jtnocode

Sales is scary.

Even more so if you’re shy or introverted.

But it doesn’t need to be.

I’m one of the biggest introverts you’ll ever meet. And yet I make 90%+ of my revenue from direct selling. In this post, I’ll share my exact process for selling products of all prices. I use these methods to sell 5-figure sponsorships, 2-figure consumer products and have even sold 4 companies, some for multiples of 6-figures.

Why would you want to learn how to sell? Isn’t sales dead in the internet world? Quite the contrary. Selling is one of the most predictable revenue channels you have. By knowing stats like your email open rates + conversion rates, you can create a very clear picture of how much money you will make for every 1000 emails you send. As a solo-founder, this is one of the most powerful levers you can pull.

Unfortunately, most people shy away from sales and focus on “less scary” marketing methods like social, content and SEO.

But sales doesn’t need to be scary When a lot of people think about sales, they think about:

• Wolf-of-Wall St levels of sleaze

• Cringeworthy emails

• Unsolicited follow ups

• High energy / high charisma people

• Cold calling

Thankfully sales doesn’t need to be any of these things.

One of my key methods of making sales less scary is to remove myself from the selling process as much as possible. I do this by making the sales offering so sellable that it sells itself.

So instead of trying to be high energy, charismatic sales people and making hundreds of cold calls, we focus on all the other aspects of our business that can do the selling for us. These include:

Product, Pricing, Credibility, Psychology, Strategy, Honesty, Tools, Sales materials and your Sales process.

Let’s go over each of those:

1/ Product

Your product or service is the actual thing that you’re selling so it’s pretty obvious that the quality of the product should be good. If you don’t have a good product, it doesn’t matter how good you are at sales as it will never sell. On the flipside, if your product is fantastic, it may sell itself.

The key here is that you need to be able to identify your “unique selling points”. The key features which differentiate you from your competitors. Your selling point could be a lower price, a feature that nobody else has, a bespoke service, 1:1 customer service etc. It’s not branding. Don’t make the mistake of thinking branding alone is a unique selling point. It may help in selling your message more easily, but it’s not a selling point in its own right.

2/ Pricing

Next up, your pricing is a massive strategic lever you can pull to make your product sell more easily. You can use high pricing to suggest quality, a lower price to suggest value, or use pricing strategies such as “price anchoring” where you create additional products that you don’t intend to sell to help showcase the value of the main product more. Couple your pricing strategy with upsells and discounting and you’ve got multiple ways to invoke powerful responses from customers by simply playing around with pricing options.

3/ Credibility

Existing success is one of the biggest cues that convinces people to buy your products. This is why companies put logos of their existing clients, or publications where they’ve been featured, or reviews from previous clients. Do everything you can to get any of these and put them on your website and sales materials. If you’re just launching your business, consider giving some work/products away for free (or at a reduced rate) to get a few logos/reviews for your site.

Optimize your social profiles in a similar way by using high-quality images, creating a clear bio that explains what you do and posting high-quality content on the topic your business relates to.

4/ Psychology

The key thing I think about with selling is psychology. I don’t think about sending 8 unsolicited messages on LinkedIn, which everyone seems to do and I can’t imagine ever works. Instead, I put myself in the shoes of the person I’m trying to connect with and work forwards from there. That’s a good rule to keep in your mind, to always think about how your email, or pricing, or what you say in a call comes across to the other person.

The next part I think about is the actual sales process. I don’t do the hard sell. Instead, I try to start conversations. Conversations lead to calls, calls lead to sales. Start conversations.

5/ Strategy

I’m a big fan of chess. And Sales is not too different as there is a lot of strategy involved. You always need to think about potential customers as the other player and think about what their next move might be. Take into account things like changes in the market, seasons, holidays etc. Read the news. Watch the industry. Always be ready to pivot your strategy when something changes.

6/ Honesty

There is a stereotype that sales is all about lying. It’s not. This probably came about as a good salesman is often characterized as somebody who can sell anything, even when it’s a bad product. Effectively, these people are good at acting and lying.

Real selling on the other hand is about selling a product where the buyer will get more value from the product than they paid you. That’s fair business. So there’s no need to feel like you need to lie. People can smell a lie. If you approach your sales with honesty, customers will appreciate it and will buy more readily.

7/ Tools

There are a lot of great tools for helping you with your sales nowadays. My favorites are:

• Apollo for outbound email campaigns

• Superhuman for emails

• Attio CRM for managing the Sales Pipeline

It doesn’t need to be complex. These 3 alone make the entire process a lot easier.

8/ Sales Materials

Create a visual sales deck which has everything a customer needs to know about what you’re offering. This includes the details of the product, the pricing, quotes and logos of previous customers, places you’ve been featured etc. Make it as visual as possible, using images, graphs and charts where possible. This allows you to showcase all the selling points of your process succinctly and in a compelling manner.

Instead of writing long emails with every selling point you have, you can now write short emails explaining the overarching benefit they will receive and then ask them if they would like to take a look at your sales deck. It’s very easy for the customer to say yes to that question because there is no obligation to buy and allows you to move them onto the next stage of the sales pipeline.

9/ Sales Process

Speaking of the Sales Pipeline, the final weapon in your arsenal is to have a very simple and efficient sales process that takes care of moving potential customers through the sales pipeline. Here is my high-level sales process:

• Automated outreach emails with follow ups

• Respond to all incoming emails with email templates and sales deck

• Book meeting

• Follow up

• Close

I'm writing on this topic every week on Substack where I share 15 years of learnings in 3-min guides. Feel free to use those guides too if they're useful.

My normal advice for solo-founders is to focus on sales, rather than social media. In some cases however, social media is EXACTLY what your business needs, especially if it’s consumer-facing in some way. This includes 2-sided businesses such as marketplaces, communities, media companies etc (i.e. anything where you're selling ads/sponsorships).

Why? It builds reputation, connections, awareness and leads all in one go.

Unfortunately, many people fall into several pitfalls which kill their chances as a solo-founder on social.

Here are 6 of the biggest mistakes to avoid:

1/ Don’t use a brand account

When you’re a solo-founder, using a personal account is usually more effective than a brand account as it feels more social and less “salesy”. It’s easier to create trust when they can see your face and hear your personality through your posts.

2/ Don’t post about multiple topics

Focus on only 1 topic for your entire account. It makes your account easier to follow, but also helps the algorithm know what you talk about so it can recommend your posts to others. This is true of most social networks. It’s much easier to say 1 thing over and over again in different ways, than try to talk about multiple topics. You can literally write 1 tweet about your main point and then ask Chat GPT for 50 different ways of saying it, and you’ve got the basis of 50 new tweets.

3/ Don’t make your bio complicated

Make your bio straight to the point about who you are and what you talk about (again, just 1 topic). This is the first thing people will see if they click your profile so you want to give them a clear reason to follow by demonstrating what value you give them. Make sure your banner and profile photo are high quality and look good on all devices.

4/ Don’t change your profile photo often

Your profile photo should be unique so that it stands out in people’s feeds and they will remember you. When you change it, don’t change it again for at least 6 months, but ideally longer. Otherwise you don’t give people a chance to get used to it and they will scroll past your posts.

5/ Don’t use every social network

I go against the advice of the popular social media influencers who suggest that you post on every platform 10 times a day. As a solo-business, you don’t have time for this, and unless your entire business is built around social media (for example if you’re a social media ghost writer, or you run a social-media course), you still have a lot of other things that you need to do during the day and you can’t dedicate your entire day to creating social media content. Instead, try them all and see where you get the most traction, then double-down on the ones that work. It’s very time consuming to do social media well, so focusing heavily on 1-2 platforms that work well is a more efficient use of time.

6/ Don’t come up with content from scratch

Instead of writing your posts from scratch, look at other content that has had a lot of likes or engagement and then copy the format. For Twitter and LinkedIn, you can copy the format of text and apply it to your industry. For visual channels like Instagram or TikTok, it can be a little more abstract, but you might find videos follow a certain template for example, where they might start with a question, then answer it, using specific cuts or filters etc. Ultimately you’re trying to avoid reinventing the wheel. 2 great tools for this are TweetHunter and Taplio that allow you to search for high quality tweets in your industry, or other industries and then use them as a starting point, where you can replicate the structure, but apply it to your own topic. This isn’t plagiarism, but instead just utilizing structures that hundreds of others are using.

Hope this was helpful?

I'm writing on this topic every week on Substack where I share 15 years of learnings in 3-min guides. Feel free to use those guides too if they're useful.