Boiler Room: Lessons in sales

Dec 15, 2007

I want to write more in this blog but have a difficult time finding truely original content to post. Everyone knows that you need to pick up the phone and call your leads and most people know that closing the deal is not always as easy as asking for it (Sometimes it is.) So I thought I would start a section called Lessons in Sales since I am inspired by the Lessons on Blogging from the Blogging Experiment site.

Sales is for the hungry:

Boiler Room Poster When you are new to sales you are a bit overwhelmed to say the least. Product features, pricing, positioning. None of this matters initially. If you want to succeed you need to have that fire in your belly which typically comes from lack of food and REALLY want to make some money. People get into sales because they know someone or have heard that there is some serious amounts of cash that can be made. Seth Davis played by Giovanni Ribisi talks to this in the opening scene of the movie. Seth is running an illegal card game to make ends meet and is approached by an old friend to get started selling junk stocks. All Seth had to see was the flashy car in front of his house to know that he wanted in. Sales people are some of the highest paid employees minus the executive management. Granted you get paid a dirt salary around $30K that will get you a box of Cocoa Puffs and a gallon of milk, the money is made in closing deals. If you negotiate right during the hiring process you can get between 8-12% of all the deals you close. If you are selling a $1000.00 product you can get about $100.00 for each one. Just coming into the office and collecting your salary will never make you wealthy and will probably get you fired in a matter of months. If you want to pull in $70-80K a year, you have to work for it. Being hungry and chasing deals is the best way to get a good close rate and have those commission checks rolling in.

Knowledge is power:

The more you know about your product or service is going to set you apart from your competition internally and externally. Yes I believe that though you work in the company with other sales people, you are in competition with them. Your manager sets it up this way and it’s done for a reason. Every Sales Manager has a leader board where the names of the top sellers are broadcast for the rest to envy. If you want to get on top, you need to know more about your product than them and more than the competing products in the market. There is a scene in the movie where Seth is sitting at his kitchen table eating a bowl of Cheerios and reading through a stack of pamphlets on the stocks. The kiss of death in a sales call comes when you are asked a simple question from your prospect that you should know and you have no answer for them. Now there will be times that you genuinely have to come back to them with an answer, but it is ALWAYS better to have these answers on tap. Your company should have a sales FAQ on hand for the newbies. If they don’t you should make one. You will be a superstar because having a list of frequent questions from customers and your company rebuttals is golden on EVERY sales call.

Act as if:

Boiler Room Yell

My favorite scenes in the movie are when Jim Young played by Ben Affleck talks to the new hires. He storms into the room like a bull in a china shop and lays down the law. “Act as if…” when you are selling a product you need to believe that you are selling the cure to a major pain. Act as if your product fits the exact need of your customer. Never lie to your customer but if you qualify the deal correctly, you should have a position for your customer that will make them want to buy. Closing is a gradual process and not something that happens at the end of the call. You should be getting buy in from your prospect from the first 20 seconds on the phone. Getting them to ask questions you expected and delivering answers that they are looking for. Drive the conversation and make the customer feel comfortable. Don’t over sell your product, ask questions that get the prospect to open up and give examples of how your product will help. Remeber act as if your product is the solution to their needs and they will believe you if you do a convincing job.

Deals will go south:

You will lose deals. Let me reiterate, you will lose A LOT of deals. this is expected. sometimes this is because you did a crappy job qualifying the opportunity; you made an ass of yourself on a call or it could just be that some external force took over and all of a sudden you have no chance at winning the deal. Chances are you did a bad job qualifying the deal to begin with. Rarely will some magical force cut you out of the deal, but it does happen and it is the exception rather than the rule. What do you do? Take it for a loss and walk away as soon as you know it’s a goner. There is no brownie points for fighting for the deal. Use it as a learning experience and find out what went wrong so it doesn’t happen again. In the beginning of the movie it’s painful to watch Seth get on call after call where his prospect hangs up on him or just isn’t ready to commit. Getting shot down is a good thing as long as it’s not happening 100% of the time. I have found that the general rule is 20% of the people you contact will be real opportunities with a high chance of closure. Now if you set up the strategy right, you can get this close to 45%, but in most sales jobs the lack of strategy from upper management keeps this number low. Suck it up and get back on your phone!