Sales Tips from UpKeep's Joe Venuti
How Do You Start A Career in Sales?
Joe Venuti, Vice President, Sales Development at UpKeep, began his career in sales after leaving the contract security world and looking for a new career - and it was not all smooth sailing, but he learned several top tips that he shares with us today.
“I started in the contract security world and, pivoted into sales through a whole bunch of events. Quite honestly, during my first month, I was terrible. I was an SDR. I couldn't set a meeting to save my life. I was concerned I was going to get fired,” he notes.
Venuti decided his best course of action was to knuckle down and learn, so he went to one of the leaders on the sales team, switched his desk and sat next to him, and spent months absorbing as much information as he could.
During the process, Venuti realized that something was repeatable about the sales process. As he started performing better, he took on a more significant role and became a manager, and that is where his passion for sales and his ability to create and teach a sale process that works - began.
Top 4 Things Sales Leaders Need to Know
Process repeatability
A repeatable sales process means you can have a standard way for your sales team to operate from sales rep onboarding to selling and beyond. To do this, sales leaders must have visualized their ideal sales rep and the entire sales cycle and know it inside out. Their sales team must have a common set of skills and access to critical sales messaging, know their touch points, and be able to personalize their messaging to fit their prospect and sell your company. In the initial stages, this requires working alongside HR to define a candidate and marketing to create the proper messaging.
“It's very easy to say ‘it's really hard to build a repeatable process around high-level personalization’. It is, but I think that it's really incumbent upon leadership to build the process for you,” notes Joe.
Execution
Sales prospecting needs to be almost flawless from end to end. From initial outreach to close, sales reps need to be customer-centric and develop personalized outreach using their sales tech stack. Sales reps must provide solutions to a company’s problems, not just sell a product. They need to build relationships and make those clients brag about how well their needs were met. There is no better advertising for sales than word of mouth.
Never Suffer in Silence
This one’s easy! Reach out when you need to, and ask for help. There is no point sitting at your desk head in hands weeping over a problem, challenge, or a client that you cannot get to close. Reach out to your team, refresh those ideas and get yourself back in a winning mindset.
Be coachable and agile
No matter how high up you are in your career, you still have more to learn. You need to be open to learning, adapting, and changing. Having an agile mindset helps organizations, teams, and individuals to foster more effective, transparent, and cohesive teams, and to enable better outcomes, solutions, and products/services for customers. Agility in sales means salespeople learn to adapt their sales approach to meet their customers' needs. Those needs can be defined in a variety of ways, but the goal of sales agility remains the same: to make salespeople capable of adapting their sales process to each buying process.
Sales leaders need clear insight into their teams and must know their goals and strategies to be able to guide their teams to sales success. The most important part of that is creating a repeatable process so that everyone is on the same successful page, this repeatable process is particularly important when it comes to personalized outreach.
With Owler Max, the ultimate sales companion in your tech stack your sales team has great reasons to reach out and personalize their outreach. The sales triggers and company news items that informs that outreach is delivered to them from Owler Max - directly where they work, whether that is their CRM, Slack, or via email.
Watch out for our NEW CRM integration announcement - coming soon.
