You can have the best offer in the world, but if you’re a beginner and you can’t convey the value in that offer to your target market… it’s going to feel impossible to make sales.
But learning how to sell your offer, especially when it’s something your audience needs, doesn’t have to feel like a never-ending struggle.
With the right sales techniques, efficiently selling your offer, getting more “yes” and less “no”, and growing your business, even as a beginner, becomes significantly easier.
In this guide, we’re going to break down 7 killer sales techniques that are specifically designed for beginners so you can shake the nerves & anxiety and start closing more deals.
By the time you’re done reading, you’ll know exactly how to attract more of the RIGHT customers, confidently sell your offer, and consistently grow your business year over year.
It all starts with the first technique: knowing WHO you want to actually sell to.
#1 – Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile
If you’re not familiar with the term, an ideal customer profile (ICP) or ideal buyer profile lays out exactly who the perfect customer is for your business.
It helps you determine exactly who has the problems your offer, product, or service can solve, what would drive them to buy, what they look like, how they act, and helps you align with their desires.
When you know who it is you’re looking for, finding them becomes substantially easier to do.
And since you’ll already know that they’re potentially in the market for an offer like yours, selling them on the value in your offer gets easier to do, too.
Now, when it comes to actually building your ideal customer (or buyer) profile, there are a bunch of questions you’re going to need to be able to answer.
- What is their demographic? (age, location, educational background etc.)
- What job title does my ideal customer hold?
- Which industry are they in?
- What size company do they work for?
- What values, interests, and aspirations does my ideal customer have?
- How do they prefer to be communicated with?
- What motivates their purchasing decisions?
- How do they typically purchase products or services (online, offline, through referrals)?
- How much are they willing or able to spend?
- What is their typical purchasing process? (e.g., require multiple quotes, approval chains)
Finding the answers to those questions can take a bit of time but the effort you put into this first technique will pay off massively for you when you nail it.
To help make finding the answers to each of those questions even easier, here’s a few quick tips:
- Tip #1: Interview your audience! They’ll be a wealth of information for you as you’re building out your ideal customer profile. The best way to learn how they spend their money and time is by going straight to the source and getting feedback directly from them.
- Tip #2: Let it evolve! Start broad with your profile, then narrow it down over time. Begin with a wide perspective of who they are and gradually narrow down based on feedback you get, research you do, and data you collect. This iterative process helps refine your ICP over time.
- Tip #3: Think about your team! Sales isn’t the only team that interacts with customers. Your customer support, marketing, and product development teams can all help you by providing different perspectives on the customer profile.
- Tip #4: Break down the market! If you have multiple products or services, or if your product serves different market segments, you might need multiple ICPs. Creating an ICP for each segment of the market or offer you make will help dial in the messaging you use to attract the attention of your ICP.
Then, as you’re building and refining your ICP, remember this quote…
- “When you have a perfect vision of who your dream customer is, it becomes easy to find where they are congregating. On the contrary, if you don’t have perfect clarity on who that person is, it’s really hard to find them.” ~ Russell Brunson, in Traffic Secrets
#2 – Identify the Level of Awareness
Once you understand who your offer can help the most and how it can help them, the next sales technique you’ll want to use is identifying their level of awareness.
Every prospect that you encounter will be at a different stage in their understanding of their own needs, the solutions available, and your specific product or service.
So instead of bombarding an unaware prospect with product details, or a highly aware prospect with top-of-funnel marketing & messaging, you can provide the right information at the right time.
To help you understand this concept, we’ll break down each of the awareness levels: unaware, problem-aware, solution-aware, product-aware, and most aware.
Unaware
Unaware people in your market are exactly as the name implies: they’re not aware they even have a problem yet, let alone know anything about solutions that may exist to solve the problem.
In terms of market segment, these tend to be the largest group — which can make them the most challenging to actually market to.
In order to get their attention, you’re going to need to introduce that problem to them, using relatable stories or scenarios that they may already be experiencing.
Take a look at the example below:
This example focuses on raising awareness of a problem that exists — increasing conversion rates by improving the messaging on their website & hitting the right awareness level.
Problem-Aware
For problem-aware prospects, they may have realized that a problem exists but they’re still in the early stages of their journey toward fixing that problem.
Prospects in this stage tend to have questions — a lot of them.
Questions like…
- What is the problem, exactly?
- Why does it exist?
- Where did it come from?
- How is it affecting me?
- Do other people have the problem, too?
- How do I fix it?
This is typically the stage where prospects will start searching around on Google or YouTube for answers to each of those questions.
When you’re trying to get their attention, you want to introduce the types of solutions that are available to them without pushing your offer too aggressively.
Instead, focus on highlighting the benefits of addressing and solving the problem and what it can look like once the problem has been solved.
Solution-Aware
A solution-aware prospect knows that they have a problem and have started looking for answers.
While they’re in this stage, though, they’re still not aware that a product like yours exists to help solve the problem they’re facing.
The good news for you, though, is that they’re looking for ways to solve it — which means they’re warming up and getting closer to being ready to make a purchase.
At this stage, you want to present your product or service and lay out your unique value proposition.
Explaining what sets you apart from the competition will help your prospects realize how you can uniquely help them solve the problem they’re struggling with.
Check out the example below to see what this looks like in the wild:
Product-Aware
For prospects in the product-aware stage, exploring different solutions, including yours, and making a decision on which one to purchase becomes their focus.
This is the stage where you want to begin introducing how your product or service is the one they should be paying attention to and it’s where the work you’ve done to take them from completely unaware and through the different stages starts to pay off.
To get their attention in this stage, you’ll want to show the different features and benefits of your offer.
Make your offer shine in comparison to the competition and show your prospects how their problem is being solved with your offer, specifically.
In this stage, you can also introduce future pacing and show your prospects how their life will improve, how to use the features in your offer, and how effective, easy, and complete it is.
Most Aware
Prospects that are in the most aware stage of the buying process are fully aware of your product, the problems it solves, what life looks like in the future, and just need a small nudge to make a purchase.
People in this stage won’t respond to the same types of content as people in the previous stages.
In fact, using the content-first approach may not actually be the best approach with them, at all.
Instead, you might want to use incentives like discounts or bonuses to help get them off the fence and pull out their credit card to make a purchase.
Check out the example below:
How to Identify Their Level of Awareness
Before you can figure out which stage your prospects are at — and which messaging to use to get their attention — you’ll want to spend a bit of time identifying where your ideal customer may be right now.
- Listen for Clues: A prospect saying, “I’ve been researching solutions like yours,” suggests they’re at least solution-aware.
- Observe Their Behavior: For online businesses, the content they interact with (e.g., introductory blogs vs. product comparison pages) can reveal their awareness level.
- Review Past Interactions: If they’ve had previous conversations with your team or engaged with your content, these can provide insights into their stage of awareness.
When you’re able to properly identify which stage they’re in, the next sales technique revolves around figuring out what they’ll need to hear in order to consider buying YOUR offer instead of a competitor’s.
#3 – Understanding Their Pain Points
People are more inclined to move away from pain than they are into pleasure.
In order to effectively position your offer in the marketplace, you want to understand the pain points that you’re alleviating.
To build the trust and empathy you need in the sales process, you want to identify which pain points exist and then show that you understand what those feel like — and what life should feel like.
Take a look at this example to see what it looks like in action:
The email lays out the problems their prospects are experiencing, how those problems show up, what they feel like, and what the solution to each of those problems is.
To identify these pain points so you can use them in your messaging, follow these tips:
- Actively listen to your audience to see which frustrations they vocalize, how they experience those frustrations, and what they expect the solution to look like.
- Use open-ended questions to elicit better responses and get your prospects to answer with more than a simple “yes” or “no” answer. For example, asking “Can you describe the challenges you’re currently facing with writing sales copy?” will give you a better, more usable response than a question like “Are you struggling with writing sales copy?”
- Get feedback from your customer support team to help refine the offer you’re making, the messaging you’re using, and who you’re targeting inside of your market with that messaging.
Then, once you’ve identified these pain points, you can start to empathize with your audience using phrases like “I understand how that can be frustrating…”.
You can also position your solution as the fix to those problems.
To see what we mean, take a look at these ads from Grammarly:
In this example above, the ad speaks to students about writing assignments and papers.
In the example below, the ad connects with working professionals who are looking for a promotion.
The offer is exactly the same between each of the ads, but the positioning and messaging used resonates with different segments in their audience.
To make your ads as effective as possible, though, you want to make sure EVERY element is tailored to the segment of the audience you’re advertising to.
From the social proof to the benefit-driven bullet points, your CTA, and even your landing page, custom-tailoring the messaging specific to the segment you’re serving will dramatically increase your conversion rates.
And with that custom-tailored messaging comes the next thing you’ll need to be aware of: your customers don’t actually care about you — only themselves.
Which brings us to the next sales technique you can use as a beginner looking to drive more sales…
#4 – Don’t Think About Your Goals – Think About Your Customer’s Goals
If there’s one thing people in your audience will resist more than anything, it’s overt selling.
This happens when you’re putting your goals ahead of your customer’s goals.
By focusing on their needs, though, you’re able to collaborate with them to help them solve problems instead of just selling them something — which greatly reduces barriers and friction in the sales process.
Since humans have a natural inclination to return favors, genuinely helping them achieve their goals is a great way to get them to reciprocate that by purchasing, being loyal to your brand, or making referrals.
As a general rule of thumb, the more trust you build with your audience, the more sales you’ll make.
And there are a few ways you can build that trust in your sales process…
- Deep Dive Questioning: At the beginning of a sales conversation, ask deep, open-ended questions. Instead of “Are you looking for X product?”, try “What challenges are you currently facing, and how can we assist?”
- Avoid Premature Solutions: Hold off on suggesting products/services until you have a clear understanding of the customer’s goals. This ensures tailored recommendations that resonate with their needs.
- Share Stories: Narrate instances where you’ve helped similar customers achieve their goals. This not only showcases your success but also demonstrates your customer-centric approach.
For example, ClickFunnels showcases these on each individual landing page they send to the relevant segments in their audience:
In the example above, the landing page dives deep into a story about someone similar to the segment of their audience that they’re driving to the page.
The story resonates deeply with people in that segment, talking about the problems James overcame while building a B2B company, and what success looks like for him after.
In the example below, a similar message is being used with a different segment of the audience — focusing, instead, on people who are building a service-based business.
Now, inside each of these messages and landing pages is something incredibly subtle happening.
The messaging is focused on more collaborative language — like “Let’s find a solution together” and “I’m here to support your vision”. This helps position ClickFunnels as a partner rather than just another salesperson trying to sell something.
In your own messaging and meetings, you can tap into these subtleties by asking your customers to outline both their short-term and long-term goals related to your product or service.
Then you can tie everything that you “pitch” to them around both of those sets of goals.
Once you fully understand how to use your audience’s goals, wants, needs, desires, and greeds inside of your messaging and sales approach, the next step is automating as much of the sales process as you possibly can.
#5 – Create a Sales Funnel
If you’re not familiar with the term, a sales funnel is built to help automate the sales process and take your prospects through each stage of awareness — from unaware to most aware.
With a tool like ClickFunnels, it’s never been easier to do it, either.
For instance, when you have prospects that are in the awareness stage, you can create a landing page using one of the proven-to-convert templates inside the ClickFunnels library:
Then, you’re able to capture their email address and quickly send them newsletters and emails using our built-in drag-and-drop editor.
For prospects inside the decision-making stage, you can create sales pages, host webinars, and take payments directly through your funnel.
This all happens without you having to be a designer or developer, too.
With ClickFunnels, you can tap into 20+ different sales funnel templates, like the Squeeze Page Funnel that will help turn more of your visitors into subscribers and leads for your business.
Then, when you’re looking to offset your advertising costs or drive more frontend revenue, you can introduce a 2-Step Tripwire Funnel using one of our pre-built templates, so all you have to do is plug in your messaging and branding, then deploy the funnel to your audience.
Once you’ve refined your funnel flow, dialed in your messaging, and know exactly what converts, you can shift into using a Webinar Funnel that’s built to help you quickly scale your sales volume.
In our own business, we use a combination of each of these funnels to grab attention from our target market no matter what awareness stage they’re currently in.
One of the most critical aspects to consider, though, when you’re building your funnels, is that most prospects aren’t going to convert right away.
Which is where our next sales technique comes into focus.
#6 – Follow Up With Your Prospects
When you’ve worked so hard to get the attention of your target market, the last thing you want to do is let them slip through the cracks — and let their problems remain unsolved.
Or, worse, giving your competitors a chance to convert them into a sale.
In order to prevent either of those situations from happening, you want to make sure you’re following up with the prospects who didn’t buy the first time they interacted with your business — either directly on a sales call or by moving through your sales funnel.
Now, unless you enjoy following up with each and every one of the prospects you interact with, you’re going to want to automate this process, too.
With ClickFunnels, you can create Follow-Up Funnels that do the heavy lifting for you.
A follow-up sequence (and funnel) or workflow is a set of emails, ranging from 4 to 7, 12, even 15 or more, depending on the complexity of your offer, that helps convert more prospects into customers.
It can help you address objections, answer questions, provide more insight into features and benefits, and keep you top of mind while people are in the consideration stage of the sales process.
To give you an example of what a good follow-up sequence looks like, check this out:
The example above helps remind prospects what they’re going to get when they decide to become a ClickFunnels member (and click here to start their free trial).
Then, for anyone who doesn’t become a member after seeing that first email, two more emails are included in the series to introduce a bit of scarcity to the decision.
Introducing scarcity like this helps expedite the sales process since people have a fear of losing out on a potential deal when it’s put in front of them in the right way.
Later emails in the sequence shift into focusing on breaking down objections, answering questions, and diving deeper into each of the features prospects will get when they become a ClickFunnels member.
Finally, one more email is sent reminding prospects that the time is running out on the exclusive offer they’ve been given and what will happen when the timer reaches zero.
For your own follow-up funnel, spend time walking a mile in your prospect’s shoes.
Understand what would keep them from buying right away, what they may need to see in order to buy, objections they’ll have to your offer, questions they’ll need answers to, and different features that they can benefit from.
Then lay each of those out in an order that helps move them from the awareness stage in your funnel to making a decision and moving forward with your offer.
#7 – Use Affiliate Marketing
As you implement each of the sales techniques in this guide, you’re going to be on your way to moving from beginner to advanced marketer & sales strategist.
With that, comes one of THE most effective marketing and sales techniques you could ever use…
Affiliate marketing.
By recruiting other business owners who already have your ideal customer inside of their audience, you’re able to collaborate with them to drive more sales into your business.
And they’re more than happy to help — in exchange for a small piece of the pie.
Now, implementing this strategy is a bit more advanced than the first 6 techniques we’ve given you in this guide, but once you’ve implemented each of them you already have the foundations in place that you’ll need in order to make affiliate marketing work.
To implement this technique, you’ll want to first decide on the offers you want to let affiliates have access to and then determine which commission structure you’re going to give them.
At ClickFunnels, we offer 30% recurring commissions on our core offer — ClickFunnels.
Once you have that in place, you want to start marketing to affiliates by creating a landing page specifically for your affiliate program.
Then, you’ll need to accurately track sales they’ve made for your business to ensure you’re paying them out on a consistent basis — so they’ll continue promoting your offers for you.
The end result is a full team of salespeople who are actively promoting your business for you while you’ve automated the majority of your sales process using the techniques in this guide.
One thing you’ll notice, though, is that each of these techniques builds on the one before it.
Since advancing your sales skill is a process, it’s always best to start at the beginning: understanding your audience, what they want and need from you, and how to convey the value you deliver.
Then, as you become more advanced, you can begin to implement automations and efficiently sell more of your offer every day.
And if you want to get started the right way, click here to take a look at ClickFunnels, start your free 14-day trial, and experience how much easier we can make implementing each of these techniques.