20 Sales Cheat Codes That Made Me $1.63M in SaaS Sales

My first year in SaaS sales, I earned $40,000 as an SDR. My last year in SaaS sales about 10 years later, before I became a CEO and entrepreneur, I was fortunate to earn $1.63 million in a single year. In this video, I Want to share 20 sales cheat codes that I wish I knew when I got started. Now before we get into these 20, go ahead and like this video. Subscribe to the channel so that you don't miss a single money making deal. Closing Tip from the top 1% of revenue experts let's go ahead and get started. Number one Buyers spend more money to relieve pain than they do to achieve gain. What does that mean for you as a seller? It means stop obsessing about your product's benefits and start obsessing about your customer's problems and pain. Number two the biggest opportunity your competition is probably not leveraging is deep and wide multi threading that gives you an opportunity to swarm your deals, reach out to multiple people on the buyer side and have multiple people on your side reach out to those buyers. If you're swarming your deals and your competitors aren't, you will win. Number three, the product demo that your product team teaches you never works. The the product team means well, but they are too interested in making customers and buyers aware of every feature. Your job is to only show the features that solve problems. Leave off the rest. Number four One of the best and easiest sales hacks is responding fast to your buyer. Responding fast to inbound leads, Responding fast to demo requests, Responding fasts to emails they send you, Responding fast to asks that they make of you. Buyers will mirror your speed if you respond fast. Most likely they'll respond fast. On the other hand, if you respond slowly, they are going to respond slowly and your sales cycle is going to get longer. Number five Personalization will help you book more outbound meetings, but there are diminishing returns to it. Adding way too much personalization creates a lot of work and doesn't add to conversion. The rule of thumb here is to scale your personalization to the scale of the account. If you're targeting an account that could be worth millions of dollars in terms of revenue and they're a high propensity account, then you're best served personalizing deeply. On the other hand, if you're targeting a mid tier account that could pay mid tier dollars, it's best that you scale your personalization accordingly. Number six, Offering an end of month or end of quarter discount only ever works if your buyer has total control over pulling the trigger. If they still have to get approval from others, if they still have to go through legal, through procurement or anything like that, it's not going to move the that's not going to close the deal. And worse, you're going to lose a ton of credibility and they're still going to hold you to the discount the next month. Number seven Spend more time getting new influencers up to speed on past conversations you've had with their colleagues. Spend a couple minutes summarizing other conversations so they're up to speed and then ask their perspective on the challenges. Number eight Plain and simple. A great question will always carry more persuasive power than a great question statement. Number nine People don't buy because of roi. ROI doesn't create demand. ROI justifies demand. What does create demand? Pain and problems and priorities. Only once you've established those does ROI have a place in your sales cycle. Don't lead with it, end with it. Number 10 Perfect Sales Technique and sales execution will not close the deal if you're talking to the wrong person or the wrong account. I still remember the best discovery call I've ever run. I didn't close the deal. Why? I was talking to the wrong person. Get in front of the right people and the right account and then everything you say and do is amplified. Number 11 Social selling is not better than cold email. Cold email is not better than cold calling. All of these channels work together. Leverage them as land, sea and air. Stop thinking binary between channels. Number 12 if you can describe your buyer's problem better than they can describe it themselves, their light bulbs will turn on. It's almost beautiful. Buyers favor the seller that can best articulate their problems. Buyers will buy more from you when they feel understood by you than when they understand you. Big difference. Number 13 get to know your market like the back of your hand. If you know your buyers so well that you can peer into their soul, you are going to win. Get to know their pains, their fears, their frustrations, their hopes, dreams and aspirations. When you get to that point, you you will carry enormous influence power. Number 14 buyers never reveal the real problem after your first or second question. Your job is to uncover the need behind the need. Not the need, but what is the need behind the need. Being able to do that and do that well without your buyer feeling like they're being interrogated is the closest thing there is to a magic bullet in sales. Number 15 senior executives and those in the C suite. They want to know that you did your homework. If you show up to A sales call with a C Suite executive and ask a generic question, you'll lose them. Number 16. Never negotiate price until it's the last issue. If agreeing on price doesn't close the deal, it's too early to negotiate. Remember these words. Let's say you and I agreed on price right now. What would still have to happen before we move forward together? If there are still significant steps to take, then you're negotiating too early. If, on the other hand, the buyer says nothing, we're past legal review, we're past all approvals, and all we have to do is agree on price and commercials and then we can get a deal done. Then negotiate away. Number 17. Every time you demonstrate a feature, preface it with the problem that feature solves. You'll double your demo success with this change alone. If you're not already doing it. The worst thing you can do during a demo is to present a feature or a solution that's in search of a problem. If your buyer is thinking to themselves, what problem does this solve? You lose. If, on the other hand, you say earlier you said, and then you summarize their pain and then you show the feature that solves it, that is the essence of a super effective deal closing demo. Number 18, stop blaming buyers for falling short. If they said they were going to sign last month and they didn't, it's your fault, not theirs. Maybe don't take this too literally, but placing blame on other people strips you of your power. If you take blame on yourself, even though it can sting a little bit, it puts you in a position of agency. Now you get to decide what you're going to do next. Number 19. The best sales demos are more about the customers than they are about the product. The hero of the story is the customer, the buyer and their problem. Not your product, its features and its benefits. And finally, number 20, if you want to close deals in today's economy, you have to utterly master selling to the C Suite. Decisions are getting made at a higher level. They're getting made with more scrutiny, they're getting made with more people involved. That means just about every deal is hitting a C Suite executive's desk. If you're not very good at selling to the C Suite, you're going to lose. You're going to have a bad time. If you are very good at selling to the C Suite, you are going to become the highest paid salesperson that you know. If you are struggling to sell to the C suite, if you're stuck with mid level managers who just can't get deals done. And if you're sick and tired of closing small deals instead of the big deals that lead to huge commission checks, Then I want you to claim this free copy of this brand new data driven cheat sheet. The seven skills that will add 50 to $100,000 to your W2 in 12 months or less. All based on data from 20,000 account executives that are making $300,000 per year or more. Go ahead and enter your email and I'll send you the cheat sheet for free.