Sales in 2025: Simple, Results-Driven Strategies to Land Your First Deal

Imagine I plopped you into the middle of a startup. The whole shebang: an empty room, an office with no furniture, and a blank whiteboard on the wall. 

Then imagine I said something inconvenient:

“Hey, now that you’ve got your own business—and congrats, btw—it’s now your job to do a bunch of cold pitches and make your first sale.”

Be honest. Would you have any idea what to do?

I could probably fill a book with all my ideas on this. But before I go spinning this off into a thousand LinkedIn posts—and yes, I do believe I can—I’ll give you the eagle-eye view on what sales should look like in 2025. 

How Do We Define Sales?

Sales is results-driven communication. 

That’s it. Don’t overthink it, don’t make it more complicated than it has to be.

Sales is the art of applying two-person communication towards some end goal. 

Aha. There’s the trick.

“End goal” can mean a lot of things. 

What are you trying to accomplish here? What defines “success” for your company? What is the end result driving all of the communication that comes before the close?

If sales is results-driven communication, your first concern is to start out with clarity. What are you trying to accomplish?

Doing so will require overcoming a few common stumbling blocks for people starting in sales:

Sales is not communication alone. 

One common flaw in sales logic? Believing that the product sells itself. 

Even if your product is great, face it: it just won’t sell itself. 

A lot of salespeople have this misconception. They think: “Oh, if I scheduled a sales call, all I have to do is show the prospect how my tool works. If I can just demonstrate its cool features, I’ll make the sale.”

Nope. Wrong. 

Unless you effectively communicate that your tool solves a specific problem that they need solved, you’ve just communicated. You haven’t communicated toward the goal of making the sale.

Clarity isn’t just for you. It’s for the customer.

Ever talk to a salesperson who seemed to have no idea what they even wanted you to do? What a bad feeling. 

This lack of confidence will seep into all your communication. You’ll say “um” more. You’ll pause too often—or talk too much. And at the end of a point, your customer just thinks: “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

Remember: customers know what they want already. One report said 81 percent of customers are already doing research before they contact you. 

Let’s say I’m your customer, and I know I’ve got a problem. If you’re not clear about the solution, you haven’t helped me, have you?

That’s why clarity is so key. Before you pick up the phone, you should know a few things about yourself:

• Who is your solution for
• The exact problem your solution fixes
• Who your solution isn’t for—because you can be clear about that, too

Know those three bullet points and you’re probably ahead of 90 percent of sales reps already. And that kind of confidence comes across in all your communication.

What Does it Mean to “Hustle” in Sales?

Don’t overcomplicate the word “hustle.” All it means is in sales is that you have to keep showing up.

“Hustle” has a negative connotation these days. Cue a thousand Internet-bros telling you to wake up at 5 a.m. so you can get your morning gym sesh in before a thousand cold calls.

Yikes.

I don’t like the phrase any better than you. But cringe as it may be, “hustle” does have a specific meaning in sales:

It means you have to show up.

And don’t just show up. Follow up. Close. Ask for the close. Ask your prospect what they need. (More on that later). 

It sounds simple—and it is—but it’s not easy. But you have to stop convincing yourself that sales is this complicated process with a thousand variables you have to master.

It’s not rocket science. It’s simple, but hard. And showing up every day in the face of competitive, strong resistance and smart customers with creative objections is difficult.

So your definition of “hustle” needs to carry more weight than the generic “wake up at 5 a.m.” posts on X.

In sales, “hustle” means being willing to do the difficult things:

• Showing up. Are you making the calls? Reaching out to prospects soon after they fill out a contact form? Getting past the nervousness of a cold call so you can build your skills? 
• Taking charge of an interaction. This is the hardest part. Here’s what most salespeople spend their time avoiding: being willing to risk someone not liking you. But if your communication is results-driven, you have to remember that communication alone isn’t enough to make the sale.
• Pushing through internal resistance. Hustle is sometimes just a matter of overcoming your internal resistance. Maybe you’ll tell yourself, “I’m not a take-charge kind of person.” Or “I like to let customers make their own decisions.” That’s fine and all. But these internal beliefs will only give you resistance when it comes time to close.

Sales is ultimately about moving from inaction to action.

Are you showing up? Following up? Asking for the close?

The sad truth about sales is that most of the interaction isn’t driven by your goals. It’s driven by your own desire to dodge rejection.

In this context, hustle means something completely different. It means cutting to the heart of the issue.

Are you comfortable cutting through a derailing conversation and saying: “So. Are you ready to buy?”

Once you’ve opened the conversation, now hustle has to take over. Take charge of the interaction. Consider yourself officially in charge of the relationship: initiating the call, following up, asking questions until you get answers.

After all, if you’re after a specific result, shouldn’t that determine what your communication looks like?

And remember: “no” is a result, too. 

If you’re trying to improve at sales, if you can get everyone to say no—or to reject you—at least you still have results to work from. Your success rate might be 0 percent, but now you’re tracking it. And that’s something you can build on.

In fact, “no” often has the best lessons. You can ask prospects: “Okay, what led to that no? What was the main objection?”

Now you have a list of common objections.

Most people barely show up in sales. They do the minimum. Then they waste daydreaming instead of staying relentlessly proactive.

But if you take a simpler approach, show up and follow through forever, you’ve got enough “sales philosophy” to build a business.

How Do You Know Whether You’re a “Wolf” or a “Lamb”?

You’re a wolf if you’re leading the interaction, and a lamb if you’re waiting for the prospect to lead you.

A lot of people resist me here. No one wants to be the big, bad wolf. We want to be friendly! We want prospects to like us.

But if you’re getting into sales, you might have to redefine your opinion of what “friendly” really is.

In the presentation in Paris, I showed the audience the matrix above. On top, you had two types of strong. On the sides, you had two types of friendly.

Salespeople, I find, tend to lean too hard into either side. They come across as one of two animals: the overaggressive “wolf” or the overly-accommodating “lamb.” 

Your job is to find the sweet spot. 

Clients do appreciate confidence, after all. They want someone who knows their solution inside and out and can recommend it without being pushy or insecure.

It’s not being “unfriendly” that makes those “Wolf of Wall Street” types successful. It’s the fact that they’re strong. You can be friendly and strong with one ingredient:

Lacking uncertainty.

Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes. Don’t you want to buy from someone who feels confident that their solution is right for you?

Yes, confidence can come in the form of “I want to win.” But it also comes in the form of: “Let me teach you how we can win together, because I know the solution I’m offering is perfect for you.”

Nothing unfriendly about that.

On the flip side, don’t be a pushover. Don’t half-apologize. Don’t apologize for “taking” their time. 

Oddly, in sales, it’s the people who seem most vulnerable who attract the most aggression.

Friendly? Yes. Friendly and noodly-weak? No, no, no. 

Why is Consistency King in Sales?

Consistency is king in sales because there’s no other “it” factor.

Not charisma. Not confidence. Just consistency.

People with consistency dominate the landscape. In fact, high-performing sales reps tend to generate around 80 percent of a company’s revenue.

So what is “it”?

In my experience, it’s a ruthless dedication to consistent action. 

You can identify this consistency by looking at salespeople and what they do after they just closed the biggest deal of their life.

Do they stop working? Or do they go back to their simple routine they’ve built because they know that consistency is how they found that “luck” in the first place?

You can’t define great salespeople by their best moments. Instead, look at what they do after a win or a loss. Do they take a day off? Do they let up on the gas? 

Or do they go back to the grind of calling and emailing? 

Consistency, not charisma, is what separates the top performers.

You need to be consistent, because your sales never will be. Highs and lows are never-ending in sales. One stat says it takes an average of eight cold call attempts just to reach a prospect. Is that the kind of consistency you bring to the table?

Ultimately, sales is a game of confidence: of building a self-fulfilling prophecy. To be convincing, you have to be convinced. 

And to achieve that, you have to put in the reps.

Consistency also leads to constant learning, especially if you’re proactive about getting feedback. So ask for it. Ask why the sale didn’t get made. 

The positive feedback might even surprise you. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked for feedback on the sale, only to learn that it wasn’t me or my product, but the fact that they had a limited budget. And that’s the kind of insight that helps you build confidence—along with giving you a new objection to overcome.

What Question Should You Ask to Get Better at Sales?

It’s one of the most powerful questions you can ask in sales, and it’s not reinventing the wheel to say it:

“What is it going to take to get this deal done?”

This question is an important tone-setter. It builds the road map between where you are and where you want to be, which connects back to the idea of results-driven communication.

Sometimes, the most powerful move you can make in sales is the simplest. 

Say something like “Help me out here.” Ask clarifying questions, like “What’s the most important thing you’re trying to do?” 

People want to talk about these things. And asking key questions doesn’t only build trust, but sometimes leads to a prospect actively telling you how to close the deal.

Think about the potentialities when you raise these questions:

• If the prospect gives you a positive response, now you have a way to move forward.
• If the prospect gives you an objection, you now have clarity on that and know how to move forward anyway.
• If they throw you a curveball (“I need to know that my team also likes it,”) you can get more clarity. Maybe you can ask: “Okay, is there someone on your team I need to talk to now? Some sort of hurdle this needs to overcome?” Before, the answer wasn’t even on your radar. Now you’re tackling the obstacle head-on.

How Should a Salesperson Manage Objections?

I’m going to tell you to do something counterintuitive here:

Don’t avoid your objections.

A lot of salespeople learn the common objections and try to structure the conversation around them. They try to dodge. 

But you can build more trust if you simply lead with it. Say something like:

“Before I say anything, I know that you might find this expensive. So here’s what I’m thinking…”

Or maybe you elaborate that some of your best customers had the same objection, and then explain how they overcame it.

Managing objections is powerful because sometimes it’s the most direct path to the results you’re after. Just a few tips here:

• Acknowledge what the prospect is thinking. “I know that sounds expensive…” is a good example here. Use these kinds of phrases to build your counter-objection.
• Bring up the objection before they do. People are nice. They don’t always want to tell you why they can’t do something. If you don’t bring up the objection, maybe it never gets addressed—and they start dodging your emails.
• Put yourself in the prospect’s shoes. When I was starting out, I’d cold call companies and see if they could use a service in which they delegated sales to me and my company. I tried to think about what they needed. In fact, I started trying to get them to say “No, I don’t want this,” so I could start qualifying whether they were even interested at all. I’d try to get to the core of their problem. If I could ask them, “What’s your sales process like?” and they had a problem with it, they’d talk my ear off. And that’s when I knew I had a potential match. After all, who doesn’t like to talk about a problem that needs solving?

A New Approach to Sales

These are all separate pieces of an elaborate puzzle: what sales and prospecting look like in 2025 and beyond. And we’ve just scratched the surface.

There are going to be future articles and posts about these. I’ll dive into greater detail about each idea. But now you have an overview of what you need to get started if you’re building a sales team from scratch and need to land your first deal.

Want to get started with the right technology in place to ensure you can follow up the way I described here? Sign up for a free trial of Close today.