To hit the target, sales reps need to know a lot of things – from excellently knowing the product and the market to freely building successful communication with prospects and creating decent value propositions.
Therefore, every salesperson who wants to be successful and useful to the organization has to develop the right skills. Training, coaching, and effective modern guided selling solutions, in part, greatly increase salespeople’s productivity and help them close more deals.
Let’s see what skills a good salesperson should develop to achieve his goals.
- Strategic prospecting skills
While Sales Development Reps make cold calls, quota-carrying ISRs have to effectively devote their time to strategic prospecting. The essence of this process is to find and analyze the existing customers who are best suited to the role of the perfect target customer.
Also, it is imperative that reps return to closed-lost opportunities over and over again in an attempt to reopen conversation and induce action.
Another area of action within strategic prospecting is asking for referrals from existing company’s customers.
- Lead qualification skills
This skill involves collecting and analyzing the unique information that will convey to prospects which product characteristics specifically solve their current problems.
This process also identifies the important product and prospect mismatches to direct prospects’ attention to other solution providers and tackle the next quality lead.
- Presentation skills
The daily routine of sales reps is sheer uncertainty and therefore they must practice beforehand. Demonstration calls and thought-out sales presentations help a lot with this.
Most often, presentations are feature-centric, but they should become customer-centric, and the message and the content of the presentation content should be as informative and engaging as possible.
For managers, such methods of evaluating sales reps as screen recording or sitting in on calls are very effective.
- Closing skills
The stage when your prospects realize the need to purchase a product/service is the core of the selling process.
In large companies, the task of closing deals is taken over by senior sales reps or account executives, but closing deals has to be the backbone of the entire organization.
- Tech-savvy skills
No matter how experienced and talented your company’s sales reps are, they should know perfectly how to take advantage of modern sales tools (CRMs, sales enablement tools, or productivity applications), which have become an important trend today and won’t go away soon. This skill simplifies the selling process and makes it more profitable.
However, it is important not only to be able to use sales tools but also to choose the most effective ones.
For example, if you are using Salesforce, then you will be interested to know that there are better alternatives to tools like Einstein activity capture for keeping data between Salesforce and your email and calendar applications up to date, or Pardot, the B2B marketing automation solution.
- Customer engagement skills
Excellent communication skills are the basic professional traits of a good salesperson.
And the perfect sales is fluent in high-performing methods for customer engagement: for instance, modern sales call techniques that effectively help rapport with a customer, or research methods that help to quickly and effectively learn everything about a prospect, or communication strategies that help build long-term relationships with clients.
Many modern organizations understand that closing a deal is not the end of a customer journey, and if the specificity of product or service allows, they practice offering additional value to generate more engagement with existing customers (for example, post-sale relationship management).
- Objection handling skills
Qualified salespeople know how to work with objections. For them, they are a perfect occasion to ask more questions and get more important information from the customer.
There are many effective techniques for dealing with customer objections (Gratitude, Empathize, Ask + Probe + Confirm, Show The Value, etc.), that you can use to reach your goals.
It is crucial to realize that your potential customers use objections to make sure that your proposal is the one that best suits their needs.
Therefore, the purpose of working with objections is to identify a person’s attitude towards the things you say and overcome disagreements.