To succeed in sales, a sales person needs to know how to nail the prospect in the first 20 seconds and keep him engaged, use creative techniques to subtly reveal the hidden needs of the customer, and finally he should never be in a hurry to close the deal. The customers do not like salespersons who are pushy or those who invade their personal space.
The laundry list of the sales skills is pretty long. Here are a few critical skills that are required to succeed include sales conversations, negotiate the best deals, develop relationships, manage the sellers and so on. However, there are a few critical skills that are required to meet the challenges of selling products/services in the ever evolving market place.
Driving account growth
There is huge difference between sales personnel who achieve their goals by overcoming many challenges and those who achieve their goals without much effort. It’s easier to upsell and cross sell to the existing customers because you have already established a good relationship with those clients. The frequency of enjoying the benefits of meeting the target is more for the sellers who drive growth to the existing accounts than the sellers who bring in new logos to the organization. But creating new accounts by bringing in new logos is a major challenge that many sales people shy away from.
Advanced insight selling
An organization that is primarily into selling product/services should also concentrate on advanced consultative selling. This is where your firm would be differentiated from its competitors. That is the sales force should be trained in the skill of inspiring the consumers by providing them the relevant insights as well as ideas. The challenge of consultative selling is one of the critical skills and also a sales tool if used properly can take the organization to great heights. This is a crucial area a sales manager need to pay attention to and train the sales force of the organization.
Sales opportunity management
There is a huge gap between the achievers and non-achievers in sales opportunity management. Sales opportunity management is all about driving and opening sales opportunities. The sales personnel who fall into the category of driving and winning sales opportunities are considered to be among 68% of the top performers. If a seller does not possess the skill set to drive sales opportunities, it’s going to be difficult meet the challenges of sales.
Filling the pipeline
A sales organization is said to be successful when its sales funnel is refilled very often. To achieve your sales target, you need to regularly refill the front-end of the pipeline. A sales skill that is required to keep the pipeline well-nourished is prospecting. Prospecting is necessary to bring new accounts to the organization.
To be a successful seller, you need to work towards uncovering the requirements of the consumers, provide insights as well as offerings to resolve those requirements and communicate with the existing as well as potential prospects to drives sales and meet the challenging sales goals. There is a huge scope for core consultative selling and those who work towards acquiring this skill will be very successful in meeting their sales challenges. In brief, selling is the summative of all that is mentioned above.
