How I discovered the world's greatest sales technique

👉 and how it saved my career

Have I ever told you the story of my first proper sales role and how awful I was?

No?

Well, let’s get into it, because it’s a good one.

About 20 years ago (I know, I know, I raised my eyebrows when I read that too) I got my first pure sales role in consulting.

Instead of managing projects and selling to my existing clients, I had to win new ones from scratch.

I wasn’t very good at it <—- massive understatement

The hardest part of selling is lead generation. Getting that very first contact with new potential clients.

And I was awful at it.

I’m an introvert. The kind of person who’d rather read a book than go to a party. Let alone call or email someone I don’t know to try to sell something to them.

Lord knows why I thought it would be a good thing to agree to a sales role.

But there I was anyway, with responsibility for selling £5m+ a year in consulting projects to a couple of big clients we weren’t working with yet.

I found every excuse in the book not to call them.

And, when I did manage to muster up the courage, they didn’t want to talk to me.

I’d pretty much resigned myself to getting fired when a wonderful thing happened.

Our company had just run a research project in collaboration with a business school and they sent the results to all their sales people with an offer that if our clients wanted to hear more they could arrange for an expert to come and present the results.

Well, I didn’t have any clients. But I thought maybe, just maybe, a couple of people in my target client organisations might be interested.

After all, the topic was one they should be interested in - how their customers were changing.

And it turns out they really were.

Lots and lots of them.

When I called up to tell them we’d just done some research and to ask if they’d be interested in hearing about it suddenly all the folks who didn’t want to speak to me before suddenly did.

And they agreed to meetings and workshops where we presented the results of the research. In fact they kind of snapped my hands off.

And it was there I unleashed my devastating sales techniques.

I basically listened to what questions they asked in the workshops and the topics they seemed the most interested in.

And at the end I asked them if they’d like us to come back to talk a bit more about those areas and how we might be able to help them with them.

And staggeringly, they said yes. And after the follow-up meetings, many of them bought projects from us.

I never did learn any proper sales techniques.

But I did learn what I think is the easiest and most effective sales technique of all:

1. Share valuable information on topics that your clients care about.

2. Ask if they’d like help implementing what you taught them.

And you know what?

That “sales technique” works in emails too.

There are a lot of very expensive courses on sales copywriting and writing sales emails.

But for me, the very best way for most of us to do it is simply to share valuable information that’s helpful to our readers, then ask if they’d like help implementing it.

No fancy techniques or decades of sales training needed.

For example, today I’ve taught you the basics of selling in email. Hopefully you found it useful.

Would you like me to help you get great at selling in your emails?

You’ll learn how in my Effective and Engaging Email Newsletters programme. And you’ll get my personal feedback on your emails to help you learn fast and get results fast.

Click here for details

Until next time…

- Ian