Shooting your shot in sales: No Matter Who You Are

Welcome back to Selling with Sabine. I’m Sabine Taylor, your host. I’ve spent years working in sales enablement, cybersecurity, and telecommunications, helping large sales organizations train B2C representatives to confidently sell complex products using real-world experience and practical storytelling. If you’d like to connect or explore sales training support, you can reach me at: [e-mail]

In this episode of Selling with Sabine, I break down the reality of “shooting your shot” in sales moving past the color of your race and into the grit of daily sales execution.

Transcript

Welcome, everyone. This is Sabine Taylor, and thank you for listening to Selling with Sabine. I’m the host. Today, I want to talk to you about shooting your shots.

What came to mind is a conversation I had with a friend many years ago. He was in the chicken business, and he felt that his prospective customers would not give him a chance because he was a Black man, and that they would be more likely to give a white woman with blue eyes and blonde hair a chance at selling. So he just thought that his customers would be racist toward him. And I understand that, but I kind of told him he needs to get over that. And anyone out there listening needs to get over that, because if you have a product or a service that can solve someone’s pain point—meaning you can help them save money, be more productive, or feel safe—whatever you’re offering, people will buy it, but you’ve got to shoot your shot.

And there is a quote that I want to read to you, and Michael Jordan used to say it all the time: “You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”

And with that said, I worked in a high-tech cybersecurity company, and I was responsible for training my employer’s partners’ workforce. And it was a lot for me to do by myself. Oftentimes, it was overwhelming. I felt like I had more work than hours in a day. And so I took every request to set up a meeting to learn about products from different vendors, and they came from all over the world. They came from India. They came from Switzerland. They came from America. They came from Italy, and they were all pitching me. And I took it because I wanted to learn.

And I can tell you they were shocked that I was a Black woman, and they weren’t expecting that. But they followed the sales steps, and they pitched me their product. They explained how it could help me resolve my pain point—meaning be more efficient. And I was like, okay, I’ll give you a chance. And so I onboarded them.

Another reason why I took the call is because I wanted them to teach me what my competitors were doing, what was making them so successful. And that’s something you have to keep in mind. As you talk to different customers, whether they sign up with you or not, you will start to learn about their pain points for your particular industry, and you might become a subject matter expert. So your customers may be attracted to the information that you have about their competitors, too. So you have something to offer.

Don’t just think that someone’s doing you a favor. You have a product. You have a service. And it has features that your engineering team, or you, designed to make your customer’s life easier. So, again, I want you to take every shot that you’re supposed to take. And what I mean by that: send those emails, call those customers, go knock on those doors if that’s what you have to do to talk to customers and to eventually get through those objections and finally close the sale.

So that is what I have for today. If you want to go back and review some of my previous episodes where I talk about doing a mindset reset, look at some recent podcasts that I released. With that said, I want to thank you for listening, and I hope you have a great day. See you next week.

And with that said, if you have any sales needs in terms of training for your staff, please keep in mind that I have trained over twenty thousand sales employees that focus on the business-to-consumer side. And I would love to have a conversation with you. You can reach me at [e-mail].

And I hope you have a great day. Bye.