Lesson 1: What it takes to up your sales game

Let’s Get Started!

Hard skills VS soft skills for sales 

Hard skills for sales are formal and technical abilities learned from academic institutions, workplaces, seminars, mentorships, and training courses, including role-critical skills that are specialised for a specific function. Soft skills, on the other hand, are informal abilities that are learned over a person’s lifetime and usually relate to your aptitude in performing common tasks and connecting with other people.

Source: https://www.saleshacker.com/sales-skills-traits/#qualities

Soft skills can have just as much impact on a sale as hard skills. That’s why you want your leads to enjoy talking to you and you want to build relationships with leads through active listening, problem-solving skills, and your work ethic. A successful salesperson who can sell sawdust to a lumber mill has incredible soft skills: these people manage a customer relationship well, have a positive attitude, follow up when they should and are pleasant to talk to. A sales professional with strong soft skills contribute to a positive work environment, makes the workday more pleasant for their colleagues, and are excellent representatives of the team and company they work with.

Source: https://www.pipedrive.com/en/blog/soft-skills

To become an amazing sales professional, you’ll need to be a master of both hard and soft sales skills! In this course we’ll look at both BUT will do a deep dive into soft sales skills, which after all is the title of this course 🙂

Top 8 hard skills for sales professionals

1. Product Knowledge

Inadequate product knowledge is unacceptable in the world of selling. Any sales professional who goes to the field without having an intimate knowledge of the features, benefits, and weaknesses of their product will have a hard time creating effective pitches and connecting customer needs to the best solutions available.

2. Strong Knowledge of Common Business Software & Sales Enablement Solutions

Sales ops and sales enablement technology — through products such as CRMs, document management software, and workplace productivity apps — makes selling easier and more profitable. As a sales professional you should learn how to use the software, platforms, and other tools your company uses to run operations and engage your customers.

3. Business Communication

Your talent at engaging prospects during the sales conversation or articulating a concept can still be honed for the business landscape. It is imperative that you learn best practices in both oral (e.g., phone calls, presentations, pitches, etc.) and written (e.g., proposals, memos, referral requests, etc) communications.

4. Client Engagement

Getting along with people and having good communication skills are baseline traits. For high-performing sales professionals, there is a science and a method for establishing and maintaining excellent client engagement.

5. Active Listening

There are different levels of listening but you need to operate at full throttle when it comes to your customers. Active listening in sales requires focus as well as occasional/follow-up queries. These allow you not only to glean complete and clear information from your clients but also to build rapport and demonstrate that you genuinely care about your customers’ concerns.

6. Conflict Management & Resolution

In sales, you need to expect regular episodes of complaints, conflicts, and rejections. These incidents may involve just about anyone, such as clients, peers, management, and other parties. Because these can occur at any time, you’ll need to learn and practice how to proactively handle objections and manage conflicts. High-performing salespeople have been known to use these incidents as a platform for converting new leads or an avenue for demonstrating a workplace solution to management.

7. Sales Presentations & Sales Demos

Whatever tool you use, being good at presenting and public speaking is a great skill to have in the world of selling. Excellent sales demos and presentations convey subject mastery and build trust around your brand.

8. Social Media & Social Selling

Because social has become a major part of our digital lives, many companies now employ social media managers to oversee their brand’s online presence. You need not be as technically adept as these specialists but you need to know your way around social media.

Top 8 soft skills for sales professionals

1. Collaboration

Sales teams rarely operate as a one-person army. Sales teams follow a game plan that assigns different roles and requires different outcomes from members.

2. Relationship-building

The ability to positively engage other people, build long-term relationships, and form mutually beneficial networks will find frequent use in your daily workflow. From meeting clients and gathering referrals to getting advice and achieving team objectives, relationship-building skills enable you to accomplish tasks easier and make better-informed decisions.

3. Knowing When To Shut Up!

Listening is the best method to understand where clients are coming from, what their pain points are, and how you can effectively provide solutions for their challenges. Without listening skills, a sales professional risks compromising other stages in the sales process such as lead qualification and customer-solution matching.

4. Time Management

While selling involves money, something a lot more precious gets exchanged and used along the way — time. Your ability to optimise time improves productivity and cost-efficiency and creates an environment for high performance.

5. Tell Stories

Selling not only requires showing the features of your product but also convincing customers that these features will solve their problems or will benefit them in some significant way. A lack of baseline communication skills is a glaring red flag for anyone planning to enter the world of sales. You should learn to use story-telling to connect and sell.

6. Research | Information

Gathering accurate information about clients, market trends, competitor solutions, and other business intelligence enables you to make better decisions, engage the right customers better, and close high value deals while shortening your sales cycle.

7. Critical Thinking | Problem Solving

You need critical thinking skills to process information, analyse data, and sift through the heap for relevant bits of information that will help you form solutions for problems your prospects or your team are experiencing.

8. Be Tech Savvy

You must at least be comfortable around digital devices. This makes it easier for you to adapt to emerging technological advances in AI, big data, and other fields that will transform the way organisations run businesses and the way brands engage audiences.

Download Extra Notes

“Top 30+ Sales Skills You Need to Become a Great Sales Rep (and Add to Your Resume)”

For extra reading, click on the image below to get the PDF or click here to read the full article published on saleshacker.com covering “Top 30+ Sales Skills You Need to Become a Great Sales Rep (and Add to Your Resume)” by Max Altschuler

Summary

Still to Follow

• Understand why soft sales skills matter
• Discover the essential soft sales skills
• How you can master soft sales skills
• How you can build advanced soft sales skills