Selling for non-salespeople!
Updated: 2 days ago
The start of a new year, the annual review process, and discussions of targets, metrics, KPIs, and OKRs have everyone thinking about how they can grow their business in 2025 and beyond. Naturally, the first consideration is how to grow the top line and drive revenue through increasing sales.
Recently, I’ve had several conversations with founders, business leaders and their wider teams about how hard this part of leading a business is. Most business owners and founders are not commercial experts; they are product or service experts who started the company with a great idea, a bucket load of passion and the courage to take on the world.
During these conversations, I keep uncovering three common themes. First, everyone tells me they are not 'natural salespeople'—you know, the larger-than-life, life and soul of the party, super-extroverted, pushy type of salesperson—always on the go, always talking and bouncing from one deal to the next.
Secondly, they tell me how hard selling is, the emotional drain of the never-ending 'NO' if you are lucky enough to hear back from prospective clients. This leads to the third challenge.
People often feel that the 2025 target or objective is unachievable, and they have no idea how they will even get close to achieving the results they need to make the year successful.
Does any of that feel familiar? If it does, then you are not only in some illustrious company but also in the right place, so read on. In this article, I will share a few simple ideas to help you change your approach to selling and the results you get. Nothing here is groundbreaking, but that's the point. You can implement these quickly to deliver the results you want in 2025.
Now, the first and most important aspect of improving your sales performance is very much internal, and in this case, I get a bit shouty,
Stop telling yourself you can't sell.
That is just your internal monologue. We all can sell; we do it way more than we think or give ourselves credit for. Selling is just communicating value; you've been doing it all your life. Every single one of you reading this article—or at least you, that one person who got this far—has been successful at selling. Friendships, job interviews, relationships, hell, even convincing yourself a new outfit looks excellent, are times you have sold your value.
Selling a product or service should be far less terrifying and much more manageable, but I get that it can still be scary; it certainly was for me when I first started. In my first proper sales role, at the end of the day of 'training', I had to stop on the way home to make my first sales visit; I'm not sure I would have had the courage after a night of restless sleep to get out and start selling.
The point here is that you need to shift your mindset and start selling. Yes, you are going to make mistakes and face rejection, but every unsuccessful sales pitch is 100% more likely to win business than the pitch you didn't make.
Turn Better Selling Into Consistent Results
You don't need to become a professional salesperson to grow your business. But you do need a clear, repeatable approach to finding opportunities, building relationships and winning customers.
The Harrison & Hunter Sales Motion Reset Toolkit helps business owners structure their sales activity, identify where opportunities are being lost, and focus on the actions most likely to generate revenue.
Less guesswork. More purposeful selling.
Not Sure What's Holding Your Business Back?
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Our free 3-minute Commercial Growth Diagnostic assesses your business across four areas: Market, Message, Motion and Management.
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Now that we've got into the mindset that we need to sell and will sell, how do we make more of your pitches successful?
Throughout my career, I've thought strategically and created a growth strategy for every role I have had. I genuinely believe this has been a major driver of my success in selling. Writing a strategy is often overlooked, particularly by smaller businesses, which may struggle to differentiate their strategy from their business plan. While the two are complementary, they serve different purposes: your business plan is full of business details, whereas your strategy is higher-level and serves as a guide for you and your business.
For more on the importance of strategy, see an earlier article, Why Your Small Business Needs a Growth Strategy, published before Christmas, but take it from me: putting effort into crafting a winning strategy will exponentially improve your sales!
A well-crafted growth strategy helps you establish a unique market position, differentiate your business from the competition, and attract loyal customers. It's about identifying your strengths, understanding your target audience, and crafting a compelling value proposition that resonates with them.
But what does a winning strategy look like, and how do I build one? Well, the first thing is not to get too complex too quickly. A simple model will suffice at this stage, so think about writing a story. You'll need a beginning, a middle, and an end, just not necessarily in that order.
Think about you and your business. What do you want to achieve? Simply put, what is your vision? Your vision should be compelling; yes, this is easier to write here than to create in the real world. There are many examples of grand vision statements, so I advise you to consider recruiting some help first. This can be current employees, friends, family or colleagues who can help you 'talk' your ideas rather than writing them down; after all, two minds are better than one. After that, keeping your vision statement short, punchy and inspirational is essential. Make sure your goal is lofty but realistic, and easy for your audience to understand and identify with. My favourite example was Disney's 'Make People Happy', which is clear, simple and authentic to the organisation (for the most part).
Once you have your vision, consider your values next. These core principles will help you achieve your vision. No matter the size of the business, I firmly believe articulating your values is an essential step in driving growth. As a small business, your values will guide your decision-making and add a unique element to your business, employees, and clients. Many may see these as corporate buzzwords or nothing more than slogans. However, that means they don't reflect the organisational culture and were likely written for the organisation, not by it. By this, they were likely written as a sticking plaster to cover underlying issues. Combined, a strong vision supported by lived values is the beginning of your strategy.
Next, we jump to the end of our story. Here, you consider your objectives. These are different from our vision. They are shorter-term and can come from key milestones in your business plan, such as your revenue target for 2025. Your objective is likely easier to articulate than your vision and values. It may be a target, a milestone, or a metric that falls out of your business plan. It needs to be SMART, as this will be what you will ultimately use to measure success, and the core part of your strategy will be geared towards this objective.
Vision, Values, and Objectives can form part of your overall business strategy, not just your sales or growth strategy. Next, we will focus on your sales strategy with the final puzzle piece: our middle section. This is where you will detail the areas you will focus on to realise your vision and achieve your objectives; they shouldn't be detailed or metric-driven, but high-level, inspiring, and motivating. Your objective here is to uncover the key areas you need to Win to achieve your purpose, so it's all about nurturing your uniqueness and understanding your customers and their needs before communicating your value in ways that resonate. Some brief examples could be
Unlock a new international market.
Reduce customer churn by 10%.
Increase spontaneous brand awareness by 7%.
The final secret to selling is turning your strategy into a process you can implement, evaluate and repeat. This is where you should get into the details, and I could spend hours discussing everything that should be included. However, the headline aspects should be:
Identify your target customers and where they shop.
Build a sales pipeline of qualified prospects.
Build a communications model to engage with prospects.
Document your sales efforts and track results.
Developing a sales process will help you convert more prospects into paying customers; over time, you will better identify what works and what doesn't, allowing you to adapt and tailor your approach to the circumstances. Every sales pitch will be a learning experience, and you will improve every step of the way. Selling is more art than science, so the more you practice, the easier it will become. However, you won't be successful 100% of the time, so remember: resilience and perseverance are critical in sales, just as they are in running a business.
Improving your sales approach is only one part of building a stronger business. Your target market, customer proposition and commercial priorities all need to work together. Our guide to building a small business growth strategy explains how to connect these elements into a practical plan.
Steve
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