How To Sell Anything

Understanding how to sell is the most important skill you can learn.

Sales is highly transferrable. If you are in Technology, you need it to sell your software or if you work as teacher, communicating to a class about the importance of maths — you need the pupils to buy into your lessons.

Frankly put, whether we like it or not — we sell everyday and those of us that get what they want out of life have understood the importance of when, where and how to to sell. 

The issue with Sales is that the word alone provokes a dark cloud. When someone introduces themselves as a salesperson, we can automatically envision Jordan Belfort, in The Wolf of Wall Street. Someone who is manipulative or fraudulent. But what we don’t consider is ourselves as a salesperson, maybe sat at an interview, communicating to our future employer or employee on our vision. 

My advice is to not throw the baby out with the bath water. If you have chosen to conflate the poor ethics of a few with the value of the skillset, stop. Don’t miss out on learning the most important skillset of the 21st century. Sales is one of the few skillsets where A.I. may not be able to completely erode human relevance, so bullet-proof yourself by learning the principles on how to sell anything. 

I have spent the last 3 years heading up Sales at my startup and have cleared over $1m in software sales on items that have an average ticket value of $15,000. I previously curated a sales newsletter capturing my key learnings, and now I want to share some of that knowledge with you here.

So get a pen and paper ready.

My 11 Principles of Sales

1. Sell what people are buying

People don’t like to be sold to, but they do enjoy buying — Jeff Lovejoy

The quickest way for you to build sales momentum is to sell into an already established market.

When you are selling something you will quickly realise that you are in one of two scenarios: Running downhill or hiking uphill. In as much as you can control the circumstance, choose the former. You want to be running downhill when selling and the best way to be running downhill is to be in a bullish market. You want to position your product or service in a market where people are buying.

If you are trying to create a market to sell into, this is a tall task that may take many years and a significant sum of money to achieve. You might even need to consider venture capital or private equity funding. This is more for the people who are concerned about making a profit from a day one. 

Never forget that cash is king. Yes, you may love the product or service that you are building — but you need a market for it. I am all about distribution. Without the demand for what you have your dream will die. You can avoid this outcome by somewhat profiting off the work of others who have created a ready-made market for you to capitalise from. 

2. Sell what you know

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough — Albert Einstein

Sales is all about clarity. There are two things you need to be clear on when selling: What you are selling and who you are selling to.

Just because you are a skilled sales person, it doesn’t mean you should sell everything. The most effective salespeople aren’t simply strong communicators but they are extremely detailed. Why? Because they understand customers are smart and you cannot sell what you do not understand. 

I’ve been guilty of this. In recruitment, there is something known as an Application Tracking System (ATS). Rather than understanding the exact function of the ATS, for the first month or two in my role I just hoped a customer wouldn’t ask about it. Obviously, they did. Don’t tell the CEO but I’m pretty sure I lost $15,000 worth of sales because of this. 

The lesson is that you need to be an expert in what you are selling. Granted this is easier if you are the person building or designing the thing, but if you are not, take an extended amount of time to understand the ins and outs of your product or service and how it might compare to competitors.

3. Don’t sell water to a well

We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price — John Tuld

In Sales, when someone is capable of selling water to well it is a nod to that person’s ability to be able to make a market where there is none. It is to say that, that guy can sell anything.

Don’t be this guy. But have this guy’s ability.

Selling water to well is to effectively sell a customer something that you fully-well know they do not need or worse still, like John Tuld in the film Margin Call, know is garbage, just so that you can acquire their money in the short term.

A decent salesperson cares about their customer and his team. Normally after a sale is agreed, the sales person will transfer the customer on to the customer success team who will now look after the customer on a day-to-day basis. Effectively, now that the customer has been closed the salesperson is free to move on to the next customer. If this salesperson has misssold a customer, they are relinquishing liability and this causes issues for both the customer who realises they were effectively sold a dream and the customer success team who are now dealing with a mistrusting and disappointed customer.

Rather than selling a customer what you know they do not need. Take some time in educating them on what you are offering. There is something such as customer-product fit. As tough as it may be to turn away a sale, you need to qualify your customers to avoid disappointment.

Satisfied customers, are trusting customers and trusting customers will not only become repeat sales but will also spread the word about you. And there is nothing more powerful than a word-of-mouth recommendation.

4. Be clear on who your customer is

If you don’t know who your customer is, you don’t know what quality is”— Eric Ries

“Everyone” is not your customer.

If you are asked “who is your customer?” You must be able to answer it clearly and succinctly. Preferably, in one to two sentences maximum.

So, who is your customer? People often confuse the definition of a customer. Your customer is the person who will buy your product, service or whatever it is you are selling. Is the purchaser an individual consumer? Is the purchaser a company? Find this out. If the purchaser is an individual consumer, write out all their characteristics:

• Age

• Gender

• Socio-economic 

• Interests

If the purchaser is a company:

• How many employees

• What Industry

If the purchaser is an individual at a big company — what is their role title? This is what I mean by being specific. 

You need to be able to define who your customer is, as if they were a friend. If you can’t do that, you don’t know who you are selling to. You want to be able to say something like “I sell yoga classes to pregnant women, struggling with joint pain, who are due to give birth in the next 3 months.” Or “I sell a Product Analytics tool to Product Managers at Software companies, who want to better track how their product is being utilised by customers.”

Once you have this level of aim, now it’s all about communicating value.

5. Understand the value you are providing

“The price is what you pay, the value is what makes you stay” — Warren Buffet

Ensuring the customer understands what value you are providing is of utmost importance when selling.

A confused prospect, will not become a client. If the customer is confused about what they will look like once they may be done working with you, they won’t transact with you. “The Sell” needs to be made dummy-proof. The way to do this is by clearly communicating what value you will provide.

What value can you provide? I assess value in three ways:

• Saving a customer’s time

• Increasing a customer’s money or reducing a customer’s costs

• Improving the quality of a customer’s product, service or particular area of life

In short, the question you need to ask is: how does my product or service make my client better, faster or cheaper?

Once you have this nailed down, then you must bake it across all marketing messaging and continuously remind customers of what you bring to the table.

6. Market yourself

“Like it or not, the market’s perception becomes your reality” — Howard Mann

Most people fall down when it comes to sufficiently marketing yourself, your product or service.

Trying to sell without marketing is like pushing a boulder up a hill. Selling becomes much easier when customers get in contact with you. The way customers get in contact with you is by finding out about you, which requires you to put yourself, your product or service out there.

Marketing has a multiplier effect. When you put something out there, you open yourself up to perpetual returns. This means a customer may reach out to you the next day or the next year based on what you put out today.

Marketing also helps you determine customer-product fit. If someone arrives at your door for more information, after seeing a sign in your window — the chances are that they may be in the market for something you are offering. So there’s more chance that they are actually willing to pay.

To attract customers, you will need to create a marketing strategy. Let’s take two scenarios:

• If you are a writer/podcaster like me, your marketing channels might probably include: long form content on this podcast and short form content to distribute as videos on TikTok and Instagram.

• If you are selling a product or service, then you might be interested in sharing your product on ProductHunt, your industry knowledge and successful case studies on LinkedIn.

The way you distribute your brand is up to you. The most important thing is that you are distributing your brand. Selling anything involves marketing. They go hand-in-hand. Especially if you are starting out, you will have no marketing machine, you will be responsible for both championing and selling. So, get comfortable with putting yourself out there.

7. Reach out to a lot of the same people

Sales are contingent on the attitude of the salesperson, not the attitude of the prospect — Unknown

It’s easy to forget that no one knows you when you are starting out.

Unless you are famous or already have some cult following, the majority of us will begin with our product or service and a few potential customers who are interested. Some of these so-called ‘customers’ may be friends, or friends of friends, others may be customers who said they were interested and have since disappeared. You will probably begin with a couple who hold genuine need for you.

You will need to go and find customers. Your lack of presence is why you do not have the luxury to wait for customers to come knocking at your door. Reaching out to potential customers is known as Out-bounding or Cold-Calling. Generally, you will close maybe 2% of these, so for every 1000 people you contact you may close 20. Over the last 3 years, my closure rate has been between 4–5%. Whilst 20 people for every 1000 you reach out to may seem small, if you are selling items which have an average ticket size of $20,000 those 20 sales equal $400,000.

Numbers aside, there are two principles that I have kept when out-bounding which I believe have made me successful with Sales: 

The first is to reach out widely. The reason why I mentioned these numbers is so that you will understand that there is almost a 98% guarantee of rejection. So in order for you to hit that 2% you need to reach out to a lot of contacts. Finding new customers is a game of volume. The one who reaches out the least has a lesser chance at closing sales. This is true for selling a product and true for being a YouTuber. If you stop putting content out on your channel, your chances of capturing your desired audience diminishes as there is less chance for the algorithm to send your content to people who might match your interests. So rule number one of out-bounding, send out a lot of emails to potential customers. My number is 100 a week, 20 a day.

The second principle is to reach out to the same profile of person. This goes back to the principle 4 on being clear on who your customer is. You only want to reach out to people who are willing and able to pay for what you are offering. 

Combining the two sounds like a riddle, but your sales outreach should be wide and specific. Simply put, reach out to a lot of the same people.

8. Only negotiate with the decision-maker

I don’t mess with the middle man, I’ma only meet wit the bosses — Nicki Minaj

How you spend your time is everything when you are looking for customers. When you start out, naturally you are open to chatting with anyone who has a remote interest in your product or service — but as time goes on, you realise a couple things: I need cash in the bank to survive and the best way to get that is by talking to people who actually have the power to decide on a transaction.

I have made the mistake numerous times of speaking with middle management, assuming they are the buyer. This can be unavoidable, especially if your customer is large organisations — the chances of you getting a meeting with the CEO is next to none. But what you can do to save your valuable time and resources, is at the outset understand the role of the person. Again this is especially true for if you are selling to a business comprised of many employees, if you are selling to a consumer then you won’t have this worry. If you come to understand the person you are speaking with is not the buyer, invite the individual to bring along the decision maker to a second call.

The middle person should give you a sense of what the decision maker is thinking. The middle person shouldn’t give you absolute assurance on this. Get as close as you can to the decision maker, so that you can sell directly to the source of truth.

9. Make your offer simple

Don’t make me think — Steve Krug

So you’ve managed to get to the stage where the prospect wants you to present an offer, congratulations — but the job isn’t done here.

The offer is where you have the opportunity to communicate the value that you are going to deliver and attach a price to it.

The key is to make it easy for them to say “yes”.

Here you want to remind your client of how they will become better by working with you.

You can also introduce things like urgency, scarcity or exclusivity — for example, our first 5 customers will receive 10% off. What you want to avoid is providing discounts from the outset, studies have shown it can reduce your closure rates by 17%. I think this is because unintentionally devalue your product or service by showing desperation.

You need a structure to present the offer. I suggest not having more than three price points, otherwise it can get confusing. Sales Guru, Alex Hormozi author of $100 million offers and $100 million leads, suggests putting the middle price point closer to the top to increase sales. Putting the middle price point closer to the top makes the top look like a steal, increasing buys of your premium offer.

10. Remove worry

The Selling Starts When the Customer Says No— Sales Maxim

Your product or service could make all the sense in the world to a customer but they still might say “No.” Do you stop there? Absolutely not.

In sales a simple no isn’t a good enough reason to not continue selling. We need to understand why, because often times the customer either needs further convincing, hasn’t revealed the true reason or isn’t the actual decision maker.

At this point in the sales process, your job is to identify and eliminate barriers to entry to allow the transaction to close. This all begins with asking the question, “why not?”

In my experience, customers have normally given the following objections to closing:

• It’s too expensive — Great. Start by expressing the value you would provide relative to the cost they would pay, to reaffirm that they are paying pennies on the dollar to solve their issue. In parallel, try to understand what their budget is and putting together something that fits that.

• It won’t work or it won’t work for us — This is a matter of social-proof. The easiest way to calm the nerves of a prospect is to show them a track record of success that you have delivered to people similar to them. If you have no track record, then offer customers a money-back guarantee.

• I think I’ll wait — This is a soft rejection. The way around this is to stress the opportunity cost at stake to the customer by not working with you now. The easiest way to do this is to have the customer participate in a visualisation exercise of before and after working with you. So let’s say you will agree on a 12 month contract, you need to communicate the vision on how they look in January vs. December.

What you are looking to do here is convince the prospect that whilst they feel these things, their objections are either untrue or irrelevant. You can legitimately do this by providing evidence of the contrary and offering guarantees of their money-back if their fears do become true. Chances are they won’t and you would have closed a transaction.

11. Follow up with value 

2% of sales are made on the first contact. 80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact — Unknown

Expect to be ignored. It’s your job to not take it personally and continue to reach out, with value.

A lot of people will reach back out to customers they have had an initial conversation with saying something along the lines of “Just checking in…” This is a sentence of no value. It gives the client no reason to contact you back other than them having a good heart. Whenever you contact a customer, you want to give them a very good reason to contact you back. Psychology aside, people are busy. The last thing they want to see in their inbox is a nagging salesperson, forcing them to buy a product or service that they can’t even remember the name of. You need to reach back out 5–12 times with value. 

The 5–12 times you reach out need to be spread out. Don’t finish a conversation on Monday and by the time you reach Friday you’ve emailed your poor prospect 12 times. Spread out your contact in this way:

• 3 days later — send an email, 3 days later — send another, 3 days later — send another.

• Then reach out every week for a month 

• Finally for the final 5 emails send once, every two months

Do this until you get a response to adjust your reach out accordingly. 

In combination with reaching out, you need to reach out with value and purpose. The customer knows you want to get them back on the phone, but why should they? This is where you need to show how and why you are the person to help them. Position yourself as a knowledge and service expert. A few quick ways you can do this is sharing success stories or sharing your knowledge of a product or industry in a free e-Book. Your customer needs to understand how they will move from A to B with you by their side. If they don’t understand that, expect no message back.

Remember, despite all this you may not get a reply back. I’ve had customers disappear for 9 months, only to come and apologise and say they now have budget to re-engage, this happens. Just take the necessary steps outlined, so that you at least have peace of mind that you have covered all bases.

Learn to Sell

Sales is only a bad thing when you refuse to learn it because you think it’s bad. You are always selling your ideas, your skillset, your personality, your product, your boss’s product — Dan Koe

You can imagine what one piece of advice I will impart on you: Learn to sell.

Sales is largely an uncomfortable process due to the rejection that you are signing up for. But it’s worth remembering that the sizeable long-term returns of learning to sell makes the short term discomfort worthwhile. Whilst you are working on selling, the skillsets are being soaked in by you. 

I would go as far to ask, if you aren’t getting some of the results that you want out of life — is it because your sales script and approach needs work?There are amazing artists, writers, teachers who may be struggling because they do not know how to sell.

Personally leaning into this skillset has changed my life to the extent of being able to demand capital outside the walls of an institution. So, if you are looking to survive outside of a job with a paycheck, learning how to market and sell is your golden ticket out.