March 30, 2022

Can An Introvert Be Good At Sales? Here Are 11 Tips For The Introverts!

Are you an introvert who wants to succeed in sales? In this post, we'll go over some tried-and-true sales advice for introverted salespeople.

Saqlain Mushtaq

Content Writer

Reading time: 5 minutes

Many salespeople think that salespeople should be extroverted.

After all, extroverts are naturally comfortable being around people, able to engage in small talk, and are generally more outgoing.

However, introverts can also be great salespeople — with their deep thinking capabilities and active listening skills, these are more of an advantage rather than a weakness.

In this article, we’ll go through 11 sales tips to help you generate leads and outdo other extroverted SDRs!

11 sales tips for introverts

Research your prospect

Doing research on your prospect is by far the most crucial component of sales to improve your chances of offering value to prospects and their business.

To see if there’s a good match between your value proposition and your prospect, ask yourself these questions:

Which departments do they work in?
Which industries do they belong to?
What’s their company size?
What is their company’s annual revenue?
What is the business problem they are facing?
Can your product or service address this business problem?

This helps you understand your prospect better, making you more prepared for the second part of the sales cycle where you approach them.

Make sure you’ve practiced

Practicing the way you reach out and engage with your customers can certainly help ease the nerves and makes selling much easier.

If possible, get a colleague or friend to roleplay as a customer as you practice your sales conversations. If you don’t feel comfortable practicing with someone else, do it in front of a mirror so you can watch your expressions and body language).

Record your conversation so that you can replay them and monitor your pitch. This helps you identify points of improvement and better prepare you for real-life conversations with your customers.

Tailor pitches for each prospect

In this stage, you’ll acquire detailed information on your prospects to fine-tune your pitch and tailor your cold outreach. So, first and foremost, you must decide what matters to your prospects.

This can be done in a variety of ways:

Examine the prospect’s social media to see what they’re passionate about based on the content they’re sharing or reacting to
Make a list of their social media accounts and skim through them. Do they have any new announcements or updates?
Look through the “About Us” page on the company’s website

You need to develop a cause to connect once you’ve learned more about your prospect’s business and function. Are there any ties between you and the prospect? Is there a triggering event? Have they been to your website recently? If that’s the case, what search keywords brought them to our site? What pages did they go through?

You can develop a decision map to define your prospect’s options and end-goals if you want to become more high-level with your preparation. It will allow you to better handle any objections and tailor a pitch that is relevant to their core goals.

Conduct sales in chunks

If you conduct all of your outreach in chunks, you’ll be a lot more efficient. For example, begin your prospecting block by making all of your outreach calls at the same time.

Not only will you feel more at ease on the phone after making several calls, but it will also save you time. You’ll get a lot more bang for your buck than if you make a call, then go on LinkedIn to prepare for a demo, and then make another call.

You’ll be able to stay in the selling mindset if you do all of your prospecting in chunks.

If you have a lot of prospects to reach out to, dividing them into groups can also help you calm the nerves and makes it more manageable.

Confidence is the differentiator

Prospects will pick up on your confidence in your voice, and it will have a direct impact on the outcome of the call.

Remember that the person on the other end of the line can’t see you and can only trust you based on how you sound when you’re on the phone. They will develop confidence in you if you are confident in yourself.

If you’re monotonous, sound boring, and obviously scared, trying to convince your customers to buy from you would be a tiring process.

If you really can’t sound confident, a pro tip would be to picture yourself succeeding and achieving your end goal to give you that confidence boost.

Be consultative, don’t be a salesman

As an introvert, you probably won’t be caught ‘hard-selling’ to your customers because of your shy and reserved nature.

According to a sales tip by an ex-Salesforce account executive, Edouard Obin, use a consultative sales approach.

Start the discussion by letting the customers share their pain points. Engage in active listening, and understand the problems in order to add value to customers.

Instead of leading with a solution, you first understand the customers’ problems. This makes you appear more genuine and honest to the customer. And well, on your part, you get to talk a little less. 😉

Use a good CRM software

Technology may assist you in a variety of ways when it comes to conducting sales.

Using a CRM software can help you manage and automate some customer activity, which can reduce the pressure and anxiety of having to maintain constant communication.

Easily schedule follow-up calls and schedule appointments without the hassle.

When used effectively, your CRM software can help automate some of your interactions, alleviating some of the pressure introverts may feel to remain in constant communication with their prospects.

Invest in chat marketing tools

Speaking over the phone isn’t an introvert’s favorite thing to do, but following up with your contacts is a must.

That said, adopting a chat marketing software like NovoChat can help ease this burden. Freely communicate with your customers through chat messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook, all while remaining comfortable behind a phone screen.

You’ll be able to engage with customer in one-on-one conversations without all the stress and anxiety of calling (on your part).

Examine the sales process to see where you can make improvements

Keep track of which actions contributed positively to the sales process and which could have been a waste of time throughout the process.

Following each interaction with a customer, evaluate how well you:

Diagnosed their problems
Assisted in the formulation of well-defined objectives
Confirmed budget availability and comprehended the decision-making process
Determined the consequences of inactivity
Identified potential success outcomes
This self-reflection will aid us in the future in improving our sales prospecting strategies

Celebrate your wins

There’s no doubt about it — selling is a difficult task. Even the most experienced and extroverted salespeople occasionally stumble over their words and don’t have all the answers to every question.

You will encounter a lot of rejection in sales. Learn to appreciate modest victories to keep you motivated and keep level during the roller coaster ride that is a sales career.

Celebrate small wins — you improved your pitch this week, you managed to schedule a follow-up call, you managed to cold call one more prospect. Even if it may seem small to others, don’t undermine your achievements!

Set aside time to recharge

Most of the time, introverts lose most of their energy from being around people and engaging in social activities.

Since sales can be a very social process, this depletes your social battery quickly and can leave you feeling mentally drained. This can decrease your sales productivity and have a negative effect on your sales output.

That said, be conscious of your schedule and have some downtime to recharge. If you find that you’re doing way too many cold calls, balance it out by performing admin tasks where little customer interaction is needed.

It’s all about finding a good balance between your sales activities to give yourself the much-needed break to remain focused.

Conclusion

And there you have it! We hope that this list has given you some tips to outsell your extroverted peers.

Don’t be discouraged if you’re an introvert and still want to do sales — in fact, there’s no ‘best’ personality for sales. Just because you’re naturally more reserved doesn’t mean you can’t succeed in sales.

Instead, capitalize on your strengths and don’t let your weaknesses dictate your journey to success.

For more of such sales tips and advice, check out our blog!

Saqlain Mushtaq

Saqlain is a content writer at Novocall.

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