Skills Salespeople Should Have and Develop

Sales is both an art and a science. As a sales professional, or even as a founder foist into a sales role, you must always be honing your sales skills.

“Sales is both an art and a science. As a sales professional, or even as a founder foist into a sales role, you must always be honing your sales skills.” 

Whether it is just you or a full sales team, here are few of the sales skills that you or your team should be developing to stay ahead of the sales curve:

• Understanding the Buyer. The most important of today’s sales skills is simply understanding the buyer. It’s the foundation of effective selling. But it involves more than just understanding who the buyer is. It’s about identifying the experience that the buyer wants to have as they consider making a purchase. Your buyer has a set of expectations about that experience and your job as a salesperson is to exceed those expectations.
• Buyer Responsive Selling. When a salesperson understands the buyer, they can engage in what’s called buyer-responsive selling. The idea here is to provide the buyer with what they want, when they want it. For example, if your buyer needs a trial to evaluate your product but can’t allocate more than 30 minutes to it, give them a free trial. But don’t just give them any free trial. Give them a free trial that is easy to set up, easy to use, and really demonstrates the value of your product in five minutes or less.
• Buyer Engagement. It’s remarkable how few salespeople know how to use psychology to more effectively engage the buyer. There are a variety of techniques you can use to create deeper engagement with your target buyers. One really effective tip is to make sure that the customer knows that you won’t take too much of their time.
• Establishing Trust with The Buyer. Buyers like to do business with people they trust. Good salespeople view their ability to establish trust with the buyer as a core sales skill. Helping the buyer goes a long way in this regard, as does understanding what the buyer wants.
• Invest Time Prospecting for New Business Weekly. Most salespeople rely on existing clients to generate their sales. Allot a specific amount of time to look for new business opportunities whether it’s within a current account or a completely new company.
• Hone Your Value Proposition. Can you make it shorter and show how you directly produce results for a client. Focus on developing a 30 second pitch on this and make sure it is focused on your prospect, not your company. How can you improve your value proposition?
• Concise Communications. A critical sales skill is to make sure that you communicate succinctly. The days of the silver-tongued, overly verbose salesperson are coming to an end. Buyers value how information is presented more than the information itself. A good rule here is to never try to communicate more than three important points in a single conversation with a buyer.
• Customer-Driven Responsiveness. A lot of sales leaders and pundits like to talk about good salespeople are good listeners. We think that goes without saying and that the best salespeople take action based on what they hear from their customer. It’s not good enough to just listen. You need to internalize what the buyer just said and then do something about it.
• Subject Matter Expertise. Salespeople need to be subject matter experts in two areas. First, they need to understand the buyer. This involves knowing about the pressing issues that the buyer is facing and what the buyer wants as they work their way to a purchase. Second, salespeople need to know a lot about their own product or service.
• Always Be Helping. Buyers don’t want to be closed; they want to be helped. That’s why always be helping is the new always be closing and is more of a mindset than a skill. Help them – don’t just help them related to your sales process.
• Improve your Questioning Skills. Learn how to ask high-value, high-impact questions that make your prospects think and that differentiate you from your competitors. It requires forethought and courage to ask. What new questions can you start asking?
• Storytelling. Buyers also don’t want to hear about your product or service. Good salespeople know this and weave the product or service they’re selling into larger story that has an arc and ends with the customer receiving what they want (which is usually not your product). For example, when a business buys phone system, they don’t really want to buy a phone system – they want to grow their revenues and recognize that the phone is an effective tool for doing that.
• Copy-writing. Salespeople must be able to write. It’s one of today’s most important sales skills given how much sales now uses email to communicate with buyers. There are a few rules to keep in mind when it comes to sales copywriting. First, the less you write, the better. Try to keep written communications short and sweet. Second, avoid using generic copy. You should take the time to personalize as many of your communications as possible. Third, use bullets to format your copy – lists are just easier for customers to digest. Finally, start and conclude your written communications with a call to action that asks the buyer to take a next step.
• Perfect Presentations. Become adept at adapting each sales presentation to the specific needs of each prospect or customer – even though you are using a standard presentation.
• Garner Agreement. Many sales people fail to ask for some type of commitment when they meet with, or talk to, prospects and customers. Asking for some form of commitment at each stage of the process increases your opportunity to close the deal. This can be as simple as asking, “What are the best next steps?” or “Are you prepared to move forward?”
• Phone Sales. Field sales is definitely moving inside and the face-to-face meeting is quickly becoming the teleconference. As a result, salespeople need to be effective at managing sales calls using the phone. This requires different skills such as the ability to read the tone of someone’s voice or measure the cadence of the conversation to determine whether the prospect is satisfied or not.
• Social Engagement with Buyers. Social media has given rise to the field of social selling. A lot of good salespeople now view their participation on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as one of the more effective sales skills. We’re talking about really engaging your buyers socially. Some of the best salespeople out there do things like organize dinners for groups of buyers that they are interested in getting to know. There’s very little selling that takes place at these mini-events. And it’s the salesperson who organizes them; not the company they work for.
• Personalized Interactions. A lot of buyers want context when they have an experience with sales or marketing for that matter. They don’t want the generic message or sales pitch. They want something that’s specific to them. One way to do this is to weave messaging and content that is specific to the buyer’s demographics into your sales efforts. In a B2B setting, this might involve using specific industry examples when selling. On the consumer side, this might involve tailoring how you communicate with a buyer depending on their age and gender. You can also reference recent events in the buyer’s personal or professional life (depending on the sales context) to personalize your interactions.
• Keep In Your Prospect’s Mind. Find creative ways to keep your name in your prospect’s mind. This can include snail mail, email,networking, drop-by calls, etc. and make sure that every contact offers some type of value to your customer and prospect. What can you do to keep your name in your prospect’s mind?
• Helping Prospects Achieve Next Steps. The buyer has less attention to give to you than ever before. That’s why it’s no longer good enough to agree on next steps. You actually need to help the buyer achieve those next steps.
• Using Sales Technology to Boost Productivity. Many sales organizations are using technology to become more efficient and shorten the length of the average sales cycle. The salesperson that can use technology to become more productive has a significant advantage over their peers – they are able to spend more time selling.
• Show Customers Why They Should Stay with You. Just because someone has bought from you in the past does not mean they will continue to do so in the future. In today’s business climate you need to constantly prove to your existing customers why it makes sense to continue buying your product/service. What can you do to reinforce this to your customers?

The sales profession is changing fast enough that we probably didn’t identify every essential sales skill. But this should be more than enough to get you started. Salespeople always have to be improving these skills to stay ahead of the curve.