If great sales people are anything, they are resourceful. They create unique hacks to do their job better, to get a competitive edge. They’re always looking for something that will allow them to do what everyone else is doing better.
Good sales hacks aren’t cheap shortcuts, but rather creative ways to do the work and improve the results.
I’ve seen all kinds of crazy hacks in my day and when it comes to sales tips and hacks they fall into 3 camps, crappy tips that no one should use, great tips that everyone uses and are very good and killer tips and hacks that work brilliantly because few people are using.
Understanding this, I wanted to know what some of the best sales hacks used today were, so I asked.
I went and asked 22 of the industry’s leading sales influencers what their best hacks were and boy did they deliver. The tips were amazing and unbelievably creative. None of the sales tips or hacks were the same. They were all different, covering many different aspects of the sales process.
Here are a couple of my favorites:
Mining your out of office messages.
Don’t delete them. That’s right, read them first. Do you hate getting out of office messages in your inbox, especially after you send out an email blast? Stop hating them and start mining them. I discovered that there is a lot of information in those out of office messages. Take a minute and read each one. Some of them don’t have anything in them so you can quickly delete them. But take a closer look. Here are some of the great things I have found in out of office messages.
1. The names of other buying influences. Not only their names, but their titles, emails and phone numbers sometimes. They are telling you who to contact while they are gone and many times they are sharing the names of other decision makers, not just an admin (although admins can be very helpful). Get those names and do some research. Start interacting with them on social media (Click like, Comment and Share) then maybe connect and start building a relationship.
2. Something interesting about them. They may be out of the office on business but they may also be on vacation and sometimes they share where. Sometimes they are out for a wedding or birth off a baby and state that. Now it’s time to use that info to send a card in the mail or even a gift if appropriate. You can often check facebook for more details (who says facebook isn’t for B2B sales).
May sound crazy but those Out of Office messages can be a fountain of useful information to help develop a relationship and move a sale forward. — Alice Heiman
When offering a white paper or offer via social, invite them to DM their email vs. clicking on a link. We A/B tested links vs. “just reply” and got a 5X increase in response. We’re currently getting 12-15 leads PER DAY using Socedo on Twitter with this tactic — Matt Heinz
- Anthony Iannarino
- Jill Konrath
- Mark Hunter
- David Brock
- Jack Kosakowski
- and more.
So what did we do with all of these brilliant sales tips and hacks? We put them in an eBook of course.
If you want to get an edge in your selling process, if you’re looking for a way to find more customers, get better email responses, improve your close rate and more, these sales tips will do the trick.
I’m also curious about this communities sales tips and hacks. Is there a cool sales hack you use? Share it in the comments. I’ll take the best ones and add them to a 2nd Edition, updated ebook.
