What core skills do salespeople need? We’ve covered how to find and attract A-player sales talent to your businesses in a previous article. In this article, we will discuss the sales skills you need to be on the lookout for when identifying star talent.
Broadly speaking, you can break the skills needed by a good salesperson up into two categories:
- Product knowledge
- Generic sales skills
Product knowledge is generally where most business owners will focus their efforts when training their salespeople. But the generic sales skills are just as important and can take years to truly master.
Core sales skills include:
- Ability to identify and clarify a client’s needs.
- Ability to marry the client’s needs with your product service offering
- Asking good questions such as open-ended questions and probing questions
- Handling objections from the customer – these will come and any good salesperson needs to be well-prepared to answer them.
- Understanding the concept of sales cycles and managing deal flow accordingly
- Understanding deal advancement ratios and closing ratios
- Managing deal flow based on known deal advancement ratios
- Understanding sales processes and adhering to these
- Adapting style and approach depending on clients demands, while still adhering to process.
- Building sales plans for each client
- Negotiating skills to unique find solutions that work both the client
This is just a brief list of some of the core skills salespeople need. Salespeople should never stop learning, and sales managers have a responsibility to ensure that their salespeople are given constant training and coaching to continuously improve their sales skills.