What would a Sales 101 course look like? | Hacker News Reader

What would a Sales 101 course look like?

onesock.net

27 pointsblewis12 comments

There is a actually a fair amount to learn. We went through an incubator program at William and Mary and learned a ton about identifying FABs (Features, Advantages, Benefits), crafting language to appeal to decision makers (i.e., showing them how your product solves their specific problems), segmenting markets, using your resources narrowly -- rather than trying to do too much, b2b sales etc.

We are going to roll out www.nixty.com in beta mode in couple of weeks. I'll try to populate the system w/a course on sales from MITs Sloan School of Business. You can go there directly too. Our version will just be a bit more accessible.

I'd be more interested if this blog was offering to teach sales 101 rather than just asking what should be in it. Anyone know where to find something like that online?

The Sales 2.0 site has a lot of articles: http://sales2.com/index.php/articles

First step is knowing what we need to know :)

Learning to sell is just like learning to program. You learn by getting your hands dirty, not by reading a book.

The absolutely best way to learn sales is to get a job cold-calling people trying to sell them newspapers or something. You'll learn more from the people you work with than you'll ever learn in university or anywhere else. After a few weeks you'll pick up peoples intonation, mood and other subtle cues and you'll be able to tell within 30 seconds whether the guy at the other end of the phone will end up buying. When you've learnt to cold-call people and sell to them everything else is easy.

I did exactly this for a while in college, for this exact reason. At one point I was getting hung up on seven, eight times a shift.

There are lots of one day training classes that are pretty effective taught by Miller Heiman, Huthwaite, etc.

I took one in grad school, the professor's background is a huge contributing factor. Fortunately ours was pretty good and certainly experienced in selling and sales instruction;

http://www.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/Faculty/search/detail.cfm?p...

Certainly working as a sales person is the best way of learning the skills of selling. However, the points I was trying to make was that: a. Business Students completing degrees at Australian Universities will never be exposed to Sales - despite the fact its the most important thing they can learn in a commercial career. c. There is a lot about sales that is theory based and that you won't learn on the job (customer psychology, legal frameworks for transfer of title, designing a products revenue model etc.)

I think the argument for including Sales 101 into commerce degrees is strong.

Brendan www.onesock.net

I'd spend more time on week 3- including practice. That would make a lot more sense than the focus on ephemera. Much of the other stuff is going to vary by industry.

There are many different sales methods out there. You can get trained in the carnegie method, for example. http://www.dalecarnegie.com/search_courses/course_desc.jsp?c...

I've never done it (it's on my list of things to do), but I'm guessing that a summer job at a used car dealership will teach you everything there is to know about sales.

so tricks taught at used car dealerships are the height of sales? I don't doubt you'd learn a lot, but if that's the best you can do, sales might deserve its reputation.

Sales is the engine that pulls a business along not production.

This sentence really sticks in my craw. You can produce and not sell, the results may not be as good as doing both in concert, but without production, you can't sell. What's with this constant reverence for sales?

Don't get me wrong, I'd actually like to learn more about sales, and I think approaching it scientifically / rationally is a good idea, I just don't grok this whole concept of sales uber alles.

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