learn new things that can help your sales career. Articles, blogs, books, podcasts, reels, videos, courses, webinars, live events, mastermind groups, and more.
Any self-respecting sales professional from sales development reps (SDR’s) to account managers, sales managers to sales executives, must be committed to ongoing learning.
97. Find Coaching & Mentorship
As we know, leveraging your own experience and failings via S3 is critical for improvement.
You will level up even faster by expanding your field of awareness through the experiences and failings of others who are where you want to be.
As soon as possible, spend money on exceptional coaches and mentors to supercharge your results.
98. Diversify Your Interests
Becoming curious about different topics can be enriching personally and also makes you more interesting to others.
Well-rounded people can talk and bond with others over a variety of topics.
99. Think for Yourself
It’s very easy to acquire opinions from others instead of formulating them for yourself. Consider wide-ranging ideas and opinions when exploring a topic.
Make time for active thinking so you can process outside ideas through the lens of your unique perspective.
Consider a meditation practice to begin proactively quieting your mind for greater clarity. Sam Harris has a great meditation app called Waking Up.
100. Be Grateful
There is no better technique for improving your mood than to actively feel gratitude for something in your life right now.
Practicing gratitude helps in the moment but also has a cumulative effect. The more you do it the more long-term happiness and sense of abundance you will feel.
All you have to do is pause, acknowledge something you are grateful for, and revel in that feeling for a few seconds.
101. Give
By experiencing your desires already fulfilled (tip #10) you can feel the associated emotions now.
Why is this important?
Because every desire you have ties back to your quest for certain emotional states. It’s not the car or the experience that matters, it’s how these things make you feel.
What I found by experiencing my desires fulfilled was that satisfying personal desires, although enjoyable, ultimately left me feeling a bit empty.
Your success and emotional state will only amplify when get past your personal desires, and being to share and help others.
Let your imagination run wild on how this will look and feel for you…
Conclusion
These are some of the most effective sales techniques and strategies I have learned and refined over my 20+ year sales career.
Many items in the list are high-level talking points and are just the tip of the iceberg on certain topics. My forthcoming book is an expansion of this article and will feature more depth.
I invite you to keep learning and going deeper into all the relevant sales tips in this article.
Most importantly, I encourage you to apply the S3 framework in everything you do. It’s simple but outlines the steps that most of us forget in our pursuit of success.
Remember, failure is your wise mentor so long as you are committed to the challenge of learning and growing.