002: Leveraging Non-Sales Selling to Land a Sales Role
[SS Podcast] 002 - Leveraging Non-Sales Selling to Land a Sales Role
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[00:00:00] Intro
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Mike Bird: Hello, and welcome to Sales Seekers. I'm Mike Bird. And in today's episode, I'm going to talk about what non-sales selling is and how it can help you land a job in B2B tech sales. In last week's episode. I talked a little bit about how non-sales selling, as a set of skills and activities, help me break into B2B tech sales. And I'll dive more into that now.
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[00:00:43] How I used non-sales selling experiences to get into sales
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Mike Bird: Okay, here we go. So I talked a bit about this, like I said, and this was something that I needed to rely on to really break into this space. Before I became formally a tech sales person, I was doing some things that could be considered non-sales selling such as speaking with employers who wanted to potentially hire the students at the school that I was working at. Hire them as interns. Hire them as entry level employees. So I was building relationships and moving employers toward an outcome that I and my organization wanted.
I was also- in a life before that- recruiting student-athletes to go into a junior college football program. And had I not done these kinds of non-sales selling activities, I probably wouldn't have had such a strong belief in my ability to go into sales. And I also would have had to rely on just my experience in closing new business within my coaching side hustle, at the time when I made my career transition, as being the only real evidence of an actual sales experience where money is being transacted.
[00:01:55] What is non-sales selling?
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Mike Bird: So I'm a big fan of this concept of non-sales selling because it's something that shows up in pretty much anybody's day-to-day life, if you think about the modern world and how people are working.
What is this? You might be asking. And I'll refer liberally to a book that came out in 2012 by author Daniel Pink. The book is called _To Sell Is Human_. And some really interesting findings came out of ink's work at the time. He ran a survey using Qualtrics, which was a much earlier stage qualitative HR research company at the time. Many of us in tech have heard of Qualtrics now, but at the time it was just getting started.
He ran a survey of a mostly American audience, surveyed about 9,000 people and came up with some interesting findings there. At the time, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics was publishing data that indicated that about one in nine Americans, 15 million people at that time were working professionally in a sales capacity. They were responsible for carrying out transactions within their organization.
But what was interesting that Daniel Pink and his research uncovered is that although 1 in 9 workers might've been professional salespeople, the other eight in nine workers whom he referred to as this broad, "we" are quote, "persuading, convincing and influencing others to give up something that other people have in exchange for what we have."
And so this whole concept of everyone being in sales to some extent was really the main hypothesis of _To Sell Is Human_. And he unpacks this more, definitely recommend the read. It's a good, not too dense read. It's probably, I mean, this data's a little bit out of date since it is now 12 years old. But I do think that the general principles behind this logic and thinking are still true today.
Pink's research uncovered a few more things in terms of how people who may not be salespeople use their time at work. So he ended up asking questions that tried to uncover what do people actually do during their work days? Two major findings from those questions emerged.
One is that the average worker spends anywhere from 15% up to 80%, and on average 41%, of their work day engaged in some form of non-sales selling. Which could be teaching, coaching, instructing other people, serving clients, leading teams. The data also showed that the older you are, the more time you spend doing non-sales selling. And my hypothesis there is that that's likely due to the fact that older people are more likely to be in leadership positions. And therefore are spending more of their time moving others to carry out work on behalf of them and their organization versus doing the work directly in a hands-on manner. Another major finding of the survey was that people who do these non-sales selling activities deemed these activities to be highly important parts of their average work day and some of the most valuable usage of their time.
So their own individual success in whatever role that they had, whether it was as a sales person or not, really relied heavily on how well they could move other people in these non-sales selling activities.
[00:05:30] Leveraging non-sales selling as a sales job seeker
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Mike Bird: So the point of all this is that virtually all of us have a sales skillset somewhere in our work somewhere in our day-to-day lives. And it becomes a question of how can you leverage your non-sales selling skills and turn them into something that you can market that allows you to get into sales more formally.
If you want to actually break into sales, you need to demonstrate that you can actually convince people to do something. And in sales, that's usually giving money to an organization in exchange for a product or service. How can you take the moments where you are doing this, maybe where money is not involved, and start to paint a story of you being a good candidate for an organization that is looking to hire a salesperson.
So what I suggest in terms of an actionable step for folks who are trying to break into sales. Or maybe they are going even from an entry-level sales position, like an SDR (Sales Development Rep) role, and they are trying to build out their portfolio of experiences that demonstrate how they can sell potentially as an Account Executive or as an Account Manager or someone who is usually a little further up in the sales, food chain and better compensated and things like that. They're more responsible for actually capturing revenue within the business. Especially though, if you're trying to break into sales and you've never held a sales role previously in your life. It's great to start to observe where you are in your current day, actually doing some non-sales selling activities.
So you can, for example, take out a notepad and jot down the instances where you are trying to convince or persuade people to do something during your work day. If you are a teacher that may be leading students through a curriculum. If you are in the medical world, it's convincing maybe a patient to follow some form of treatment. If you are someone who is on the front line of a non-profit organization and you are trying to bring people into your mission, support you in some way, that is a non-sales selling activity for sure. So any kind of evidence like that, that has you moving people can be going down into your note pad.
It could be big. It could be small. It could be something you do frequently. You might do it less frequently. It all counts. It could be toward your boss if you're trying to motivate or manage up within your organization. If you're a sales person, that's a lot like selling to an executive-level stakeholder. Or you might be really experienced at doing some non-sales selling to a broader set of your teammates, your colleagues in your workplace, which is akin to selling to a larger buying committee.
Again, another situation that comes up very frequently when you are in complex B2B sales, especially as an Account Executive or an Account Manager. Being able to get a buying committee on board with a direction that points to them purchasing whatever you're offering. That is a huge core skill of a salesperson in B2B tech sales.
And so anytime you may be moving teams of people around an idea, a project, something like that. That's a great thing to be putting into a log like this. You repeat this for a few days, even a week, you're going to start to capture some great examples. You might start to look back into past examples that you could pull from previous work experiences other than what you're doing today.
As you start to pull these kinds of activities down into a log. See if you can quantify as well what it is you're doing as a non-cell selling activity. For example, if you're in customer support, you could write down how many customers you may have served in a given day. How many folks did you convince to take your advice to resolve some kind of an issue that they were facing?
What was the impact? Another important thing to document. What was the impact of the work that you did as a non-sales seller? And the result that you created for the person that you were working with in that situation. As you begin to capture these examples, start to think about the stories you can tell and the numbers that are helping to describe the amount of non-sales selling that you do. For me as an example, I sometimes have talked about the fact that I helped place about a thousand students in IT careers, either as interns or as entry level employees when I was working as a placement advisor for an IT college.
I didn't manually place all 1000 students, myself personally. But I was part of a team, and at one point I actually led the team that was doing this placement work, I was putting in some systems that helped for this to actually happen at a larger scale, more than just at my level. But I also did personally help place hundreds and hundreds of folks. And that's a great example of a quantified non-sales selling activity that I occasionally bring into conversations when people are trying to understand my sales background.
I remember being asked, when I interviewed for that job as a placement advisor, being asked how many people I had coached within my side hustle, my career coaching business that I had at the time. My future employers were trying to get a sense as to, okay, how many people have you actually helped land a career through your work, through your coaching? And my number wasn't very high at the time, I'll admit, but it was higher than zero. It was still an experience that I could lean on, in an interview setting to actually paint the picture of some competence that I could bring into the role that they were hiring for.
So these examples that you are going to start to harvest by doing this work become the backbone of your personal marketing efforts when you're a sales job seeker. Can be used on your resume, cover letter, in interviews, on your LinkedIn profile. These are the things that you can start to rehearse and really become comfortable with when people ask you, "yeah why, why should I hire you?" Demonstrating the history of what you've done in a non-sales selling capacity is one of the components of a good answer. And we can get into more as to what makes up a great set of interview responses to questions like that.
But for starters, having an inventory of stories based off of your experiences to date in a non-sales selling role is a great place to begin if you are trying to make this transition. And you feel like maybe you don't have a lot of things to hang your hat on.
Again, we all have this in us. It's just a matter of becoming more aware of these experiences and beginning to craft stories that sell you to prospective employers.
[00:12:12] Recap
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Mike Bird: Let's recap this quickly. I just covered off the fact that I used non-sales selling as a set of experiences that allowed me to market myself to my current B2B tech sales employer back when I was making this career transition. So I believe from firsthand experience that it can help most people make these kinds of transitions.
We talked about what non-sales selling actually is based off of Daniel Pink's book _To Sell Is Human_. I can link to the book in the show notes so you can check it out again, really straightforward, easy read.
Talked a bit about how you can start to use a journaling exercise to become more aware of the non-sales selling activity that you are doing currently in a role you may have today or in roles that you may have held once upon a time.
And then using those logged stories and examples as the beginning for marketing content for yourself, as you start to make a transition into sales. Having content that you might share on documents like your resume, your LinkedIn profile, things that you might start to share when you're meeting people in a networking setting or talking to people in an interview for an actual sales job in a B2B tech environment.
So all of those things really, really quickly are things that we all have according to Daniel Pink and the research that he did, right? We're either in the 1 of 9 folks who are formally employed in sales. Or we're in the 8 out of 9 folks who are doing some form of non-sales selling in the days and the work that we do outside of a formal sales role.
[00:13:50] Share your non-sales selling stories!
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Mike Bird: Would love to hear from folks who are listening to this, what is coming up for them in terms of experiences they have as non-sales sellers. Feel free to send me an email if you want to share what's coming up for you. Mike@salesseekers.ca that's sales with an "s" seekers, all one word .ca.
It would be great to hear from folks listening to this show. And if you are open to me sharing some of your stories, I can publish those as well for the broader community in the bi-weekly newsletter.
So again, thank you so much for tuning in, this was episode number two. More content like this to come as well as interviews with people who have broken into tech sales, who have worked in tech sales, who have hired people into tech sales roles. Coaches as well.
If you like the show, I encourage you to subscribe, share it with someone who might also find it valuable. And I look forward to catching you again in a couple of weeks. Bye for now.
