Sales Crash Course - B2B Sales Skills & Business Development

Build a strong sales foundation by mastering essential terms and defining inbound and outbound selling. Use the sales pipeline and customer relationship management tools, and understand sales roles and responsibilities.

Define essential sales terms like lead, discovery call, and lead qualification using the BANT framework, then map prospects, MQLs, SQLs, and the sales pipeline from contact to close.

Master essential sales terms such as closed deal (closed lead), upselling, cross selling, and target market with practical examples that show how each term drives revenue.

Learn inbound and outbound sales, how leads contact you versus you reaching out, and the key differences in volume, qualification, trust, and effort.

Identify and manage a sales pipeline with its stages: lead, qualification, meeting, proposal, and closed—using a CRM tool to move leads and close deals efficiently.

Discover how a customer relationship management tool streamlines a sales pipeline, automates outreach, tracks activity, stores assets, and integrates calendar for efficient business development.

Sales development representatives prospect and qualify leads in the pre-sales process, initiating outreach. Account executives close sales and manage demonstrations, while account managers ensure post-sale success and identify upsell opportunities.

Identify your position in the industry, learn about competitors, and use a product comparison matrix to benchmark against them and strengthen your sales calls with a clear base technology edge.

Define your industry and competitors. Learn how to find your main competitors using online sources and listing sites like G2, Clutch, Capterra, and Product Hunt, and grasp why this knowledge strengthens your sales.

Compare your products with competitors using a product comparison matrix to identify strengths and weaknesses and evaluate feature coverage.

Identify the base technology of your product, from fabric to programming language, and understand why this base empowers sales teams to inform buyers and assess competitive advantages.

Master your product and company by seeing them through the customer’s eyes, recognizing that actual use may differ from intended use, and using documents and resources to deepen understanding.

Learn a three-step technique to understand any product: use the product, use it critically, and break it to test durability and usefulness.

Discover how reviewing the product's supporting documents—how-to guides, terms of use, feature lists, and pricing plans—boosts credibility and equips you to answer buyer questions in business-to-business sales.

Explore the gap between intended and actual product use and its sales impact. Discover how actual use insights boost value, sharpen pitches, and drive innovation.

Identify the product expert and top seller, extract key insights through questions and demonstrations, learn customer segments and pains, apply company values in sales, and expand your internal network.

Apply your sales knowledge with mock demonstrations to refine your pitch and flow, avoid information overload, keep your pipeline healthy, and discover shadowing benefits and downloadable resources.

Understand mock demonstrations and their purpose, practice with peers to perfect the demo flow, and demonstrate value to the prospect in in-person or remote settings.

Master the flow of your demonstration with mock demonstrations, planning, and a 30-minute structure that balances opening, needs discovery, product demo, feedback, and closing, staying adaptable and avoiding information overload.

Perform a retrospective after each call to perfect the flow of your demonstration by analyzing research, problem understanding, personalization, value communication, and decision-maker handling, then practice with recordings.

Learn to avoid information overload by applying the problem solution method, the 20% approach, the tangent approach, and the make-or-break approach, and by listening to prospects to avoid harming credibility.

Keep your sales pipeline healthy by engaging leads across multiple channels, removing bottlenecks, and prioritizing high-probability prospects. Master two stages—outreach and demonstrations—and apply assumptive selling to move deals forward.

Learn to handle challenging sales situations, such as unanswered product questions or covering a colleague on a call, by practicing with your sales, product, and industry knowledge.

Shadow real sales calls as a silent observer to learn techniques, build trust, reduce anxiety, and avoid mistakes, with guidance on who to shadow and three to nine calls.

Explore transferable sales skills that apply across industries. Learn problem solving, verbal and written communication, negotiation, relationship building, and quick pre-meeting research.

Learn a systematic problem solving approach: identify and understand the problem, analyze alternatives, select the best option, and evaluate results, with a focus on real business problems.

Master verbal communication by shaping voice, tone, and language, balancing delivery, preparing, and listening for active feedback. Understand its powerful yet risky role in negotiations and sales.

Master written communication for B2B sales by crafting messages on a single topic, tailoring style to the recipient, using clickbait in subject lines, and thoroughly rereading before sending.

Learn negotiation as a process of transferring decision pressure and building trust, using mirroring, summarizing, losing the toss, and value creation to win deals.

Build relationships to drive customer lifetime value, cross selling, network growth, and referrals by focusing on customers' real problems, a strong product, and a three-step problem-solution-result proof.

Research leads before meetings by checking Google News, reviewing LinkedIn profiles to identify decision makers, and studying the site and blogs for industry context, clients, and size.

Discover problem solving as a skill developed through a systematic approach; master verbal communication, negotiation techniques like mirroring and creating value for everyone, and research before meetings to build relationships.

Explore how ai tools boost sales efficiency; generate personal scripts, personalize emails, analyze data, and automate tasks with ChatGPT or Google Bard, while avoiding sharing personal, proprietary, or confidential information.

Learn to configure ChatGPT for better results by enabling its opinions, disabling chat history and training, and using one chat per topic, using custom instructions and data controls.

Apply prompt engineering in sales with ChatGPT by using context, action, and optimization to craft an outline and include metrics customer acquisition cost to customer lifetime value, retention, and churn.

Create engaging sales scripts with ChatGPT for phone insurance pitches by defining context, role, and benefits; customize scripts to handle objections in cold calls.

Generate cold emails with ChatGPT at three levels—from quick templates to highly personalized outreach—highlighting a SaaS solution for managing multiple social media accounts.

Develop a sales mindset by projecting positivity and charisma, staying resilient after rejections, and analyzing target businesses to build B2B business acumen and confidence for persuasion and negotiation.

Embrace new sales experiences, experiment with tools and techniques, and persistently develop a mindset that solves problems, delivers benefits and experiences, and never gives up on quotas.

Stay calm under pressure, refine your selling style through experience, and over deliver value; focus on leads with high chances of conversion, practice sales calls, and use accurate information.