Almost every small or large firm employs a sales team. It’s not easy to present and sell a product or service. Aside from knowing what you’re selling, there is a slew of other requirements to meet.
As the number of individuals working in sales increases, it becomes clear that some people are better at it than others. So, what qualifies a salesperson for success? Is it empathy or effective communication that makes a difference?
The answer to this question is far from straightforward. To be successful in sales, a person must possess a wide range of hard and soft talents. Examine how you can improve the skills required for sales while selling and increase your earnings.
To be a good and effective salesperson, you must possess a number of essential sales abilities.
Being a successful seller, though, goes beyond understanding how to utilize a CRM or generate a sales forecast. It also means you’re aware of your soft sales talents as well as your technical sales skills.
It’s fantastic that you know how to utilize the latest software or that you’ve mastered Excel spreadsheets, but you won’t get very far if you don’t know how to build meaningful relationships with consumers.
7 Sales Soft Skills Every Salesperson Needs
1. Empathy
It’s essential to be able to put oneself in another person’s shoes at all times, but especially as a salesperson. You can steer talks in a productive direction if you can grasp what individuals are thinking or feeling.
You’ll be able to identify motivations, pain areas, and more, giving you a better notion of when you should push forward and when you should pull back — turning you into a sales Rockstar!
Above all, empathy aids in the development of meaningful relationships with prospects.
They might not recall what you said, but they will recall how you made them feel. In a sales situation, the last thing you want is for a customer to feel taken advantage of or as if you aren’t looking out for their best interests.
There are several activities you can perform to practice empathy deliberately, such as picturing yourself in someone else’s shoes and reframing your ideas to be curious rather than judgmental.
Always let your customers know you’re on their side!
2. Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence enables you to comprehend how others are feeling and to manage your own and others’ emotions. People naturally relate to you and want to follow your advice if you are emotionally knowledgeable.
Emotional intelligence is categorized into four abilities:
- Perceiving Emotions: Detecting and deciphering emotions in faces, photographs, conversations, and other objects, including your own emotions. This is the most fundamental part of emotional intelligence because it allows for all other emotional information processing.
- Using Emotions: the ability to use emotions to help with various cognitive tasks like thinking and problem-solving A person who is emotionally savvy may take full advantage of changing moods to best suit the work at hand.
- Understanding Emotions: the ability to decipher emotion language and understand complex emotional relationships (and be able to describe how emotions evolve over time).
- Managing Emotions: the ability to control our own and other people’s emotions. As a result, the emotionally intelligent person can control their emotions, even unpleasant ones, in order to attain their objectives.
As you can see, emotional intelligence is a highly valuable soft talent to possess in both your professional and personal life. You’ll be able to determine how to proceed with conversations if you can detect a prospect’s mood.
Are they having a good time? Perhaps it’s time to seal the deal.
Do they seem to be in a bad mood? Sincerely inquire about their well-being and pay attention to what they have to say.
3. Active Listening
When you’re attempting to sell a product or service, and you’re pressed for time, it’s easy to slip into the habit of badgering people into buying from you and talking their ears off until they agree.
Unfortunately, even at organisations that brag about how terrific their salespeople are, many salespeople still do this.
Instead, concentrate on paying attention to your prospects. They will often tell you what their pain points are and what they’re looking for if you just listen.
Of course, asking questions to direct the conversation in a way that delivers you the information you need is beneficial, but avoid taking over the conversation. Without prodding, no one wants to hear how terrific you or your organization are. After you’ve listened to what they have to say, figure out what the next best move is for them.
Keep in mind that you must be on the customer’s side and make them happy with the transaction!
4. Growth Mindset
Let’s pretend you’re a natural at establishing rapport. Do you think rapport-building is an innate skill or something you learned through hard effort, practice, and feedback from others?
You have a growth attitude if you choose the second option. People who have a growth mindset believe they can improve their innate abilities and learn new skills through time. People with fixed mindsets, on the other hand, consider their abilities to be set in stone. They’ve been dealt the hand they’ve been given, and that’s it.
Change your attitude toward failure to shift from a fixed to a development mindset. Consider failure as a learning opportunity rather than a source of embarrassment or shame. You’ll have the capacity to bounce back and try again if you’re not afraid to make mistakes. Even better, each challenge you take on will teach you something new. (Of course, this isn’t to say you shouldn’t be concerned about failure.) Take a careful look at why you’re not improving if you’ve made the same error three times or more.)
5. Adaptability
When a salesman excels at listening to and acting on feedback, their name rises to the top of the scoreboard and remains there. After all, they’re combining the abilities of a successful salesperson with their manager’s ideas, wisdom, and experience. This is a fantastic combination.
Furthermore, sales professionals’ expectations are continuously changing. Buyers are far more intelligent than they were in 2001, and what worked in 2001 will almost certainly not work in 2021. Great salespeople must be adaptable and coachable in order to maintain processes and current techniques.
To develop adaptability, spend five minutes every day reflecting on what went well and where you could improve.
How you respond to feedback from your manager, trainer, or mentor is the most significant component in adaptability. Remember to have an open mind and implement their recommendations and remarks, even if you don’t agree with them. You’ll be in better shape than before if their advice works. You can quit using it if it doesn’t work. In any case, it’s a positive outcome.
6. Communication
Most salespeople spend at least 90 percent of their day communicating, whether it’s on the phone, sending emails, delivering demos, or speaking in meetings. It is critical to have excellent communication abilities. You must be able to communicate your views clearly and effectively, without wandering off on tangents or employing buzzwords and meaningless jargon.
Keep in mind who you’re speaking to at all times. Something is incorrect if you talk to your sales manager the same way you talk to your prospects: After all, their aims, desires, and background information are significantly different.
To develop communication skills reviewing your discussions also allows you to assess the reactions of your prospects. For example, your objection-handling strategy may appear to be working at the moment, but you notice that the same objections surfaced on the next call. Regrettably, what you thought was a brilliant counterpoint didn’t work out. You can make adjustments to your communication tactics once you’ve identified the weak points.
7. Humility
Your prospects will instantly trust and appreciate you more if you are humble enough to expose a vulnerability or acknowledge you don’t know something. As a result, they’ll regard you as a reliable counsel, if not a partner in their achievement (this is ideal).
Most people’s impulse is to hide their ignorance or avoid the conversation when they discover they don’t know something. Rather than doing either, simply say, “I’m not sure.”
Are you concerned that the prospect may lose faith in you? Add something like, “But I’ll find out,” or “I’ll look into it right away.” (After that, make certain to follow up.)
Humility also requires you to accept responsibility for your faults. When anything goes wrong, avoid using language that assigns blame to other people or factors outside of your control. Instead of stating, “I forgot to explain when we’d meet — that’s on me,” you may say, “I forgot to clarify when we’d meet — that’s on me.”
Final Thoughts
Work ethic and soft skills are inextricably linked. Understanding your product, industry, and sales tools will assist you in exceeding your sales goals. Communication, empathy, and resilience are examples of soft talents that can help you continually exceed them.
The soft skills discussed in this article are relevant to sales professions, although they may be applied to almost every field. That means that these soft sales skills will accompany you into management or even a different department as you advance in your career. Take up the Advanced Certificate Program in Sales and Sales Management and upskill today!
