Introduction to Sales - A Beginners Guide

Hello and welcome to Introduction to Sales, a beginner's Guide. I am your instructor, Tavishima Aidi. I'm a sales coach, business development consultant, a business growth podcaster, and I'm also a public speaker. Today we're going to be going straight to Module 1, which is on sales fundamentals. And the first question we're going to tackle is what is sales? For most people, when they hear sales, they think it means the ability to persuade someone to do something.

But can we indeed persuade someone to do something? The answer is a big no. We can't make people to do things that they didn't already plan to do in the 1st place. And this is whether you're a parent or whether you're someone who is in a commercial context, you cannot persuade someone to do something that they didn't already intend to do in the first place. So the job of a sales person or the job of a business person who is in the commercial context,

whether you're a founder looking for fundraising or whether you're trying to sell a product or a service, your first role is you're trying to figure out people's pre-existing motivations and then aligning them with yours. Let me repeat, your first job is to try and figure out what are people already interested in in the 1st place? What are people already motivated by in the first place? Then you apply some creativity and see how those motivations are aligned, the other person's motivation and your own motivation.

So your job as a salesperson, as a business person, is to make sure that you align both motivations. And that is the easiest way to quote, persuade someone to do something. But let us forget this myth that you can persuade someone to do something that they didn't already intend to do in the first place. Now there are however some people that can get people to do something despite how they feel or what their existing motivations are.

If you notice, those people are normally called frauds or fraudulent people. So they are scam artists that can get you to do something you didn't intend to do in the 1st place. And there are people who, whether through psychosomatic drugs or whether through juju or jazz or whatever, can get you to do something that you didn't intend to do before. But if you notice from the examples that I've given, once we start talking about these sorts of things, we have gone beyond the purview of sales and business.

And people rightfully think of those people as frauds. So as a business person, as a salesperson, your number one job, try and figure out what is that person already interested in? What are they motivated by? What are the visions, the goals, the that they're heading towards, the challenges that they're trying to solve. And then you've figured out how your product or your service aligns with that. That is the best way to make a persuasive pitch, a persuasive presentation, and to be convincing.

That way the person sees that the current trajectory of heading from A to B, your product or service, makes their life a whole lot easier. And it makes it easier for the person to say yes, they are going to buy, and if they say no, they're not going to buy. If you have established rapport and done a good job with trying to figure out what their motivations are and if you've listened to them, it should be a whole lot easier to ask a few more questions and figure out where you went wrong.

And that will help you rescue your next selling conversations. So is sales the ability to persuade? The answer is no. Is sales something that is only done in the commercial context? And I'm going to say mostly for most people when we're talking about sales. You remember when I started off this segment, I spoke about how parents, we have to persuade our children to do something and persuade people within the same organization, our colleagues,

people in similar departments or church group to do something. Sales skills will come in handy, but for the purpose of this course, the introduction to sales, we're going to be focusing on things in a mostly commercial context. When I say commercial context, I mean that there's a business person or there's a product, or there's a service and there's a potential buyer. Now, can anyone learn how to sell? The answer is yes.

It is not an innate skill that people are born with. Sales is made-up of a bunch of learnable skills. Each of them can be learned. Let's go back to the ability to persuade. The discussion that we had a few minutes ago and I said it's not about persuading anyone, but trying to figure out what their motivations are, figure out what their goals are, figure out what their challenges are. These are things that you can learn by using simple conversational skills, tips,

strategies and tactics. It is a learnable skill. Anyone can do this. An extrovert can do this, an introvert can do this, an ambivert can do this, and anagram 5 can do this and anagram one can do this. A phlegmatic, a choleric native person, a Yoruba person, an English person, a Buddhist, an Australian person, anybody can do it. It's a learnable skill. The next question how we're going to consider in what is sales is do you have to be a good talker?

And the answer is maybe not listening skills are more important when it comes to sales because remember I said it is about trying to figure out what are these person's motivations? What are they interested in? Where are they heading? What problems do they have in their personal life and in their business life? You know how you're part of your service can solve these problems, and then you try to align those motivations.

So talking is half of the battle. But the most important thing is listening, because listening skills are what are going to provide you all the ammunition and all the data that you need to make a convincing case. Until you know for sure what the person is interested in and where the person is heading, you're just making a guess, no matter how good, and giving yourself a 5050 chance that you think This is why the person might be interested or not.

But if you listen and you get good data and you get good clues, whether from verbal cues because of what they say, or nonverbal cues like body language, how they smile or how they frown or how they cross their arms, or how they seem to be in agreement or disagreement. When you put together all these clues and verbal and nonverbal cues, you stand a greater chance of being able to make a convincing sales pitch or presentation or proposal because you have a fair sense of what it is that they might be interested in or not.

Now let's look at other conceptions of sales. There's a conception of sales as service and that is one that I would ask you guys to adopt since the conception that most of you have of selling for now is sales is good talking, good presentations. The conception of sales and service has several advantages. One of them is if you think of yourself as a service oriented person, as a business person or as a sales person, you're going to easily build trust with people.

Trust is important because it helps to get repeat business and referrals, and repeat business and referrals are the golden goose when it comes to business because the goal is to get business as easily as possible for as long as possible. Going out every day to look for new customers, to look for new clients takes time, takes money, and takes a ton of rejection. If you have already built trust with people and they have bought from you in the past, it's a lot easier to get them to buy from you again and again and again.

And also to bring referrals, which are their friends, their family members, their associates, maybe even their enemies to buy from you. So other conception of sales, sales as service, that is one that I would urge every single person to adopt. There's another conception of sales as problem solving. Now, this is also important because your product or your service either solves a problem that people have or it moves people closer to their vision.

I started off my business journey more than a decade and 1/2 as a wedding photographer. And So what I did, what I provided to the couple was not just solving a problem, which was that they had no wedding photographer, but it moved people towards a certain vision that they had, a certain idealized, stylized, sophisticated vision of how they wanted their day to pan out. That is the reason why people, brides and grooms, people in the wedding space.

That is the reason why they have wedding planners, caterers, photographers and videographers. So that is one case where we have a service that is moving people closer to a vision. Now there are some other things that you buy like your mobile phone for instance, which does both. Your mobile phone solves a problem. You need to communicate, but then your mobile phone also provides different kinds of social signaling. So those of you who are an iPhone crowd, your phone provides a certain kind of signalling.

If you're a Samsung crowd, your phone provides a certain kind of signalling. If you're an Android person, your Android, your phone provides a certain kind of signalling. And if you're a China phone person, although now Chinese phones have become increasingly good in quality and in function, it provides a different kind of social signalling as well. So wedding photography, you're helping people achieve a vision. Mobile phone, you are serving both a problem and also helping people achieve a vision.

But we all have to adopt this conception of sales as service because in sorry, we're trying to this conception of sales as a problem solving. Because whatever it is that we have, whether a product or a service, we are trying to solve people's problems or move them closer to a solution. Then there is sales as creativity. Most people have a creative impulse. You don't have to be a wedding photographer or a painter or a movie director or a videographer to have a creative impulse.

An accountant can have a creative impulse, a lawyer can have a creative impulse, and an engineer can have a creative impulse because creativity is all about taking known variables and trying to solve a problem or trying to achieve a certain kind of vision. So this is something that anybody can do, even a brain surgeon. So brain surgery involves an element of creativity because brain surgery is not just A + B + C or 1 + 2 + 3.

It's about these are the variables that we have. This is what I have to do to get my patient back to optimum health. And what are the best ways of using my pharmacological skills in prescribing medicine or my surgical skills in using the scalpel or whatever tool that I have to try and get people back to better health. So sales as creativity applies to every single person. Don't assume that you have to be good with pictures and with music and with images to be a creative person.

Even if you're the most boring accountant on the face of the earth, you have a creative impulse and you can use that. You can use that in sales, and you can exercise it in sales. No matter who you are, whether you're a boring accountant or a stuffy judge, we implore the creative impulse in starting conversations with people, in building and nurturing relationships with people, in putting together networking, making connections among different class of people.

So it doesn't matter who you are or the skill set that you bring to the table, you are going to be able to exercise your creative impulse in many different ways. So that brings to the end this first module which is on sales fundamentals. And the question we tackled is what is sales? We've gone through some misconceptions that is not about persuading, but figuring out people's pre-existing motivations. And we have also gone through how as a business owner or as a salesperson, we should realise that we're in the serving business, that we're in the problem solving business, and that we are creative individuals and we need creativity in every single step of the process.

The next recording is going to be devoted to different kinds of sales roles in different industries. Thank you very much for your time and attention. I'll catch you guys in the next recording.