I have a confession to make. I always thought I was “good” at sales. I sold ads for The Appalachian college newspaper in graduate school, and since coming to work with Cube Creative, I have done sales as well.
I had two major problems and one smaller one.
As children, we were often told the story of the tortoise and the hare. It is probably one of Aesop’s more famous fables, being made into a cartoon by Walt Disney. You recall how the story goes. The hare is beaten by the much slower tortoise simply because it keeps going while the hare stops to rest. The same can be said when doing a sales call or series of sales calls. This was one of the biggest takeaways I had from the Sales Skills Bootcamp by David Weinhaus.
You may be asking yourself how can the famous fable be related to my previous sales process. The short answer is, before taking the class I would always rush to “make the sale.” I have since learned its better to go slower and really learn the prospect’s real and true goals, not just the commoditized goal.
I've never considered myself a salesman, but that's what I've done to grow our web design business over the past 14 years. When we became a HubSpot Partner Agency in 2018, we were signing up for a platform that would help us grow our clients' businesses through great marketing & sales software and business support.
Our HubSpot channel account manager, Katie Carlin, turned me on to the Pipeline Generation Bootcamp led by HubSpot sales director Dan Tyre. If you hear us use the term "Smarketing," he's the one who coined the term that combines sales and marketing into one important team.