Want to Up Your Sales Game? 3 Local Sales Managers Share Their Toolkits

The sales world is rife with advice.

Sales professionals can turn to books by Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street himself, and Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. There are weekend seminars, conferences and online courses. LinkedIn influencers and bloggers always have new pithy anecdotes to post. There are even sales comedians.

Ross Pomerantz, better known as “Corporate Bro,” carved out a YouTube niche that utilizes his chops in tech sales and his knack for dramatizing the wins, frustrations and daily realities of a sales team. At the heart of his snappy social media videos are self-aware winks to the kind of useful sales advice often encountered in conference keynotes and Medium posts — from advising sales professionals stick to “SADNESS” (Sales Are Dope, Never, Ever Stop Selling) to highlighting the pitfalls of cold calling and prospecting.

But as Pomerantz highlights, there is no one-size-fits-all sales advice or strategy.

“Every rep I have ever had the chance to work with has had their own unique skills and abilities, so I learned as a young manager that it is important to manage and coach everyone uniquely,” said Dave Ferguson, a senior sales manager at Angi.

Ashley Rouse, senior director of sales at JumpCloud agrees. “You have to get to know everyone beyond the numbers,” she said. “Understand what their strengths, opportunities and passions are, why they are in sales, where they are looking to go, how they communicate, their style of selling and how they manage their energy.”

Built In Colorado heard from managers at Angi, JumpCloud and Nylas about how they go beyond stale advice to elevate the skills and sales on their teams.

 

 

What are the traits, experience, skills or mindsets that define a successful salesperson?

In my opinion, a successful salesperson views themselves as an entrepreneur with full ownership over their book of business. The rewarding part of sales is that you write your own paycheck, so your work is directly reflected in the money you take home. People who are motivated to bet on themselves and thrive in an environment where there are no limits to what they can accomplish in any given day usually have the most success in our field. That goes hand in hand with the skill and persistence to turn a “no” into a “yes.”

Figuring out how to turn denials into deals is a little trickier, but one of my favorite methods is  asking open-ended questions and truly listening to the answers. Once you have a view into your counterparties’ perspective, a good salesperson can dig a few layers deeper and uncover the true reason behind the roadblocks in the deal. 

Finally, people buy from people who they like, so regardless of the product, a good salesperson brings empathy and understanding to interactions with their customers.

A good salesperson can dig a few layers deeper and uncover the true reason behind the roadblocks in the deal.”

 

How do you help your reps develop their own sales acumen?

I encourage my team to be the most constant part of their deal. The more consistent and formulaic they can be with their process and approach, the fewer variables they have to deal with in closing a deal. I challenge my reps to look at a few deals they’ve recently closed and work backward by asking themselves specific questions: Where was it sourced? What questions did you ask in your discovery? Which personas were involved? Where were there holes in this deal and how did you uncover them?

Once they’ve mapped out their personal path to close, I encourage them to repeat these actions on every single deal that follows. There are always going to be roadblocks in a deal. But if we can reduce some of the noise created on our end, the path to close deals is much clearer and easily repeated.
 

What’s a lesson you’ve learned that helps you bring out the best in your direct reports?

In my experience, people learn and grow when they feel supported and safe to be vulnerable. I help my team be their best by taking the negative emotions out of sales and focusing on positivity first. We are all going to mess up a deal or two, but we will all have huge wins. Salespeople will always be the hardest on themselves –– it’s not my job to make them feel any more anxious or stressed. My job is to help my reps see their deals from a different perspective, offer guidance on what information they may be missing and to take the emotion out of the deal until it is closed. 

I also like to remind my entire team that we choose to wake up and work where we work. We get to decide where we put our energy and grow our careers. It’s way more fun to wake up and choose to feel excited about the opportunities we have in front of us rather than making our jobs seem like a chore. 

Salespeople often forget that their manager’s quota is a culmination of their rep’s quota, so it’s always in my best interest to develop my reps into their best selves. When salespeople see you as someone in their corner and on their team, the relationship becomes more collaborative and trusting.

 

 

 

What are the traits, experience, skills or mindsets that define a successful salesperson?

A salesperson needs to have some form of intrinsic motivation, be self-driven, curious, a beginners mindset, discipline and grit. That’s foundational for any sales role and any level of experience. 

 

 

How do you help your reps develop their own sales acumen? 

In sales, you want to understand the needs of your prospects and customers so you can diagnose the gaps between where they are today and where they want to go. With that knowledge, you can recommend the right combination of resources and tools to get them there. That’s how I approach coaching and developing my team.

To help reps develop their own sales acumen, I break it into two buckets. First, I ask what they are interested in and what they want to learn more about to develop themselves overall as a salesperson. For this, I like to work with them on one channel, where they can learn multiple things. For example, I will give the salesperson the opportunity to work with the strategic partner team where they will get exposure in how to build relationships across partner organizations, co-selling and strategy. Second, I ask what they need to do in order to develop their skills to increase performance in their job today. Typically, that means focusing on one area through multiple channels. For example, If someone is looking to increase their acumen around negotiation, they could do this through self-assessment, call-coaching, internal or external training, reading on the topic or role-playing.

 

What’s a lesson you’ve learned that helps you bring out the best in your direct reports?

To bring out the best in my direct reports, I keep asking questions about my team, their selling styles, their opportunities and challenges and their strength over time, not just when I become their manager or they get hired on. The answers usually change as they grow and as the business grows and changes. This allows me to shift how I support them, leverage their top skills and interests as they evolve over time and support the environment that helps them be successful.

 

 

 

What are the traits, experience, skills or mindsets that define a successful salesperson?

There are three big pieces of the puzzle when looking at what makes a successful salesperson. First is the ability to get comfortable being uncomfortable. In sales, it can be uncomfortable approaching someone or asking for them on the phone. Second is the ability to be resilient. No matter what sales job you are in, “no” is the most common word you hear. If you take all of them to heart, you will always feel like you are failing. You have to be resilient — a “no” is better than a maybe. Lastly, a successful salesperson truly cares about the customer and demonstrates this by listening and connecting to the customer’s needs by believing in your product and knowing that it can solve the customer’s needs. You never want to sell something that the customer won't benefit from, so it’s important to spend time getting to know them and how you can add value.

 

How do you help your reps develop their own sales acumen?

When a new rep starts, I spend time showing them how their past experience relates to the company and the role they are in. As a personal example, when I entered the inside sales role from retail sales. Though some don’t consider retail sales a comparable position to inside sales, I learned quickly how to make my experience work. My manager spent time with me and connected what I knew about the consumer electronics world and how I learned that industry to how I would understand and learn the home services world. The sales process doesn’t change from one role to the next — what does change is the knowledge of what you are selling.

The sales process doesn’t change from one role to the next — what does change is the knowledge of what you are selling.”

 

What’s a lesson you’ve learned that helps you bring out the best in your direct reports?

Give them someone to work with, not work for. It is important that your employees know that you are their manager but when it comes down to it, they shouldn’t feel like they work for you. This is how you gain buy-in from your employees and create a safe space to provide feedback. I’ve also learned the value of employee recognition and showing appreciation for hard work. Being a manager is not always about being liked, but it is about mutual respect; you can build respect through acknowledging when someone is working hard and delivering results.