It was a nice snowy day in Hakuba Valley, so I shot this quick interview with Oscar Collingwood-Smith, who’s leaving our team. Very upset about that but wish him the very best. He’s coming off the back of an amazing sales he has made, and 100% retention on enterprise customers. Here are the most important lessons he has learnt about sales and looking after customers over the last couple of years.

1. Have a process

“The first thing you’ve got to do is you’ve got to have a process, whether that’s a weekly operating rhythm, a process on how you engage customers and process on how you actually sell to customers.”

2. Improve your skills

“The second most important thing is probably having the skills to actually execute on the process. So whether that’s how to ask for a referral, how to communicate better, how to build out a customer journey. You need to actually have those skills, so make sure you get trained on those things.”

3. Resilience and confidence

“The third most important thing is to be resilient and have confidence because if you can’t take a “No”, and you’re going to get hammered down in your confidence, then you’re going to find it very hard to bounce back and engage people once again, after you’ve had that “No”.”

4. Believe in what you’re selling

“The fourth most important thing in my eyes is you’ve got to love what you’re selling or what you’re managing. So you’ve got to love the product, because if you don’t love the product and you don’t believe in the product you’re going to find it really hard to communicate that message back to your customers.”

5. Love your team

“The fifth—and definitely one of the most important things—is you’ve got to love the people you work with. You’ve got to love your team, you’ve got to love your manager, you love your boss. That’s my top five things I’ve learnt working at SalesITV for the last three years.”

There you go, 5 fantastic wisdom from Oscar. Think about it; do you know what are your top five keys when you think about what makes you successful in sales? and is the way you’re selling enabling you to spend more time in fantastic places like this, with fantastic people like Oscar? Let me know your thoughts and make sure you check my other video in the Gen Y series featuring an interview with Christine Foulcher, my amazing daughter who is a champion salesperson at Canon.