The 1 Life-Changing Hack Every Salesperson Needs to Learn Immediately:
There is one, universal truth about learning that relates directly to sales:
The more you explain and continually regurgitate the same information, the better you understand it.
Eventually, whatever you’re explaining becomes ingrained in your subconscious until you’ve mastered learning it. On top of that, the more you continue to explain, the better you become at explaining it to other people.
Here’s a very basic example of what I mean.
Let’s say someone offers you a job to teach a group of 1,000 people who have never heard of basketball how to play the sport.
You accept the offer, but soon find out that you can only explain it on an individual basis—meaning you had to personally train each individual, one at a time.
You’d probably take quite a bit of time explaining it to the individual #1, hopping around between different aspects of the game. You’d talk about getting the ball into the hoop, dribbling, how the game is broken up into four periods, how there are five players from each team on the court at one time, the goal of scoring more points than the other team, and so on.
Unless you’ve been teaching basketball all your life, your explanation will be unorganized. The person you’re talking to will ask you to re-explain some aspects of the game, and ask questions about other aspects you forgot to mention. After you finish the conversation with individual #1, you’re going to adjust your approach accordingly for individual #2, and so on.
As you move down the line, explaining and re-explaining basketball, your explanation is going to shorten and sharpen. After repeatedly illustrating the the sport over and over again, your thoughts will inherently begin to organize themselves, and your description will become more succinct.
Based upon previous responses, you’re going to talk about certain aspects of the game at certain points in your explanation—having learned from prior conversation that doing so will paint a better picture in the mind of the individual you’re speaking to. On top of this, you’re automatically going to answer some questions before they’re even asked, assuming of course, those questions frequently came up in previous conversations.
Eventually, a conversation that took you over an hour with individual #1, took you less than five minutes with individual #1,000.
This is no different than pitching to prospects.
The more you deliver your pitch, the better you learn and the better you become at explaining it.
But there is one subtle yet crucial difference between the analogy and your sales pitch…
Unlike the rules of basketball, which are unchanging, the applications of your product differ between prospects.
You have to adjust your pitch to fit the needs of whomever it is you’re talking to in order to keep them moving on down the pipeline. The concern of one prospect isn’t always the same concern for another, which makes it difficult to masterfully explain anything—especially niche, varying pain points—because you simply don’t get to practice each and every scenario on a consistent basis.
Luckily, there is a way to master those scenarios and cater to each possible pain point you run into—and in-turn, enhance the overall delivery of your pitch, helping it to sound more conversational (and help you sound like more of an expert, too).
It’s the exact concept we touched on before:
You need to regurgitate the material through writing.
Writing is the most efficient and effective way to learn new material—specifically, material you otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity to actively practice explaining on a regular basis.
In forcing yourself to regurgitate the material through writing, you’re simultaneously developing a deeper understanding of potential prospect concerns and building a public body of content you can point to to illustrate just how much you know what you’re talking about.
Now, whenever a pain point comes up that you’ve already touched on in one of your articles, you can briefly summarize what you’ve written (because you have a better understanding of it) and, on top of that, have the ability to say, “Actually—I’d love to send you an article I wrote recently about this very topic.”
I’ve done this a countless times at my job, and the results have been exceptional.
Not only were the prospects’ questions answered thoroughly with tangible, written content, I actually saw a return on my investment to write in the form of:
“Great, great article. So many people I know are dealing with this exact same thing. Are you around to hop on a quick call later today?”
“Well said. Please reach back out in a couple of weeks. Looking forward to reconnecting.”
“That’s all I needed to hear. Will you send over the client agreement when you get a chance? Thanks.”
Closing sales is about how well you can pitch and speak to specific pain points of prospects in varying industries.
If you want to streamline that process, start writing.
