Most sales advice assumes you want to be more aggressive.
Push harder. Follow up until they say no. Create urgency. Handle the objection. It’s a style, it works for some people, and plenty of women have been handed it as though it were the only option.
When that advice has never sounded like something you would actually say, the problem isn’t you. You’ve been given one way to sell, and it isn’t the only one.
I teach a different one. It’s built on structure, language, and rapport rather than pressure, and it works whether you’re selling your first offer or your five hundredth.
Looking for advice on selling to women as clients? This is a different question, and it’s covered in How to Sell to Women.
You don’t need experience to start
A lot of the people I work with have never had sales training of any kind. They built a business, or took a role, and discovered that selling was suddenly part of the job.
This is a normal place to start. You don’t need a background in sales, and you don’t need to have enjoyed it so far.
What you need is a repeatable way to lead a conversation, and language you would genuinely use.
What most sales training gets wrong
It treats selling as persuasion. Most training is about overcoming resistance. The approach I teach is about understanding where someone actually is, and inviting them to the next step when they are ready.
It hands you scripts. A script is easy to sell and hard to use, because people can hear one. What holds up in a live conversation is understanding why a particular phrase works, so you can adapt it.
It rewards volume over skill. More calls, more outreach, more follow-up. Useful when your calendar is empty. Useless when the problem is what happens inside the conversation.
It assumes discomfort is a confidence problem. Often it’s a competence problem, which is good news, because competence is teachable. People who know what to say next tend to feel a lot better about saying it.
Why I teach this
I spent 17 years selling technology, much of it in rooms where I was the only woman, to organizations including Hewlett-Packard, NASA, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I closed individual deals worth more than $3 million and managed a territory generating over $30 million a year.
I didn’t do it by becoming louder. I did it by getting very precise about language, and by learning to recognize when someone was ready to move forward.
I’ve spent the 13 years since teaching this to other people. I’m the author of three books on selling, including The Selling Staircase, and I host a podcast ranked in the top 1% globally.
What you learn
The Selling Staircase maps the five steps a relationship climbs on the way to a yes.
- Introduction. Your prospect meets you or your business for the first time. Ensure you’re making a positive first impression.
- Curiosity. Engage in a way that makes them want more and ask questions. Watch for buying signals and act on them immediately.
- Discovery. Learn what their biggest struggle, need, or want actually is. Ask the right questions.
- Proposal. Clearly lay out an offer that meets the needs you just uncovered.
- Close. Use closing language, then zip it. Let your prospect respond first.
Every step ends with an invitation. Nobody climbs on their own. You invite your prospect to the next step, and they accept.
Most stalled conversations are a step that got skipped, or an invitation that never got issued.
Where to start
Newer to sales, or want support alongside other women learning the same things: the Sales Maven Society is a group coaching community with live coaching, practice, and a library of training. It’s the right place to begin when you’re building the skill.
Already selling, and want to work on your specific conversations: private coaching is one to one, and we work from recordings of your real sales calls.
Not sure which: a conversation about your sales sorts it out quickly. When neither is right, I will say so.
What clients say
“One focused suggestion directly resulted in $13,500 in new business. The change feels completely natural, with no pushiness and no pressure.”
Kathy Farah
“Nikki gave me a framework to navigate calls and stay in my authority. Finding her was like finding an oasis in a desert of ‘bro-marketing’ tactics. I now view sales and marketing as kind of fun.”
Catherine Lunardon
“Using one of Nikki’s referral strategies and the language she guided me to use, I reached out to a current client and shared that I was available for additional work. One conversation led to a referral, which turned into a pilot program. The pilot quickly expanded into a national rollout and is now a core part of my business, generating multiple six figures in revenue.”
Dr. Angelique Adams, Former Chief Innovation Officer