Top Tips For Working In Sales
A career in sales is not for everyone. If you do decide to start working in sales it can be incredibly hard work, but also very lucrative with the potential to learn a lot.
Here are some tips to help you through the first few months in your brand-new sales role.
Be prepared to graft
Sales is not a job where you instantly slot into and excel at the top level – you have to work for every penny, and put in a large amount of hard graft at the start of your career without much return.
Having said that, you will see a direct return on the work you put in, and the satisfaction you gain from seeing your numbers slowly increase in direct correlation to the hard graft will be considerable.
Know your product
Whether you’re selling cars or advertising space, you need to know your product inside out if you’re to have the confidence to sell it to someone else.
Specifications, prices, and the details about how something works and has evolved since previous models are all crucial pieces of info.
Be confident
However well you know your product and have the get up and go to put in the hours of work, you will get nowhere without confidence.
Presenting yourself in a self-assured, confident manner is a skill that develops with time. You do, however, need to start your sales journey with a certain degree of confidence in order to succeed at all.
Don’t be shy about your phone voice
Your first job in sales in 99% likely to be phone-based. Whether cold-calling consumers, or building up links with long-standing clients, you need to carry your confidence and ability in your voice. Speak professionally, enunciate well, and most importantly don’t be shy about volume.
If you’re one of only two or three sales-people in a whole office, this is a skill you’ll need to learn particularly quickly. Getting into the habit of using a hushed voice on the phone so that your next-door neighbor can’t hear what’s said will be detrimental to your career.
Get good at improvising
Whilst you will know everything you can about the product you’re selling (remember point 2!), the person at the other end of the phone is always highly likely to ask questions that you don’t know the answer to.
Being able to confidently improvise, assuring your customer that you can solve all their problems whilst delicately skipping around actually answering the question until you can go and find out the answer is an all-important skill in sales.
Resilience is key
You have probably heard this a million times already, but in sales you will get a lot of rejection. The key here is not to take any of it personally, and rather than get back up again, don’t get knocked down in the first place.
Keep going and remember it’s very normal in sales to hear ‘no’ more often than ‘yes’. It may take some time before you even get your first sale, but once you’ve begun things will get easier, and you’ll see your numbers go up.
Competition comes with the territory
The competitive element of the job is one of the top reasons that sales is not for everyone. This is an unavoidable part of the role, and whilst some people are hugely intimidated and shy away from it, others will thrive in a competitive environment.
Alexandra Jane writes for Inspiring Interns, which specializes in sourcing candidates for internships and graduate jobs, including digital jobs.
