How To Hub: Learning about sales

The cheesy song from the 80ties is slightly more romantic than today’s blog – but at least the first few words are the same: It all started with a beer! A year or so ago we were milling around at one of the Weekenders, a weekly get-together of Impact Hub members on Friday night. To make networking easier beer is provided to support the mingling.

Together with two friends (Christoph and Gian) we started discussing and swapping our best sales stories & anecdotes. A bit of boasting, a bit of exaggeration but quite a few interesting tidbits where shared and revealed. Suddenly Christoph had an idea and said that he would love to run a B2B sales workshop with us, to share and learn. Enthusiastically we all agreed that this was a great idea.

A few days later we hadn’t forgotten and got together to discuss on how to proceed. After a bit of back and forth we decided to bring our experiences to paper and outline the learnings we had. We then settled on a workshop format, selected our favorite learnings to present, designed a sales exercise and picked a date.

To make things simple we said the workshop was free of charge and people would pay with a tweet or a like. We thought maybe 5 people would attend, but to our own surprise, we were actually asked to hold our workshop twice and over 20 people attended and provided great feedback.

The biggest advantage for me was that we collected our common experiences, put it into writing and further improved our sales skills by learning from each other. It took a little work but the invaluable experience shared and learned from people in a similar situation has paid off: We sold our first proof-of-concept shortly after running this workshop! And it all started with a (kiss) beer!