Sales is a science, not magic

Course content (16 lessons)

In this lesson, Loren shares some Shopify 'secret sauce' for getting sales. The core message of this lesson is: sales is not magic. It's a science that can be taught with process engineering. You'll learn how to optimize your approach in the video below.

[MUSIC PLAYING] I found that throughout my career, people are either afraid of or just don't understand sales and how it works. You either believe sales is something people are born with or you believe sales happens because of some unseen magic. Let me be as clear as I can, sales is not magic, sales is science. And more specifically, sales is process engineering.
Just like any good engineering process, there are ways to optimize your approach to sales for better outcomes. Before I get into that, I want to run through some sales truth. 58% of all companies miss their annual revenue targets. 61% of sales people don't hit their quotas. 81% of sales are closed after the fifth attempt. And 76% of sales people stopped trying after attempt number two.
The average tenure of a VP of sales is 16 months, but it takes 18 months for a sales team to adjust to that new VP. I share these to tell a story. Companies miss targets because they believe sales just fall out of the sky. They don't understand their numbers, don't have a strong data driven approach to sales, and their CEOs and founders rely too heavily on what their new VP of sales tell them, instead of asking the hard questions.
Once you have a sales team and arguably even before that, you have to get very serious about engineering your sales process or success. In any business, there are key metrics which can drive your sales success. But many people don't understand which ones are critical for managing sales every day. Let me explain. We have business results, sales objectives, and sales activities.
As a leader, you have to focus on what you can control, not the outcomes of your sales process. You have to ask the hard questions about where things stand. You have to keep people accountable to the process, because sales doesn't just happen, you build it. In order to do this, you need the right tools. You can't manage what you are not tracking.
So invest in the right systems to help you track the right information. At a minimum, you're going to need a good CRM or Customer Relationship Management system to track the activities that happen every day in your sales team. Excel isn't an option. At Shopify, our CRM is HubSpot. If you're a larger business, you're also going to have marketing automation tools, lead management tools, and a whole plethora of technology to support.
At Shopify, we use things like LinkedIn, data nice, HubSpot, and Salesforce, as well as many other tools to help support and understand how sales work at Shopify. Hiring salespeople is exciting, supporting them is important, and knowing you can engineer a great experience is your job as the founder or CEO of your business. You're the top salesperson.
Thank you for watching this lesson on hiring sales people that scale for your company. And good luck. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Sales is a science, not magic

Course content (16 lessons)

Module 1: Where do you find top talent?

01 |Module 2: Acing the interview process

02 |Module 3: Hiring a salesforce that helps you scale

03 |Module 4: Creating a culture where talent thrives