Selling for non-salespeople!

The start of a new year, the annual review process, and discussions of targets, metrics, KPIs, and OKRs have everyone thinking about how they can grow their business in 2025 and beyond. Naturally, the first consideration is how to grow the top line and drive revenue through increasing sales.

Recently, I’ve had several conversations with founders, business leaders and their wider teams about how hard this part of leading a business is. Most business owners and founders are not commercial experts; they are product or service experts who started the company with a great idea, a bucket load of passion and the courage to take on the world.

During these conversations, I keep uncovering three common themes. First, everyone tells me they are not 'natural salespeople'—you know, the larger-than-life, life and soul of the party, super-extroverted, pushy type of salesperson—always on the go, always talking and bouncing from one deal to the next.

Secondly, they tell me how hard selling is, the emotional drain of the never-ending 'NO' if you are lucky enough to hear back from prospective clients. This leads to the third challenge.

People often feel that the 2025 target or objective is unachievable, and they have no idea how they will even get close to achieving the results they need to make the year successful.

Does any of that feel familiar? If it does, then you are not only in some illustrious company but also in the right place, so read on. Today, in this article, I will share some simple ideas that can help you change your approach to selling and the results you will get. There is nothing groundbreaking here, but that's the point. You can implement this quickly to ensure you deliver the desired results in 2025.

Now, the first and most important aspect of improving your sales performance is very much internal, and in this case, I get a bit shouty,

Stop telling yourself you can't sell.

That is just your internal monologue. We all can sell; we do it way more than we think or give ourselves credit for. Selling is just communicating value; you've been doing it all your life. Every single one of you reading this article—or at least you, that one person who got this far—has been successful at selling. Friendships, job interviews, relationships, hell, even convincing yourself that a new outfit looks excellent are the times you have sold your value.

Selling a product or service should be far less terrifying and significantly more manageable, but I understand it can still be scary; it certainly was for me when I first started. In my first proper sales role, at the end of the day of 'training', I had to stop on the way home to make my first sales visit; I'm not sure I would have had the courage after a night of restless sleep to get out and start selling.

The point here is that you need to shift your mindset and start selling. Yes, you are going to make mistakes and face rejection, but every unsuccessful sales pitch is 100% more likely to win business than the pitch you didn't make.

Now that we've got into the mindset that we need to sell and will sell, how do we make more of your pitches' successful pitches?

Unlocking sales is easier than you think, and the good news is you already know how to.

Throughout my career, I've thought strategically and created a growth strategy for every role I have had. I genuinely believe this has been a major driver of my success in selling. Writing a strategy is often overlooked, particularly by smaller businesses, who may struggle to differentiate their strategy from their business plan. While the two are complementary, they serve different purposes; your business plan is full of the details of the business, whereas your strategy is more high-level, serving more as a guide for you and your business. 

For more on the importance of strategy, see an earlier article - Why Your Small Business Needs a Growth Strategy – published before Christmas, but take it from me: putting effort into crafting a winning strategy will exponentially improve your sales!

A well-crafted growth strategy helps you establish a unique position in the market, differentiate your business from the competition, and attract loyal customers. It's about identifying your strengths, understanding your target audience, and crafting a compelling value proposition that resonates with them.

But what does a winning strategy look like, and how do I build one? Well, the first thing is not to get too complex too quickly. A simple model will suffice at this stage, so I want you to think about writing a story. You'll need a beginning, a middle, and an end, just not necessarily in that order.

Think about you and your business. What do you want to achieve? Simply put, what is your vision? Your vision should be compelling; yes, this is easier to write here than create in the real world. There are many examples of grand vision statements, so I advise first to consider recruiting some help. This can be current employees, friends, family or colleagues who can help you 'talk' your ideas rather than writing them down; after all, two minds are better than one. After that, keeping your vision statement short, punchy and inspirational is essential. Ensure your goal is lofty but realistic and straightforward for your audience to understand and identify with. My favourite example was Disney's 'Make People Happy', which is clear, simple and authentic to the organisation (for the most part).

Once you have your vision, your values are the next area to consider. These are the core principles that will enable you to achieve your vision. No matter the size of the business, I firmly believe that articulating your values is an essential step to driving your growth. As a small business, your values will help your decision-making process and provide an element of uniqueness for your business, employees, and clients. Many may see these as corporate buzzwords or nothing more than slogans. However, that means they are not the correct values for the organisational culture and have likely been written for the organisation, not by the organisation. By this, they were likely written as a sticking plaster to cover underlying issues. Combined, a strong vision supported by lived values is the beginning of your strategy.

Next, we jump to the end of our story. Here, you consider your objectives. These are different from our vision. They are shorter-term and can fall out of some of the key milestones in your business plan, such as your revenue target for 2025. Your objective is likely easier to articulate than your vision and values. It may have been given as a target, or it may be a milestone or metric that falls out of your business plan. It needs to be SMART as this will be what you will ultimately use to measure success, and the core part of your strategy will be geared towards this objective.

Vision, Values, and Objectives can form part of your overall business strategy, not just your sales or growth strategy. However, next, we will focus more on your sales strategy with the final puzzle piece, our middle section. This is where you will detail the areas you will focus your efforts on to realise your vision and achieve your objectives; they shouldn't be detailed and metric-driven; instead, they should be at a higher level so that they inspire and motivate. Your objective here is to uncover the key areas you need to Win to achieve your purpose, so it's all about nurturing your uniqueness and understanding your customers and their needs before communicating your value in ways that resonate. Some brief examples could be

• Unlock a new international market.

• Reduce customer churn by 10%.

• Increase spontaneous brand awareness by 7%.

The final secret to selling is turning your strategy into a process you can implement, evaluate and repeat. This is where you should get right into the details, and as such, I could spend hours discussing everything that should be included. However, the headline aspects should be:

• Identify your target customers and where they shop.

• Create and develop a sales pipeline of qualified prospects.

• Build a communications model to engage with prospects.

• Document your sales efforts and track results.

Developing a sales process will help you convert more prospects to paying customers; over time, you will better identify what works and what doesn't, allowing you to adapt and tailor your approach depending on the circumstances. Every sales pitch will be a learning experience, and you will improve every step of the way. Selling is more art than science, so the more you practice, the easier it will become. However, you will never be successful 100% of the time, so remember, resilience and perseverance are critical for sales, as they are for running a business.

If you want to learn more about developing a winning sales strategy, I am running a workshop on the 18th of February in Edinburgh. In this workshop, you will learn about and create a bespoke strategy for you and your business, leaving you with a robust plan to grow your business in 2025. Get in touch to register.

Steve