Know-How Exchange : Other

What's the most important thing a salesperson must know?

I would ask something to them about what they have seen are the good and bad points of marketing in regards to helping them sell. The goal is to both get a feel for what they think of marketing, and also perhaps get some good ideas for your own work.

In coming up with your questions, think about how your ideal sales colleague would function. Think about what you could do to support his/her efforts and what they could do to support yours. Being in alignment would help make both of you, as well as your company as a whole, more prone to success. Here's an example: "XYZ is one of our company's top three priorities. What can we do together to help achieve this objective?"

What do you wish that a sales guy would know about marketing?
What do you wish that a marketing guy would know about sales?
How do you leverage marketing to increase your sales?

Here is a great way to find out what a sales person understands about sales.

Pick something to have them sell to you. It doesn't matter what just something.

一听,寻找符合他们的反应lowing three items. A Feature, a benefit and the impact. Many sales people sell features, but the great one's sell all three. If you don't know how to figure out the impact ask yourself "What's so good about that?" This question was created by Bob Circosta who has been nicknamed the billion dollar man by selling over 1b in goods on the Home Shopping Network. In our new world of Tecnical sales many people have forgotten some of the basics that truly do make a sale. Anyone can list features, but few can build emotion into the sale and contrary to popular belief almost every sale has emotion tied to it.

You can also find out if they know their personality types and how to tailor your communication to match their personality.

I always ask them what the last non-fiction book they read was. Most sales poeple never work to better themselves, yet I could ask the same of most people on this site and it would most likely be a SEO or viral marketing book.


It's easy to find the great ones if you ask the right questions, and when you do your boss will be extremely impressed.

If you would like I can post a few pages from a sales training book I wrote in here. I personally believe that anyone's marketing efforts can be more effective if you understand the science behind sales.