In this Expert Insight Interview, Ian Koniak discusses sales and sales coaching. Ian Koniak is one of the world’s strongest B2B sales leads, a highly sought-after elite sales coach, and the founder of Ian Koniak Sales Coaching.
This Expert Insight Interview discusses:
- Strategies salespeople can employ to make their jobs more enjoyable
- Shifting from an inward to an outward focus to achieve your goals
- Genuine Curiosity and Care
Job Fulfillment
Many people default into the sales profession after graduating college and getting a degree in something else. So, many people end up in sales not by choice but by default, and sometimes it works out, but sometimes they get stuck with a not particularly fulfilling career. So, what can you do to turn this around and make your job enjoyable if you’re a salesperson and will be a salesperson for the foreseeable future?
Ian Koniak says you should stop focusing on hitting your quota, as counter-intuitive as it may sound. Once you start focusing on helping and serving your customers, your job fulfillment will grow exponentially.
Inward vs. Outward Focus
As soon as Ian stopped thinking about hitting the numbers, his performance improved. If your entire goal in sales is to hit your quota, instead of trying to help others solve problems or achieve goals, it will feel like a grind.
On the other hand, when you make it about who you’re helping, and dig deep to understand their situation and how the challenge or problem they have is impacting them or their customers and show them how they can solve this problem through the use of your service and product, you’ll feel a lot better. This, in turn, will help you drive much larger deals.
Genuine Curiosity and Care
Part of “getting out of your own head” in this sense is switching to being genuinely curious and wanting to understand more about who you’re dealing with, the issues they have, and so on. You must have genuine curiosity; otherwise, you’ll never even embark on the journey.
Being a great salesperson starts with caring. If your entire goal is to get a sale, you’re just going to do whatever you can to get that sale. There’s certainly a time and a place for that, especially when you know you’re helping the customer, but the best salespeople are those that genuinely care about their clients.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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