How to Actually Be Good at Sales
Adebayo Adebisi21 June 202619 min readWhether you sell well has almost nothing to do with who you are, and everything to do with the process you follow.
Why great founders are bad at sales
Most founders are brilliant at what they do and bad at selling it. If that's you, it's completely normal, and it's not a flaw in you. Selling is just a skill you're yet to master. For example, you can be a great coach or consultant, but a fake guru with a fraction of your knowledge who knows how to sell will sign more clients than you. Even a brilliant dentist can be the best clinician in town and still have a failing practice if they struggle to get people through the door and can't maximise their selling potential.
You got into this to do the work, the coaching, the consulting, the service you deliver. The business only grows as fast as you can sell, and most founders quietly dread it, so they avoid it, wing the calls, and undercharge because they're scared to lose the client. Revenue becomes a rollercoaster: a good month, then two quiet ones, feast then famine, with no idea why.
Businesses rarely die because the work or product was bad. They die because not enough people bought them. The most-cited reasons companies fail are some version of no market need and running out of cash (CB Insights), both, underneath, a selling problem. You can be the best in your field and still go under because you never learned to sell.
A quick word on why this is worth taking from me. I learned sales the hard way, many years of it at the corporate level inside million and billion-pound companies across sectors like tech, medicine, biotech, pharmaceuticals and life sciences, and I've personally closed over £45 million in deals. Since then I've trained close to 220 salespeople, whole teams, where the job was getting them to hit and beat their targets. And I've helped founders build profitable businesses: 35 of the people I've worked with have gone on to do more than £61 million between them, with over 350 businesses now running on my frameworks. Not to impress you, but so you know what follows isn't theory. It's what I actually did, and what I've watched work for people who aren't me.
The good news: you don't need talent to be good at sales. Sales skills can be built. By the end of this you'll have the actual system, how to find the right people, run the conversation, handle the price, ask for the sale, and follow up, so revenue stops being something that happens to you. There's nothing wrong with being brilliant at what you do, you have to be. But to grow, you have to be good at selling it as well, or at creating a sales team capable of selling it.
Sales is a system, not a personality
The myth that makes most founders decide sales isn't for them: the belief that you have to be a natural, smooth talker with lots of charm. It's wrong, and the research backs it.
- Adam Grant (Wharton) studied 340 salespeople and found the link between extroversion and sales is not a straight line (Psychological Science, 2013). The natural talkers actually sold less, because they talked too much and listened too little. The top performers were ambiverts, the ones in the middle: comfortable talking, but better at listening because they knew when to listen.
- The honest caveat: a few traits do give a small edge, but not the ones you'd guess. Decades of research (Vinchur meta-analysis, 1998) show conscientiousness and drive help, being organised, diligent, doing what you said, following up. That's not charisma. It's discipline, and discipline is a choice.
Whether you sell well has almost nothing to do with who you are, and almost everything to do with whether you follow a process, with discipline. Selling is a sequence of steps, run in the same order every time, each one learnable and practisable. That's why sales is a system.
The people who are good at it weren't born that way, they're running that same repeatable process, often without realising it. You're going to learn it deliberately, which turns out to be the advantage: when you know the exact steps, you can repeat what works, fix what doesn't, and teach it to anyone you bring on.
Selling is helping, not pushing
Sales has a bad rep, the annoying telemarketer, the pushy car salesman. So for most founders selling feels icky, like they're pushing someone into something or taking advantage. That feeling is a mental block, and it's what stops them ever getting good at it.
Reframe it, because this is how good selling actually works: if you believe your offer helps people, then not selling it is the disservice. Someone in front of you has a problem you can solve. If they walk away because you were too uncomfortable to make your case, they stay stuck, and you've helped no one. Selling well just means making sure the people you can genuinely help don't leave without it.
And the skill is one you already have: diagnosis. You can't solve any problem without first working out what's actually causing it. A good consultant doesn't prescribe before understanding the problem; a good coach doesn't hand over a plan in the first five minutes. They ask, dig, understand, then recommend. A sales conversation is the same, you understand the problem properly, then help them decide whether what you do is the right answer. If selling makes you cringe, that's a good sign: you're not the pushy type, and you don't need to become one.
Consultative selling
The approach above, helping first, diagnosing before you sell, has a name: consultative selling, coined by Mack Hanan in 1970. For high-ticket services like coaching and consulting, it's the approach that closes the most deals. A high-ticket sale is a considered decision built on trust, nobody gets pressured into a big purchase, and the moment you push, you confirm every fear they had about being sold to.
The proof: Neil Rackham analysed around 35,000 sales calls (the research behind SPIN Selling) and found that in high-value sales, the classic closing tricks made sellers less likely to win. What won was diagnosing the problem before proposing a solution, and the bigger the deal, the more it held.
You sell like a consultant: diagnose, then prescribe.
Sell to the right people
The system starts before any conversation, with who you choose to sell to. When money's tight, the instinct is to sell to anyone who'll pay. It's a trap, because the wrong client costs you more than they ever pay. They haggle hardest, they're the toughest to deliver for, they drain you, they're the quickest to refund, and when they're unhappy they tell people. You take the money and still end up worse off.
I made this mistake myself, I once built an audience in a market that, by definition, couldn't pay what the work was worth. Good service, wrong people. It doesn't matter how good you are if you're selling to people who can't or won't pay.
Get comfortable disqualifying:
- Sandler's "go for the no": a fast no beats a slow maybe, because the slow maybe wastes the thing you can't get back, your time.
- Qualify with BANT (originated at IBM), four things to check before chasing anyone:
- Budget, can they actually afford what you charge?
- Authority, are you talking to the person who can say yes, or will it go to someone else?
- Need, do they have the real problem you solve, or just a vague interest?
- Timeline, are they ready to act, or just browsing? With no urgency they sit in your pipeline forever.
If any one of these doesn't apply, it isn't a sale to chase, let it go and keep your time for the right people.
The clearest sign you're selling to the wrong people is if you're always busy and broke at the same time. You cannot and should not try to help everyone.
Pipeline is a numbers game
Once you know who you're selling to, the next thing that matters is how many of them you have in play at once. That's your pipeline: all the potential deals in motion right now, every prospect who could still become a client, and its state is what drives your revenue. Most founders sell stop-start: panic-hustle when it's slow, then go quiet while delivering, then panic again. Revenue is a lagging indicator, a quiet month today is the prospecting you didn't do a few weeks back.
Jeb Blount (Fanatical Prospecting) puts it plainly:
- The #1 reason for sales failure is an empty pipeline, and the #1 reason for an empty pipeline is that you stopped filling it.
- The 30-Day Rule: the prospecting you do in any 30-day window pays off for the next 90 days. Stop, and the cost hits a quarter later, when it's too late to fix fast.
- The Law of Need: the more you need a particular deal, the less likely you are to get it. Desperation makes you discount and chase, and people feel it. A full pipeline gives you the calm to sell well, and makes you far less likely to take on the wrong clients out of need.
Work backwards from your income goal. The maths is simple:
Say you want £200,000 a year and your average client is worth £5,000:
- £200,000 ÷ £5,000 = 40 clients a year (3 to 4 a month)
- How many conversations that takes depends on your close rate, which swings from ~15% to ~75% depending on how well-qualified your prospects are:
- At 15%: ~270 conversations a year (~5 a week)
- At 75%: ~54 a year (~1 a week)
- Same goal, 5x the work, and the difference is how well you qualified.
So keep your pipeline full of well-qualified prospects, and pad it, roughly 3x the clients you need. Not every conversation closes and some go quiet, so carry more than the bare maths suggests and keep the activity consistent every week.
The shape of a sale
A sale is rarely a single moment where someone decides to buy. It plays out as a sequence of stages, and it's easy to lose deals by skipping one or rushing through it. Every deal moves through the same handful:
- A first conversation, is it even a fit?
- Discovery, understand the problem properly.
- Recommendation and price, show how you solve their problem and what it's worth.
- Objections, what's really holding them back.
- The close, you ask for the sale.
- Follow-up, where most deals that don't close on the spot are won or lost.
One call or several? It depends on the deal. A smaller or simpler sale can run through every stage in a single conversation; a bigger, considered purchase stretches across several over weeks. The number of calls isn't the point, the order is. You discover before you recommend, and handle the real objection before you ask. Follow-up lives outside the calls, in between and after them.
Knowing the stages does two things. It tells you where every deal is right now, so none go quiet and get forgotten. And it tells you your one job in this moment, instead of trying to do all of it at once, you don't pitch in discovery, you don't close before you've handled the real objection and shown your service or product.
Then turn those stages into your own sales script. Not a rigid script you read out word for word like a telemarketer, that's the fastest way to sound fake. A fluid one: the same backbone every time (the same key questions, the same way you frame the price and ask), but delivered like a real conversation, adapted to the person in front of you. Structure you never have to improvise, with the freedom to respond to what they actually say. That's what every strong salesperson has, they know the framework cold, so they're free to actually listen.
Diagnose before you prescribe
The most common mistake in any sales conversation: pitching too early. You hear a problem you can solve and launch into "here's what I do, here's the package", and you lose the sale, because they don't yet believe you understand them. Sales is emotionally charged, so understanding someone means tuning into how they feel, not just the facts of the problem. A doctor who prescribes before examining you is one you would never trust, selling works the same way.
So at this stage you ask, and keep asking, until you understand the problem better than they do. Use SPIN (Rackham), four question types in order:
- Situation, understand where they are now (use sparingly)
- Problem, surface what's actually wrong
- Implication, explore what the problem is costing them (the step most people skip)
- Need-payoff, get them to say what solving it would be worth
By the end, they've talked themselves into needing a solution, before you've pitched. Sandler's Pain Funnel fits here too: move from surface symptom to root problem to real cost (Tell me more… How long has it been going on… What have you tried… What happens if it doesn't change?). Done well it doesn't feel like an interrogation, it feels like someone finally helping them see the shape of their own problem.
Talk less, listen more
Most founders think selling is talking, persuading, explaining. In reality, the person listening controls the conversation, because they're the one learning what matters. The data from Gong (which analyses recorded sales calls) is striking:
- Top performers talk ~46% of the time and listen ~54%. The average rep talks 68%. The people who win talk less than half the time.
- Across 67,000+ demos, not one deal that closed had the seller talking in an unbroken stretch longer than about 76 seconds. Monologue past a minute and you start to lose them, attention spans are short.
You can learn to pitch better, but you also have to know when to stop talking. Ask your question, then stop. Let the silence sit; it's where they tell you the truth. Talk less and two things happen: you learn what they need and they feel heard, which is most of what people are actually buying.
Price on value, not time
The part that pays for everything. Most founders price on time, a day rate, an hourly rate. It feels fair, and it's a trap:
- It caps your income at the hours you can physically work.
- It punishes you for being good, the faster you get, the less you earn for the same result.
Price on value instead, charge for the result, not the hours. Save a client £100,000 and the price isn't your three days' work; it's a fraction of the £100,000. A rough rule: charge 10 to 20% of the value you create, a £15,000 fee on £100,000 saved is easy to justify, and still pays you properly. Ron Baker (Implementing Value Pricing) calls hourly billing outdated for exactly this reason: it ties income to effort instead of worth.
Alex Hormozi's Value Equation is the cleanest way to think about it:
Perceived value rises with the dream outcome and how likely they believe you'll deliver it, and falls with how long it takes and how much effort it costs them. So you sell the outcome, prove you can deliver, and show how fast and easy, not the features.
One more lever, from behavioural science: anchoring (Kahneman & Tversky, 1974). In their famous study, people shown a random number gave bigger estimates to a completely unrelated question, a figure they knew was meaningless still pulled their answer. So the first number in any negotiation frames everything after it. Open low, or let the client name the number first, and you've anchored the whole conversation low. Name a confident, value-based price, and that becomes the centre of gravity.
Give them a choice, not a yes or no
Don't present one price (a yes-or-no decision). Offer three, good, better, best, what Rafi Mohammed called good-better-best pricing in HBR. It works for two reasons: it changes the buyer's question from "should I buy?" to "which one?", and the compromise effect means most people avoid the extremes and pick the middle (add a higher tier and the middle's share actually rises). So set them deliberately:
- Top tier, anchors high and makes everything below look reasonable; a few buy it as the full solution.
- Middle tier, the one you want most people on; build it as the obvious-value choice.
- Lowest tier, mostly makes the middle look generous and gives a taste of your work.
Each tier still has to satisfy both your definition of value and the client's expected outcome.
Objections are unanswered questions
When they push back, most founders hear a no and panic. It isn't a no. An objection is a question that hasn't been answered yet, a buying signal, even. "Too expensive" or "I need to think about it" usually means the value isn't clear yet, or there's an unvoiced worry. Don't argue, get curious.
The best toolkit is Chris Voss's (Never Split the Difference, Voss was the FBI's lead international hostage negotiator). None of it is pushy:
- Tactical empathy, show you understand their position before you respond.
- Labelling, name the likely concern out loud ("It sounds like the cost is the real worry"), so they confirm it or tell you what's actually bothering them.
- Calibrated questions, open questions starting with how or what: "How would you need this to work?" They feel like control; really, you're steering.
Isolate the objection before handling it: "If we sorted the price, is there anything else that would stop you?" If no, price is the only thing left; if yes, you've found the real objection.
What common objections really mean:
- "It's too expensive", the value isn't clear enough yet. Assuming you qualified for affordability, show the ROI is a no-brainer; it can also signal pricing that's too rigid.
- "I need to think about it", the pain isn't immediate enough, and there's usually an unvoiced worry, draw it out.
- "It's not the right time", they don't yet feel the cost of doing nothing, make it real, or keep them in follow-up until it becomes urgent.
- "I need to run it past someone else", you're not talking to the decision-maker (proper qualifying should prevent this).
Understand the real message and you stop taking objections personally, and start answering the question they're actually asking.
Ask for the sale
A common mistake: founders do all the work, the diagnosis, the case, the value, then never actually ask. They present, and hope. But you can't wait for the client to volunteer the money, they almost never do. You have to ask for the sale, plainly. Done right, it's the natural next step, not a confrontation.
Set it up early with Sandler's Up-Front Contract, at the start, agree what happens at the end: "By the end of this you'll know if it's a fit. If it is, we'll talk about working together. If not, just tell me, no hard feelings." Now the close isn't a surprise; it's what you both agreed you would reach.
Then, when you ask, stop talking. Name the price and go quiet. Most founders ask and immediately keep talking, and talk the client back out of it, or discount before anyone pushed back. So ask, then let them answer. The silence is meant to be uncomfortable, let it sit.
Speed and follow-up win
Two things after the conversation decide more deals than the conversation itself.
Speed. A study run with MIT, written up in Harvard Business Review, found:
- Contacting a lead within 5 minutes vs 30 makes you ~100x more likely to reach them and 21x more likely to qualify them.
- Wait an hour and you're already 7x less likely than someone who called within that hour.
- About 23% of companies never respond to their leads at all.
When someone raises their hand, the clock is your biggest competitor.
Follow-up. You've heard "the fortune is in the follow-up." The principle holds, even though the round-number stats people quote are mostly made up (so I won't quote you a fake one). But in my own experience, it usually takes between 3 and 7 follow-ups before someone buys, and most people give up long before that. So be the founder who always follows up, politely and persistently and without making it weird, you'll win far more deals than the one who gives up.
Make it a system
Being really good at sales comes down to running the same system every time. It can feel like a lot to hold in your head, qualifying, diagnosing, listening, pricing, handling objections, asking, following up, but you don't walk in trying to remember which move to pull out next. You run the same sequence every time, until it becomes a habit.
It starts with the mindset that selling is helping the right people, which lets you build a full, qualified pipeline so revenue stops fluctuating. From there every prospect goes through that same conversation, in the same order, and afterwards you follow up, because that's where most deals are won. None of it is luck or charm; every piece is a learnable step.
To make it reliable, run it like a system:
- Track your activity, calls and DMs sent, follow-ups, meetings booked (the leading indicators you control), plus deals closed (the lagging outcome that follows weeks later).
- Track each deal through its stages: conversation, qualifying, proposal, closed.
- Measure your conversion rate at each step.
- Give it a weekly rhythm, block time to fill the pipeline and review those numbers.
Those numbers are your early-warning system: watched weekly, they let you see a quiet month coming while there's still time to act, instead of being blindsided when it's too late.
In his book Predictable Revenue, Aaron Ross showed exactly this. He built an outbound sales system at Salesforce credited with adding over $100 million in new recurring revenue. His core argument is the part that matters most for you: predictable revenue doesn't come from one gifted person hustling, it comes from turning sales into a repeatable machine and, as you grow and scale, splitting it into specialised roles (finding leads, qualifying, closing) so they're not all sitting on one overstretched pair of shoulders. Right now those shoulders are yours, and the whole point of a system is that, over time, it doesn't have to be.
Your system is unique to you and your business, so never copy someone else's, build one tailored to how your business actually runs. Get it right and your revenue becomes predictable enough that you always know what to do next. You decide how much work comes in, rather than waiting to find out. That is what it actually means to be good at sales: having a system you chose to build.
What to do next
You don't have to fix all of this at once. Start this week:
- 01Work out your numbers. Look at your last 10 to 20 sales conversations and count how many became clients. That conversion rate tells you how many conversations you need to hit your income goal: a target instead of a guess.
- 02Fix your discovery. On your next call, ask more than you pitch. Run the SPIN order, Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff, to understand the problem and its cost before you mention your solution.
- 03Reprice one offer on value. Take one thing you sell, stop pricing it by the hours, and price it by the outcome it delivers.
- 04Follow up on the deals you wrote off. Pick 3 conversations you assumed were dead and follow up, simply and without apology. Some aren't dead, you just stopped showing up.
- 05Give your pipeline a rhythm. Block 30 minutes this week to fill the pipeline and review your numbers, then repeat next week. That recurring habit is what turns effort into a system.
Being good at sales is about understanding people, diagnosing the real problem, and having the discipline to run a system instead of winging it. You're already doing the hard part, you're good at what you do. Sales is just the skill that lets the right people find that out and pay you properly for it. Selling is a skill you build. So go and build it.