How I Went from Sales Newbie to Sales Guru in 6 Months

If you're not a people person, becoming a master of sales could prove to be impossible. You have to love people and be able to relate to them. Sales training, of course, is crucial, but developing a thick skin for rejection remains of paramount importance. Why? Because you need to remain highly motivated.

Let me break it down for you.

Training

Corporate training today is rich with potential. You don't even have to work for a major corporation to have access to some really juicy material. Of course, you can buy a stack of books. That can help. But there are many online training courses that prove to be effective and convenient. Such e-learning can be done at your own schedule and pace, and you can pause to come back to where you left off. Some places will let you review the material as many times as you want.

Perhaps the most exciting option is to find a marketplace of corporate training where multiple vendors display their training materials. You get to pick and choose from a wide variety of styles and expertise.

Drills

Besides the "bookwork" of reading, you need to practice what you've learned. I found drilling the materials to be a potent help. Every salesperson can benefit from this, even the seasoned experts. Because of this, you should have no difficulty finding drilling partners. True, you have to "sell" them on the idea, but that's part of the drill.

Communication

One trick I learned was getting customer service training to break down any trepidation I had with things like the cold call. I spent a little over two weeks shadowing a customer service rep and then sold their supervisor on me giving it a try. I did pretty good—even made CSR quota.

Then I found online effective communication training courses to round out my delivery skills. Such communications courses made my phone presence that much more powerful and this automatically translated into better face-to-face results, too.

Stress

As I mentioned earlier, you have to stay motivated. Rejection can knock the wind out of your sails if you have a thin skin. But I found that ego is the real killer. If you take it all as "important" (ego selfishly so), then any failure is going to hit you like a bomb. That creates stress and that kills motivation. The stress management training I found online gave me all the tools I needed to hold stress at bay and allow me to remain at peak self-motivation.

So, there you have it. In 6 months, I was having sales associates come to me to find out how I was winning sales awards. You can do it, too.