How I Got to 7-Figures in Sales as a Socially Inept Introvert Nerd

Photo by Daniel Chekalov on Unsplash

When I first started selling technology, I had no idea what I was doing.

For weeks, receptionists slammed the phone on me. I was cursed at, told to beat it, and worse.

See, I’ve never been a “gift of gab” kind of guy. In fact, I had to go through speech therapy as a kid because I couldn’t communicate well. Socially, I’ve always been awkward and a bit uncomfortable. But, I was driven to find a way to sell.

Thankfully, my CRM was my lifeline.

My personal choice for a business of any size is HubSpot. The free tools allow startups to track their contacts and sales calls. However, as your business grows, HubSpot can be scaled to the large business level.

Having gone from $0 of revenue to $2.5M per year with a small team of 4 salespeople, here are the steps I would suggest implementing to start getting sales now:

1. Build a lead list. The best lead lists aren’t purchased; they are made. Think about who fits your ideal customer profile and manually build a list of 100–1000 contacts/businesses you can call on. Once, you have this list, import it into HubSpot.
2. Make sales calls. I won’t sugarcoat it. Making cold calls is scary and difficult. While I’ve worked with all-stars who can land a meeting every 20–50 calls, my personal cold-to-customer rate is around 1/100. But I’ve still built a multi-million dollar sales team as an average cold caller. This is because cold calls work. But you have to do the work.
3. Close your first sales. Hopefully, you are selling something high ticket enough to be worth the effort. For me, it took over 400 calls to land my first big sale. This was selling in the 6-figure range, though. Your mileage may vary, but I doubt it would be worse than that. Once you get that first close, you will have the confidence to close more.
4. When sales start to fall through the cracks, build systems. As you start to onboard more and more customers, you will eventually find that you aren’t as responsive as you should be, and thus you won’t be closing as much as you could. Start using the Deals Pipeline in HubSpot to track all your deals through each stage of completion. This is also what will enable you to grow an entire sales team.

This is exactly what I did to build a 7-figure sales floor using HubSpot. And remember, I’m not some guns-blazing brilliant sales guy. In fact, I’m really awkward on the phone and have struggled in social situations my entire life. But sales calls still work for me, and they can work for you also.

Good luck!