The Salesman.com Podcast

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REPROGRAM your mind to be better at selling in 15 minutes

The Best Sales Strategy YOU MUST KNOW

The best sales strategy is to break your buyer’s journey down into its fundamental steps and then help prospects move across them. I recently explained this to a student inside Salesman.com Academy who owns a business that sells physical goods into the fortune 100 and it blew her mind. Before the consulting call where I ran through fundamental steps of her buyer’s journey, she was using a bunch of sales software tools, trying to implement fancy sales methodologies that she’d read online, and was constantly reinventing her sales process. It was a mess, she was burnt out and she wasn’t closing deals. After our consulting call, she got rid of everything and started from scratch. Within a week she’d build out her fundamental sales steps and instantly had clarity on what she needed to do each day to get deals over the line. Now when she put energy into her selling system, she got equal reward out of it. So, if you feel overwhelmed, have 6 sales cadences that don’t book meetings, and you’ve watched lots of sales videos, but nothing has changed for you… Then you need to take a step back and realise that your buyers only have to pass through 4 steps before they pay you: Step one – Find a person with a problem that you can solve. So, getting practical here, is feasible to find a couple of people today who have an issue that your problem solves? Yep, of course it is. Step two – Help that person see that your product is going to solve their problem. Now, outside of sales, have you ever helped someone change their mind about something? Yep, of course you have. That means that you can help your prospects agree with your perspective that your product can solve their problem. Step three – Help them calculate whether the cost of their problem is more than the cost of your solution. If you asked your prospects how much their problem was costing them each quarter, could you do then the math and see if they’d get a strong return on investment if they bought from you? Yep, of course you can. The maths is simple. Step four – Close the deal. If it looks like your prospects will get a positive ROI if they work with you, are you capable of asking the question “does it make sense to get started?” Yep, asking questions is easy. And that is it. You can run prospects through this sales process if you’re selling to one person. You can run the same process across multiple people and then bring everyone together at the end to ask the “does it make sense to get started” question in complex, multi stakeholder, B2B deals too. When you really remove all the AI generated emails, the weird manipulative selling tactics and the emotional baggage that you have about sales being gross and slimy… Selling really does become simple. Find someone with a problem, help them see that you can solve the problem, calculate the ROI, and ask if it makes sense to get started. That is it. Thinking about sales this way instantly eliminates the most common issues that sellers have: Struggling to book meetings? It’s because you’re either speaking to the wrong people or you don’t know who your buyers are and the pains they are have. Spending lots of time “nurturing” prospects? It’s because you are bad at influencing them to see your point of view. Your prospects jumping on the initial call and then ghosting you? It’s because you’re unable to demonstrate the return on investment of your product and so there’s no logical reason for them to stay in touch. Getting prospects right to the end of their buyer’s journey and then they never commit to getting started? It’s because you’re not asking for the business as you have baggage in your subconscious about being a slimy salesperson. Having trained thousands of salespeople and business owners over the past 10 years, the quickest way to make more sales is to always to simplify their sales process. The way I simplify the sales process when student’s join Salesman.com Academy is to create a new dashboard within their CRM that becomes their main focus throughout the day. I build out a “kanban” sales pipeline dashboard and I get them to put their leads in one of these categories: Prospect qualified > Meeting booked > Sales qualified > Agreed value > Agreed ROI > Closed won > Closed lost Then we turn sales into a game. The rules of the game are that they must: * Spend 80% of their day moving the prospects in each column to the next one. * Remove unqualified prospects from the game immediately. * Progress a predetermined number of prospects to the next stage each day by any means necessary. This turns an all over the place seller who never really has a clear grasp on what’s going on into a highly focused, elite sales operator overnight. Now, you’re probably thinking: * I’ve an 17x extra steps that must be included. * My buyer’s decision-making process is more complicated than that. * I’m special and I’ve my own way of doing things. c Well, you’re not all that special and the main problem with having a complex sales pipeline is that people get paralysed when they look at it. They’re never really sure who should be where, what the next steps are or how to implement those next steps. Complex sales pipelines become an overwhelming, emotionally frustrating, soul-destroying tool for instant demotivation. Now, do you want to be special but ineffective, constantly demotivated and broke? Probably not. The power of this simplified sales process is that all you have to do each day when you sit at your desk is move a couple of people over to the next step in the process. And because you’re now thinking about how to help individual people make that leap from one step of the process to the next, your efforts to move them become humanised. You stop spamming hundreds of people hoping to get lucky. You stop running the same boring discovery call process over and over again. You stop getting ghosted by potential customers who are starving for some human attention to their needs. So, lets take a look at why each of these steps exist and what needs to happen for a prospect to move from one step to the next. Fill up Prospect qualified To get started, you must create a qualification checklist that a potential prospect must meet. Then we find these people through LinkedIn and another secret process that we use in the Academy and add them into the system. It shouldn’t be possible to add more than a handful of prospects to this column each day. If you’re able to add 500 people in one go it’s because they’re not qualified and you’re planning on just spamming the shit out of them which isn’t going to work. Prospect qualified > Meeting booked Now it’s time to connect with each of these qualified prospects and attempt to book a meeting with them. Because the prospects in the “prospect qualified” column fit a very specific qualification checklist, once you crack the messaging to book these meetings you can repeat the same message over and over again. Meeting booked > Sales qualified In your meeting you’re going to further qualify the prospect. Do they have the budget, urgency and authority to get a deal done? Then they get moved to “sales qualified”. If not, then they’re moved to “closed lost” and you ghost them. Sales qualified > Agreed value If during your meeting the prospect agrees at a high level that your product could solve a painful problem they’re currently facing, then you move them to the “agreed value” column. If they don’t agree the value at a high level, then they stay in “sales qualified” and you create an action plan of how you plan to move them to “agreed value” column. This action plan must include a time to complete the action and a bulleted, step-by-step plan on how you’re going to influence their perspective. Agreed value > Agreed ROI Once the value is agreed either on the first call or after the action plan has been carried out, we must get verbal agreement that the prospect believes that there is a strong return on investment in working with us. Often this comes down to building a business case and then getting the prospect to agree that the ROI in the business case makes sense. Only when the prospect agrees that there is enough ROI to potentially work with us do we then move to nudging them into the final column. Agreed ROI > Closed won The final column is “closed won”. It’s not “quote sent” or “proposal delivered”. Quotes and proposals mean absolutely nothing and preparing them probably already takes up too much of your time. The goal is invoices paid; not how many e-signature documents can we have sat in our inbox uncompleted. And so, our daily routine becomes: * Add “X” qualified prospects to the pipeline, * Complete “Y” number of action plans that have already been allocated to everyone in the pipeline. * When an action plan is complete and the buyer moves to the next step of the pipeline, create the next action plan. * Avoid doing any task that isn’t those three things. I promise that if you commit to this simple system for just a couple of months, your sales performance will be unrecognisable. Do this for 12-months and you’ll have closed more deals than your even forecasted were possible.

How to Get Ahead of 99% of Salespeople

Most salespeople think their role is to complete a bunch of semi-random activities to “hopefully” get a deal over the line. [https://salesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Slide3-scaled.png] They set targets to complete a specific number of cold calls, business cases, sent proposals, discovery calls… And this is not how high performing salespeople operate. Having our focus spread across lots of non-connected activities each day leads to overwhelm. This is why salespeople only spend 30% of their time each week actually selling (Salesforce, State of Sales Report) and burn out faster than any pretty much any other career. [https://salesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Slide5-scaled.png]   I've trained over 2,500+ high performing sellers and the quickest way to improve sales performance for both teams and individuals is to get the sellers is to transform their list of random prospecting and closing activities into a defined, step-by-step sales process that they follow each day. [https://salesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Slide6-1-scaled.png] Each step of the sales process needs to have specific activities assigned to it. Each activity then moves the prospect to the next step of the process. Over and over until a deal is complete, or the prospect is qualified out.[https://salesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Slide7-1-scaled.png] This transforms sales performance because our brains love to follow processes as they have clear start and end points. For example: I feel hungry, I go to the fridge and grab a snack, I eat the snack, I no longer feel hungry, I then get a spike of dopamine to celebrate. I didn't get overwhelmed as to how to solve the problem. I didn't go onto LinkedIn to look for new strategies or motivation. [https://salesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Slide8-1-scaled.png] I started the process, finished it and then had the reward of a full belly and a dopamine hit that motivates me to do it again. STEP-BY-STEP SALES PROCESS All high performing salespeople and business owners running their own sales function follow a linear, step-by-step sales process. So, let me ask you, could you draw out your sales process? Could you tell me the exact activities that have to occur at each step to move the prospect further along to the point where they commit to working with you? Probably not. And that is OK. I'm going to explain how to build our your own step-by-step sales process in this video. But first, when I train sellers I often get the pushback that they've been given a sorta, kinda, half-assed sales process to follow in the past, but they haven't managed to stick with it. Well, it's easy to explain why. [https://salesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Slide10-scaled.png] The problem with traditional sales processes is that they're defined at a very high level, but they don't have enough detail to keep sellers on track day-to-day. As incredible as our brains are, they're terrible at managing activities that span over anything more than a couple of days. That cold call that you made 3 months ago that lead to the deal that you closed today are so far apart that our brains inherently can't connect them together. [https://salesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Slide12-scaled.png] So there is no dopamine spike and positive reinforcement for completing the steps that lead to the new customer. However, with a step-by-step sales process, with specific defined activities at each step we can help bridge the time gap in our brains between all of those boring activities that we all want to procrastinate on doing and the results that we get from them. This dramatically increases motivation to complete those activities because our brain can now see the full picture of the inputs that lead to the outputs that we desire. * More motivation = Sales activities get started * Simple, measurable activities = Sales activities get completed * Completed sales activities = More deals completed This is how you make selling simple and 2x-5x your revenue in weeks rather than years. BUILDING YOUR SALES PROCESS OK, that's enough theory. How do we build a step-by-step sales process that delivers results and gets followed every time? The first thing to emphasize is that your sales process doesn't have to be overly complicated. It does however need to have two things: [https://salesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/1-scaled.png] A series of linear steps that map out your typical buyers journey [https://salesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Slide14-scaled.png] The specific sales activities that are required to move the buyer from one step to the next. And that is it. No overwhelm. No scrambling around each morning wondering what the heck you should be doing. All we do is look at our sales funnel and start chipping away at the specific activities that are required to progress our prospects through their own buyers journey. When salespeople have a step-by-step process like this to follow all they have to worry about is ticking off activities and getting those spikes of dopamine. And in a world where 44% of salespeople give up after a single follow up (Invesp) it's obvious that without a step-by-step sales process, massive amounts of revenue are being left on the table every single day. There are a few additional benefits that come from following a structured sales process too. SALES PROCESS FEEDBACK LOOP The other benefit of having a defined system is that the end of the system can feed back into the beginning of the next iteration of the system. This feedback loop is the killer advantage that salespeople with a clear process have over all of their competitors. Whilst all their competitors are constantly trying to reinvent the wheel and suffering from the pressure of overwhelm, these smart sellers are constantly iterating on what is already working and making the process more efficient. The increase in performance that comes from refining a single sales process (rather than flailing around trying to create many of them) starts slow but with every iteration compounds their previous efforts and the results after 90 days start to skyrocket. The quickest, most practical way to implement this is to take a look at the buyers that came through your sales process over the past 90 days and identify the companies that generated the most revenue with the smallest effort. Then feed that back into the process to improve it: [https://salesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Slide17-scaled.png] Because salespeople are often left to their own devices, this incredibly valuable feedback is often never reverse engineered into the companies sales process. And for company founders who are running the sales process, well they have so many other activities that they're running around trying to sort out that this stuff just passes them by. The sales process feedback loop is typically the single process that turns barely profitable businesses into rapidly growing, money printing machines. Once you have a step-by-step sales process that works, you also unlock something that is incredibly valuable for your own sanity. PIPELINE ACCURACY Most sales pipeline forecasts are inaccurate. In my personal experience doing pipeline reviews at Salesman.com Academy, laughably inaccurate… For salespeople this is a problem. If your sales leadership don't trust your pipeline value calculations then they're going to be on your back. They're going to micromanage you. They're going to pile on the pressure and make your life a misery because there is a gap between the process and the outcome. I experienced this my entire career in medical device sales. I was renowned for being slightly behind my quota and then closing one or two large deals each year that got me over the line. If I'd have implemented and communicated a step-by-step sales process with my leadership they would have had visibility at the effort I was putting in and the progress I was making, and they'd have been comfortable enough to leave me alone. Instead, every year, constant pressure, meetings, calls and just general pestering from nervous sales leaders that was a complete waste of everyone's time. In fact 44% of sales leaders report difficulty in holding their sales teams accountable (SPOTIO State of Field Sales Report, 2024) and it's almost completely down to a lack of forecastability with their pipelines. Aside from getting your management off your back, an accurate sales pipeline forecast enables you to see where you should be spending your time each week too. Do you have deals that are stuck at the proposal side of the sales process? Then you can focus that week on getting them over the line. No enough leads coming in the top end of the funnel? Then start chipping away at the defined sales activities that fills the pipeline. This accuracy and visibility leads to the gamification of B2B sales. SALES IS A GAME Fundamentally sales is a game. All games have three elements: [https://salesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Slide21-scaled.png] * Inputs – You move the pieces on the chess board * Variable outcomes – Your moves are successful or fail * Feedback loops – You learn from your mistake and play a better game the next time around Games that are fun to play have clear rules and obvious levels of progression. The issue that most sellers face is that they're playing a game with unclear rules because the steps of the sales process and the activities within each step are completely undefined. It's no wonder that a recent poll found that 2/3 salespeople cite motivation as their biggest challenge (RainSalesTraining). I've been there in my medical device sales days too. Getting up, jumping in the shower, grabbing a coffee and then staring at my monitor for 45 minutes paralyzed by an overwhelming lack of focus of the exact task I should be doing in that moment. No wonder 70% of B2B sales rep missed their quota last year (B2B Benchmark Report, EBSTA, 2024). But, if you're willing to put in a small amount of work to build out your sales process, there is the potential for a better outcome. Sales becomes addictive when there are clear rules to follow and your brain is getting hit with the daily dopamine spikes that come from playing the game. Throw some wins in there too and dare I say it… sales kinda becomes fun. Of course, massively profitable for you, but also honestly, fun. And if you'd like to make both profitable and fun, click here and book a call with me [https://salesman.com/meeting/] and lets see if Salesman.com Academy is a good fit for your goals.

Learn This Sales Skill If You Want To Be Relevant In 10 Years

There is a sales skill that you probably aren’t very good at. And I’ve got data to back this up. The lack of this skill is a problem for you because in sales no cash exchanges hands until a person says “yes”. And people are all a little crazy… We all think that we're rational but we're not. And so, even when the right offer, at the right price is put in front of prospects, they still pass on it. Which is dumb but it’s the world that we live in. So what sales skill is required to help buyers make the right purchasing decisions? Well, that’s the skill of influence and it might be the most important and underrated sales skill in 2025. If you listen in for the next 10 minutes, I’m going to explain how I know you probably lack the skill of influence and how it’s the one skill that is becoming more and more important to sellers who want to find and close enough deals, to make enough cash to retire early. Now, my name is Will and I’m the founder of Salesman.com. At Salesman.com we have an assessment that nearly 40,000 sellers have completed. The SalesCode assessment asks 120 questions and then provides insights on the traits of high performance that the user has and is lacking: [https://salesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Slide2-scaled.png] Last week I pulled all the SalesCode data, formatted it in a new way that I haven't experimented with before and something became clear. The trait of “influence” was much lower than I expected in the sellers who have completed the assessment. It was so low in fact that I compared the data between 2025 and the first version of the assessment that we launched back in 2019 and the results were shocking. 87% of sellers who regularly exceeded sales quota scored high for influence back in 2019. Only 35% of sellers who regularly exceeded sales quota scored high for influence in 2025. So, has the social skill of ethically influencing buyers become less important over the past 6 years? I don't think so. Heck, in the Trust Crisis that we're currently selling into where everyone is more sceptical than ever, the ability to influence prospects and help them see the world from our perspective is more powerful than ever. So, what is going on here? I think from hiding behind email, attempting (and failing) to get deals done over social media and working from home has led a whole generation of sellers to deskill their ability to influence others. That is the current state of affairs. Buyers are more sceptical of sellers than ever before and sellers are worse then ever at influencing buyers. What does this mean for you? It means that if you can learn the skill of influence then you have a massive competitive advantage in the marketplace. Remember, influence is the ability to convince someone to believe something new or different to what they currently believe. If your prospects believed that: * Your product was the right product for them * It was going to solve all their issues * The price was less than the value delivered Then you wouldn't have a job. You could be instantly replaced by an online order form. But your job exists… So inherently there is a need for you to influence your buyers to change their views and adopt your perspective to get deals over the line. So lets now take a look at 3 ways that you can dramatically increase your ability to influence your prospects today. COMMITMENT Once a prospect agrees that in theory our product can help them, they’re much more likely to continue to agree this as we increase the scope of our point of view over time. Here’s why. Humans don’t like to change our minds. Back in our tribal days, if we made a decision that didn’t harm us (or better yet, benefited us), we weren’t going to question making that decision the next time around. We’d automatically do it again without critically thinking through it. This bias towards commitment is how our brains reduce their daily cognitive load. By choosing the path of least resistance, we conserve our energy so we can spend it more efficiently on new problems that we face. And believe it or not, the same principle applies to sales. If you can get your buyer to agree with you (even on small matters), then they’re much more likely to keep on agreeing with you throughout the rest of the buying process. MICRO-CLOSES: THE KEY TO COMMITMENT [https://salesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Slide6-scaled.png] The best way to leverage the influence technique of commitment is to use “micro-closes” throughout the sales process. Each time the buyer says yes to a micro-close, they positively reinforce the point of view that they’ve committed to. So the first step to using micro-closing when influencing buyers is to position something that they almost certainly believe in. For example, when I’m selling Salesman.com Academy to sales leadership I ask “is it fair to say that there’s room for improvement with the team?” The answer is undoubtedly “yes” and so once they agree to that slither of my point of view, I can continue influencing them to agree to the broader strokes that my training program is the correct decision for their business. SCARCITY We all want the stuff that is hard to get. That super attractive partner. That limited edition Rolex. Whatever it is. When it’s in high demand, it becomes more desirable. Like the other influence techniques, the appeal of scarce items goes back 10,000 years to innate biological and evolutionary desires that all humans are deeply wired with. Back then, the most scarce resources were food and shelter. If you acquired these resources you survived, otherwise you died. So, our brain values scarce resources as if our lives depend on them. The thing is though, in modern society, most of our basic needs are met. Our caveman brains are too stupid to realise this however. Our brains still put life or death levels of focus into acquiring the scarce resources found in modern society. That is why there is rampant desire for material objects, when it makes little sense to crave them. For example, you can’t eat or get a comfortable night’s sleep in a Hermes handbag or Ferrari yet we still crave them. The interesting thing is that we can engineer the same kind of lust for our products by increasing the levels of scarcity around them. [https://salesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Slide7-scaled.png] Think of it like this, for complex B2B product, typically buyers want to work with sellers who are oversubscribed. They want to meet with the best of the best. And they want to buy from people who have clients jam-packed in their pipeline. The example I always use is that if you find out you have cancer, you don’t want to visit the doctor with zero patients. No, you want to be checked over by the doctor who can just barely squeeze you in this week because he’s so damn successful. For sellers, the best way to appeal to this scarcity bias is by appropriately valuing your time. This takes some repositing on your end but you need to change your mindset. You are not a pesky salesperson trying to con and trick your way into a deal. You are a consultant. You are an expert. You are a deal-maker—so start acting like one!   High level, high self-esteem individuals should value their time. You need to communicate this with your prospects so you become a person they aspire to work with rather than the 47th seller that has sent them a crappy semi AI generated cold email begging for a meeting that morning. AUTHORITY Which then leads us onto the most powerful way to influence a prospect in 2025 and that is to have authority. Humans wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without social hierarchy. There have always been experts who knew more than others on a subject. And we have turned to them for advice, guidance, and reassurance. Authorities—are the individuals whose opinions hold more sway than everyone else, and who spur more action, too. For instance, if I got a call from Warren Buffet about changing my investment strategy, you’d better believe I’d listen. But if I received a call from a deadbeat friend who dropped out of high school and still lives with his dad, I’d be less likely to take his investing advice seriously. Authority matters. And if you appear more authoritative, you can influence your buyers. Building authority in the internet age is so easy that I really can’t understand why more sellers don’t lean into it. * Post content on LinkedIn or whatever your buyers hand out and have a strong, polarising opinion. * Brand yourself clearly as the person who solves “x problem” or “y people” using “x solution” and be bold about the specific people you help. * Create deep knowledge on your prospects problem so that when they do speak with you, they’re blown away by the fact that you can articulate their issues better than they can. The barrier to authority for salespeople is so low that doing those things over the course of a couple of months is more than enough to become known as a top expert in your field. You need to develop the skill of influence, but it is only one part of the puzzle here. There are a couple of other things you need to work on if you are to become a predictable quota crushing professional. [https://salesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Slide8-scaled.png] When you implement an effective sales process and you take on the mindset of a winner, then you know what to do and you've become the person capable of doing it. The only other skill you need is the ability to influence other people to take the action they need to leap from where they are right now, to where they want to be. Stack these three skills together and you instantly become unstoppable in sales.