Guerrilla Sales Development

Great ideas are all around you. Steal them and make them your own.

Steal Ideas from Sales Letters and Emails

Don’t throw away the sales letters or delete the sales emails that are delivered to your inbox. Read every one of them before you hit the delete key or toss them in the garbage. When you find great sales language in a letter or an email, write it down and modify to fit your needs.

Steal Language from Other People’s Sales Call

When you go on a sales call with another sales person (or your sales manager), listen to the words they use and the ideas they share. While you are taking notes, shamelessly steal any good language they use so you can add it to your repertoire.

When a salesperson calls on you, notice what they do that works for you and what doesn’t work. Ask yourself why whatever they’re doing is effective or ineffective. Then apply that thinking to your own sales game, looking for some small, valuable way you might improve by copping what was effective.

Read with the Intention of Appropriating Ideas

You have countless opportunities to read. There are great business books and magazine everywhere. And the Internet is a fire hose of ideas, including some excellent ideas ready-made for your appropriation.

Most of the time when we read, we think an idea is good, we nod in agreement, and we browse on. Instead read with the intention of finding a good idea that you can use in your sales practice. Appropriate that idea by writing it down, along with how and when you intend to use it. (I keep an Evernote notebook of ideas worth stealing and implementing).

You are literally surrounded by great ideas. They come into your life daily. But most of the time you fail to take notice or ignore these ideas. Capture the great ideas that you come across and use them to develop your own sales game. In sales, things are either effective or ineffective (not right or wrong). Take what works.