27 Best Sales Tips of All Time - Our Favorite Lessons on Sales

In this clip, we are going to talk about the 27 best all-time sales tips. But before we do, if you like clips like this, you want to help grow your business, you want to help start a business, whatever you want to do, well, subscribe and it's going to be amazing for you because you get good content. So let's jump into it. The most important thing when it comes to a sales page, number one, by far the most important, the headline. Ogilvy, who was a very, very popular marketer, one of the most popular, he said that when you write a headline, 80 cents of your dollar has already been spent. Because if nobody clicks on the headline, if nobody even gets riled up to feel that they need to look more into whatever your sales page, whatever you're offering is, you've lost them already. So you've got to have a really good headline first.

So if someone goes to your website, they read 3 of your blog posts, they opt in for a form, you got their phone number, you can do either A, a ringless voicemail, B, you can also send them a text message being like, Hey, hey, Eric, I noticed you're reading this article about Facebook ads. Is there anything I can help you with your Facebook advertising right now? Do you have any questions for me? Great way to start converting more leads into sales.

A persona. Why do you need a persona in the first place? Because you have different types of people looking to buy from you. If I am Nike, for example, I might be selling to basketball players, football players. Now, for us as a marketing agency, we're looking to sell to startup founders, big company marketing directors. We have these personas in place that way we know kind of who we're talking to. What their age is, what their marital status is, how many kids they might have. And this gives us an idea for how we might tailor our advertising, our creative. Then we can tailor our thoughts around that. Because if we're trying to target everyone, if we try to please everyone, ultimately we please no one. I think that quote's from Mark Cuban, by the way.

In sales, everyone's like, I'm going to go make some sales. I'm going to crush it. I'm going to close some deals. Why not just try to help people out first? If you help them, you educate, you try to really solve their problems and make sure they're better off than before when they talked to you, They're much more likely to sign up as a customer. Selling doesn't just revolve going out there and pitching people on your product or service. Selling is also about educating, helping people, getting them to understand what's wrong, showing them how to fix it whether they pay you or they don't pay you. Because the companies that have enough money won't care to go around you and do it themselves. They'll just write you a check. So help them out first.

Having a kind of one-time upsell, let's say they buy And then what happens right before they're able to check out is you have an upsell page that shows up. You see this on Amazon all the time. You can see this in other product pages too. Like if you're selling a SaaS product or you're selling a course, for example, you can get something else right before you check out. And the thing is they have your credit card information already. You just hit add and then you're able to get a kind of order bump, right? You can call it a one-time upsell, you can call it an order bump, whatever you want to call it, it's fine with me. I just care about doubling your sales.

You can use an online scheduler. There's a ton of them. I use ScheduleOnce. The moment someone comes to your website and they want to become a lead, assuming they meet certain criteria such as revenue budgets or marketing budgets or whatever you're looking for, company size, their title, you can then send that person only instead of sending all your leads because you want to qualify and not fill up your sales reps' calendars. You can send them to a page through ScheduleOnce or HubSpot or whatever tool you're using where they can automatically schedule a call within the rep's calendar. When you're doing this, Try not to give a window that's more than 2 days. Yes, everyone's like, oh, if you give 7 days or 10 days, you get more options and more people are going to select it. What you'll find is when you go past 2 days, the show-up rate drastically decreases.

The key thing is when you follow up with people, don't just say, I'm just checking in, I just want to see how things are going, I'm just following up. That's boring. And like, people are like, dude, when's this guy going to go away? Or when's this gal going to go away? Like, be useful to people. Rather than trying to be interesting, be interested. And with that being said, go out there, be interested in people, And then they will become interested in your services.

A lot of people create the course before they sell it. It's the worst thing out there. I don't understand why people do that. Go create a site, like a digital course type of site using Kajabi. It's cheap, it's like $100 a month or $50 a month or something like that. All right, this is if you didn't create the course. If you already have the course, I'll give you an answer for that too. But if you haven't created the course, Go to Kajabi, go throw up a landing page, they do payments and everything, then go throw in some Facebook ads, spend like a few hundred dollars, and try to make sales. You'll quickly learn if you can make sales and make it profitable. If you can, then go and create the course. You can even refund those people if you want, or say, hey, the course is going to be ready in a month, and I'm going to give you all your money back, but let me know if you're still interested, and I'll charge you in a month from now. Now you know people are gonna buy it, then go and create the course. Everyone creates the course first. Just because you create it doesn't mean it'll sell.

How do you go about pitching your first marketing campaign? It's tough because sometimes you have to deal with budgets. Sometimes you have to deal with other stakeholders. Maybe you have a partner, maybe you have a boss that's resistant, maybe you're new to a company and you kind of need to prove yourself. So how do you pitch it? I run a company called Single Grain. We're an agency. We work with companies like Uber and Amazon. And how do we go about pitching it? The first thing that you need to do more than anything else, don't be salesy. Make your boss or make whatever stakeholders, you have to get them curious. Hey, how do you think our marketing campaign's going right now? What do you think we need help with from a marketing perspective? What worked and what didn't work? And then you start to get them curious. You start with the discussion first and then from there you start educating because they might not know things. I don't know what the conversion rate is. I don't know. I don't know. But you might have a solution. Well, have you thought about this? And then you start, it starts to become more consultative. At least for me personally, it's much easier to sell when I'm consultative and I actually know what I'm talking about. You got to find emails and contacts using tools like Duck Soup and ZoomInfo. Duck Soup and ZoomInfo are going to help you because ZoomInfo will get you the phone numbers. They'll get you the emails as well. Duck Soup will get you the personal emails through LinkedIn. So Duck Soup helps you visit profiles and you can find different types of profiles in LinkedIn Sales Navigator. For example, you can use Sales Navigator to find certain titles or certain technologies sites are using.

The first thing I like to do is think about cold emails as the recipient. All of us have received cold emails in the past, and it's pretty obvious when you receive a bad cold email why it's bad. A couple things hit you right away. One, when you look into your Gmail inbox, you'll see the subject line. Two, you'll see a little bit of the first line of the email, and those 2 things will make you decide whether to delete that email or whether to open it. So the first thing to do is to make sure the subject line is at least neutral. That's why I like generic subject lines. I'm a big fan of, hi from Alex. I'm a big fan of, quick question. The one that performs the best for us at Experiment 27 is, question about, and then their company name. So like, question about Tide, or, question about General Electric. The reason why those generic subject lines work is because they don't turn somebody off. If you had pitched your product in that subject line, there's a much higher chance you're gonna get deleted. Which means they're not even going to read the body of the email.

If you're trying to close a big account with, let's say, a large Fortune 100 company or even a large company that you're having a hard time getting ahold of, email the CEO and send them something that goes like this. Hey John, or hey Sue, whatever their name is. Hey Sue, I know you're really busy, but if you can forward this email over to the person who's in charge of your marketing, that would be great. I have a way to increase your traffic by X or your conversion rates by Y. You guys are making a lot of mistakes that are making you lose to X, Y, and Z competitor. Cheers, Neil. And you can adapt that to whatever industry you're in. But when you send it to the CEO, yes, they're probably not going to respond to you, but a good portion of the time they'll forward it to whoever's in charge of that division and let them figure it out. And when your CEO sends you an email, it usually is received in a very positive fashion because the person's like, oh wow, you must know the CEO. You never said you know the CEO, but they're usually going to make that assumption. And when the CEO tells them to look into something, they're going to spend the time and attention and give you the energy you need to figure out if they can work with you or not.

Make sure that you have marketing automation set up. This kind of goes without saying, but I'm hoping you have this set up. I'm hoping, In today's world, it's kind of table stakes, but maybe not. You could use tools like Drip, HubSpot, Marketo. There's a lot out there. It just depends on the complexity. I know for people that want things simple, there's Drip and ConvertKit. ConvertKit's more, more so for kind of bloggers, and Drip is more for e-commerce. And the other thing I'll say is when you collect emails, and you should be collecting emails on your website just so you can put them into your automation sequence, you can use a tool like OptinMonster, for example, and make sure in your intro email after people have opted in, you are segmenting people. So maybe you have people that you're looking to do business with that are over $5 million in revenue, under $5 million in revenue, or maybe they don't, don't have a business. But the idea here is that you're segmenting and you're tagging these people so you know what kind of messages to send them because people are different. That way your open rates are going to be higher. It's going to be better for you overall.

With sales, what I found is sales and marketing don't really work together and it's really hard unless you have a CRO, a chief revenue officer. In which they're in charge of both sales and marketing. Sales and marketing don't have to be the same department, but if they go into, or their leader is the same person, what you'll find is that leader is able to dictate how they work together or communicate. There has to be a story. The story starts with, from someone visiting your website to not just purchasing, but the whole experience from purchasing to coming back, purchasing again, to referring more people. So it involves both sales and marketing. Unless you have one person who's in charge of that story, it's going to be hard for you to get sales and marketing working together.

When you think about hiring salespeople, they're very different people. What I like to do, I got this from when I used to read, I think, The Ultimate Sales Machine by the late Chet Holmes. Read that book. Second thing I recommend reading is The Sales Acceleration Formula, which is by Mark Roberge from HubSpot, helped them go from $0 to $100 million. You got to ask them to sell you when you're, when you're interviewing with them, right? So when you're talking with them, Ask them to sell you. The number one thing I'm looking for when I'm talking to salespeople is how coachable they are because they're coming into your system. They need to know how your system works, but they need to be able to listen. They need to be coachable. If you ask them to sell, you coach them and they listen, great. Onto the next step. If they cannot sell or if they can't change based on kind of the feedback that you've given, probably not the right fit.

Go to conferences. Conferences have been around for ages. They work well, and the reason they work is because people are getting an ROI from them. We send so many of our sales guys to events. It's one of the highest places that we're going to find leads who are going to close and become customers. Go to as many conferences as possible and have your people just walk the floor, not just attend the events, but network with people and help them out and give business cards. You'll find that you'll generate a lot of revenue from this over time. It's amazing word of mouth and if someone can go to a conference and pay a few thousand dollars to get in, they usually will have money to pay you.

FullContact. So the reason I'm saying FullContact right now is those of you that are watching on YouTube, I'm just showing my phone but what happens is when you go to a conference or you do any kind of networking event or whatever, people still like to hand out cards. I hate cards. So what I do is I scan all the information using FullContact. FullContact will transcribe it. Okay, that's nothing new. But what I like about FullContact is what happens is once I scan a card and I tag it, I can use Zapier to tie it in with a certain tag. So if I say it's like qualified for the agency, it will automatically create a deal in my CRM. So I don't need to do all the data entry that way. I can actually follow up with the people. And the other thing I like about FullContact is there's a little Gmail and there's like other email plugins. I can easily fill out all that information and then use the tags and then it'll pass over to the CRM. It makes my life a lot faster. It reduces a ton of data entry and it allows me to follow up more with any type of contacts I have, which means I'm going to get more sales, which means you're going to get more sales. Outreach is great because it allows you to set up sequences. It allows you to automatically follow up with people through email. You can set tasks for yourself. Basically what you need to do, you've got to find a bunch of emails out there, load them into Outreach, make sure you scrub the list, and then Outreach is going to help you on an automated basis send out emails. And it's going to help you basically throttle the emails too. So you're not sending too many emails out per day, so you're not going to get filtered. So that's why I like Outreach because it just makes your sales process a lot more efficient. Do something that stands out. So here's an example. I know people that will sometimes take a bottle of champagne and walk into the office. So that's really bold. I'm not saying you should do that, but I also know other people that have ordered tacos ahead of time and had them delivered to that office. So When you do something that stands out, when you do something that's actually remarkable, so taking a page from Seth Godin, do something that's remarkable, do something that stands out because people are calling all the time, they're sending emails all the time. Sure, that works, but even if you want to— even if you don't want to send them tacos, you don't want to send them champagne, I mean, look, even if you send them a more personalized email, that's going to stand out more because, well, you actually took the time to research into that person. And you took the time to understand what really drives that person. You have to look at your dream 100. This is your list of 100 clients that you would like to have. These are kind of the holy grail of who you're trying to get. Maybe you need to focus on acquiring people that are smaller or in a very specific niche, right? What I recommend doing is using a framework where you can find emails and then you can reach out to people. Tools like Datanyze, Find That Email, Duck Soup. These are all tools that can help you find emails. So you got to figure out who you're going for in the very beginning. And hopefully that Dream 100, it kind of starts to get the wheels turning for you. Like, who do you want to focus on in the beginning? Do you want to work with software as a service companies? Do you want to work with e-commerce companies? Do you want to work with video production companies? You kind of decide what, what's in your wheelhouse based on your experience. After you found the emails, I would also recommend finding people's phone numbers too. So you can use a tool called ZoomInfo for that. And then from there you want to set a sequence using tools like Outreach or Mixmax. Instead of having to follow up with people manually all the time, you're able to say, okay, on, on the first day I want to send this email, 4 days later I want to send this email, 7 days later I want to send this. And if they don't respond for 1 month, we're going to follow up with them once a month. It's all about the process at the end of the day. And this is just one of the many processes that you're going to build as an agency.

We found that there was a high correlation of, you know, certain buckets like 10 to 20 employees, 20 to 40, and then also like, $400 to $600 in spend, and we bucketed it all out, we ran the data, and we found that there are some buckets that convert way higher for us than others. So what we did is we made the lead score algorithm say, hey, if these leads have this much spend and this many employees, that's an A lead.

Oh, okay.

And then some of the other buckets that converted well but not as well as the A leads, okay, those are B leads. Leads. And then what we found is when we ran all the data on all of our past leads, there was a cutoff point where there was no more revenue, but there was all these leads down here that didn't convert, right? So we looked at the common characteristics among all those leads. Those became our D leads, and, and those get lopped off. So we've adjusted the algorithm twice now, so we're cutting off about 40% of our leads now. 40% of our leads that don't even go to A sales rep, those immediately go down a self-serve funnel.

I remember one time I was flying American Airlines. I was so pissed off because American Airlines, like, just not my jam. So flying American Airlines is like the worst service ever. We were waiting on the tarmac for about 2 hours or so and our flight's like, guys, oh, we got to pull back in. So we pull back in and we pull back out again. We pull back in again. It's just like a nightmare, right? And so, oh, here comes a tornado. We're in Dallas, right? So it's just like, dude, what is going on? So I got so angry. I didn't get reimbursed for that. So I ended up writing this email. Now in copywriting, these emails are known as Seinfeld emails. It's from this copywriter. His name is Ben Settle. If you watch Seinfeld, and I've actually never seen an episode of Seinfeld in my life, but, but, but the gist around Seinfeld is that they talk about nothing. Not saying anything. You're saying something. What could I be saying? Well, you're not saying nothing. You must be saying something. If I was saying something, I would have said it.

Why don't you say it?

I said it.

What'd you say?

Nothing. So literally what I did was, I talked about my terrible experience with American Airlines. I wrote, you know, a couple hundred words or so. At the very end, I tied it in with an offer that we had, which was a course that we had, which is a course on hiring. I was like, my experience is so bad with American Airlines and that's why you got to hire great people, right? Literally at the very end. And a ton of people bought from it. And that's the beauty of copywriting. That's when I started to see that, oh my God, this copywriting stuff actually works. Anybody can do it. I can write that way. I'm literally just telling a story and just tying it in like, 5% I'm tying it in with the sale and are you kidding me? I'm getting sales that way. That's the power of copywriting. Live chat. A lot of e-commerce sites I see out there, they don't have live chat on their, on their sites. Let's say you have live chat and people are viewing a product page on shoes for example, and you ask them a specific question around shoes. Hey, like do you have any questions about so-and-so product? When you're able to do that, you're able to engage people. People are already on the product page, they're further down the funnel. Sometimes they just have some clarifying questions to ask. And then you can move them along and they'll buy it.

My number 1 sales tip is to approach every client call not like you are a sales guy trying to pitch a product, but instead like you're a doctor trying to diagnose a disease. What does that mean? So for instance, when I am on a sales call, and we sell marketing services for agencies at Experiment 27, I'm talking to an agency owner, I know because of our research and because of our cold emailing process that they're between $1 and $20 million in revenue, and based on our past conversations, not with them but with other agency owners in the same spot, I have a very good idea of how they think and problems that they might be dealing with. But I'm not gonna come right out and say it. Instead, I'm gonna give a 2-sentence pitch on what Experiment 27 does and then ask them about their marketing. Have you hired a marketing vendor in the past? Who runs marketing for you right now? Do you have key performance indicators set up? Questions that don't lead them towards a specific answer, but do give me a better idea of what they need. I know your sales managers might have given you scripts or key points to hit, but the easiest way that I found to sell anything is to listen to a question, think of a case study that you might have in your head that relates to it, and then answer the question based on your past experience. So if they say, as an example, oh, we've run all of our marketing internally this entire time, and it's just me who runs the marketing, I could say something like, that happens in a lot of agencies. The one founder tries to take on marketing and also sales and also do production, and it slows everything down. I know a ton of marketing agencies where, based on their client results, you'd think they were crushing it, but then you look at their own website and And their inbound leads are way lower than where they should be. And that's the exact type of thing that we help with. What I did there is I heard his answer, I internalized what he said, I listened to him, and then I took it back to the Experiment 27 pitch and brought up one of our case studies.

This tool is called Gong.io. So Gong.io is a massive advantage. You know why? Because when you are Getting on a call with somebody, you don't know what kind of behavior you have. So if we look at the screen right here, I can see I spent 45% of the time talking and then the other person on the call spent 55% of the time. So like, that's cool. Gong is a sales intelligence tool. It starts to see patterns, right? It starts to see the topics that I'm talking about. So you can see here, it senses that I'm talking about pricing, talking about moving forward. We have small talk and being— I remember for that specific period of time we did have small talk. And on the other side of things, look at these interaction stats over here. So you can see I have, there's a talk ratio, there's the longest monologue, which is I guess, you know, the longest each person has talked. There is a longest customer story. So that's 3 minutes interactivity and patience is 0.65 seconds. So you can see not only for myself, but you can see people on your team, how they behave, how patient are they? Uh, how long do they talk? Um, their talk ratio. If like, for example, if I spent 75% of the time talking, it's probably too skewed towards me, so I need to make adjustments there, right? So that to me is something like if I see someone on my team doing that, and Gong will show my entire team doing that, it becomes incredibly powerful because now you have a coaching thing where you can actually go to your team and say, hey, look, I noticed that you're spending 75% of your time talking. Well, I think we should dial it back a little bit. Maybe let's, let's dial it back to 50% and maybe down to 40% because In the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, the most interesting topic of anybody, anybody in the world is themselves, right? Get people to talk about themselves, but don't make it seem like you're just trying to get them to talk about themselves. Like it seems very manufactured. Don't do that. That's just a little tip over there.

Integrating with Twilio. So whether you're using Gong, whether you're using ScheduleOnce, HubSpot, whatever it may be, in most cases, if you're trying to improve your sales, you're going to have people picking up the phone. With Twilio, what I do is anytime my reps have calls, you're never going to have 100% of the potential leads or customers or just anyone show up. So by integrating with Twilio, what we do is we'll send text reminders 15 minutes before the scheduled call, a day before, an hour before. We do it a few times. That helps ensure that people show up because they're reminded. And that's huge. The last thing you want to do is have all these calls and have no one show up. So think of your whole sales process as a funnel as well. And you can use a lot of traditional growth hacks to get more people to show up, close, convert.

Establishing some sense of urgency when they are on your checkout page, you say, okay, well, we're holding this product for you for 5 minutes before we have to release it back. Urgency is really important when we're trying to get someone to buy, whether it's trying to buy services or trying to buy a product. Right. Which is why you see a lot of these internet marketers out there when they launch their courses, they're opening the cart. Closing it in 7 days, right? But then there's like a barrage of emails that you get in between that. It's because urgency works. About 50% of the sales happen on the day right before the cart closes. All right. So I hope you enjoyed those 27 all-time best sales tips. Let us know what you plan to do with any of the tips. And if you have a tip for us, drop it in the comments below. And don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe whatever platform you are on. And we'll see you tomorrow.