5 Ways to Improve Your Sales Skills

In a perfect world, your company would provide all the sales training you need. In reality, most salespeople have to take responsibility for their own sales training and either request the training they need from a sales manager or find another way to get it. However skilled or experienced you may be, you still need to constantly hone and improve your sales skills if you want to succeed. Here are some ways to keep that improvement going. 

Sales Tips For Introverts

Everyone expects a salesperson to fit the high energy, fast talking, in-your-face stereotype. Many qualified people shy away from sales as a career because they are not perceived as a “people person.”

But, being more comfortable listening than speaking can be as much of a benefit as the gift of gab. Selling for introverts requires understanding and emphasizing your strong points. It also means stepping out of your comfort zone in some areas. If just the idea of initiating a conversation makes you feel queasy and start to sweat, these tips are for you:

Listening Skills

5 Tips for Training New Salespeople

If you want a strong sales team, you need to give your new hires some TLC

When you hire a new sales rep, the last thing you want is to end up having to fire the person after a few weeks or months. That hurts the whole company. Not only have you invested time and money in this person, but customers and other employees tend to get nervous when they see a new hire walking out the door. Yet many companies throw salespeople into a new job without enough training or encouragement.

Here are a few tips that will give your newly hired sales reps a better shot at success:  

9 Communication Skills for Salespeople

Knowing how to communicate well is a minimum requirement in sales. If you can't talk with people and get them to open up and share information with you, you're going to struggle to sell anything. Assess your communication skills in the following areas to see where you're excelling and where you need a bit more work.

Can you give a prepared speech?
Delivering a pre-written presentation effectively is a necessary part of the sales process. Can you give a prepared presentation without sounding stilted and unnatural? Can you handle questions without losing the flow? Can you incorporate factors that are important to a specific prospect? 

9 Communication Skills for Salespeople

Knowing how to communicate well is a minimum requirement in sales. If you can't talk with people and get them to open up and share information with you, you're going to struggle to sell anything. Assess your communication skills in the following areas to see where you're excelling and where you need a bit more work.

Can you give a prepared speech?
Delivering a pre-written presentation effectively is a necessary part of the sales process. Can you give a prepared presentation without sounding stilted and unnatural? Can you handle questions without losing the flow? Can you incorporate factors that are important to a specific prospect? 

How to Find and Get the Perfect Sales Job

Accepting a job offer is a lot like buying a house. If you've been looking for a while you might start to feel desperate enough to take the first halfway decent one that appears, but if you compromise too much you'll regret it for years to come. Unless you really are out of money and time, don't accept a sales job unless you're enthusiastic about the position.

Before you even start looking at ads, the first step in your job hunt should be defining your ideal job. Sit down in a quiet spot with a pen and paper and spend a few minutes thinking about how you like to work. Would you be doing lots of prospecting, or handling warm leads only? Do you enjoy traveling or like to stay in one spot? What kinds of prospects do you prefer to work with – consumers, small business owners, executives of major corporations, purchasing agents? Do you like to work on your own or as part of a sales team? Do you like having plenty of support from a manager or prefer independence?

Writing a Great Sales Resume

Good resumes share certain attributes regardless of the type of job you do. But once you've incorporated the basic must-haves, there are a few additions that will help you land the sales job you want. Remember, your resume is the equivalent of the brochures and other material you use to sell products – the only difference is that the resume is intended to sell YOU.

First, put your major accomplishments right at the top of the resume. Hiring managers often spend only a few seconds skimming each resume, so you want to ensure that they will see your biggest selling points. These accomplishments should be as specific as possible. For example, instead of writing “Top-producing salesperson at Company X,” write “Top-producing salesperson - generated 34% more revenue than the next-best salesperson at Company X.” Use exact numbers whenever possible. Companies want salespeople who will generate lots of revenue, so if you can show how you've done so for other employers they'll be eager to speak with you. And by using specific amounts you'll sound far more believable.

Compounding Your Sales Successes

One of the greatest things invented by the financial service industry was “Compound Interest". Save for the fact that no one is paying much interest on money these days, the reality of Compound Interest still holds and delivers added gain regardless of how low of high rates are. I was watching a teacher explain the concept to a grade 5 class, and he brought it down to "a little to start, a little from here, a little from there, and over time you end up with more than straight interest".

As you assess your plan for sales success in 2013, you can take advantage of "Compounding" to achieve greater success. Rather than resolving to do new things in new ways in 2013, why not resolve to improve a little here and a little there with things you already do or need to do; but do it in a way that ends up being greater than the individual gains on your efforts.

Coping with an Angry Customer

As a salesperson, you are often the face of your company. You will find that customers will often call you if they have an issue, instead of calling the customer service or technical support departments. And that means you can find yourself facing more than your share of upset, angry customers. Often the problem they face has nothing to do with you, but because you are standing in as the company representative, you're the one who will face the brunt of the customer's wrath. When you find yourself in this kind of situation, remember the following eight tactics for defusing your customer's fury.

How to Build a Great Salesperson From Scratch

A sales organization can have no competitive advantage greater than an exceptional sales force, and an exceptional sales force is made up of great salespeople.

How do you build the great salespeople that make up your exceptional sales force?

Like this.

Hire Attributes
Nothing after this line matters if you don’t hire people with the right attributes.

Selling Point: How to choose the right sales exec

A business is ready to go up the ladder only when the sales department is in place and it is staffed with the right people. This is even more crucial for a start-up because one wrong decision could create an irreparable dent in your business. Thus, look for people who have a natural ability to sell and market a business and its offerings.

Start small
Start-ups begin with a small team and a modest budget. With early investments in the bank, it's time to expand your team. The sales force is the last team to come on board, probably because, up until then, the founders were still putting together the company. It's always a good idea to hire someone with a little experience, even if yours is a small company.

Recruiting Your Way to Sales Success - Why is it SO HARD?

I've decided to hit you all with a very focused month of blog posts.  The topic will be on recruiting and upgrading your current sales team.  In our Sales Management Environment Program, we focus on 5 primary components:  Setting Standards and Accountability, Coaching for Success, Motivation that Works, Growing by the Numbers and Upgrading Your Sales Staff.  Of the 5, Upgrading Your Sales Staff, is the MOST under-utilized and least implemented component.

Why? Because it's so damn hard.  It's hard because it requires change.  It's hard because it requires a whole different level of desire to be successful in sales management and a whole different level of commitment to success in sales management.  It's hard because it requires 100% accountability for results.  It's hard because it requires discipline to a system and process designed to disqualify candidates rather than qualify them.

9 Essential Selling Skills Every Sales Person Must Know

There are dozens of selling skills that sales people should know. Here are nine of the most important skills every sales person must have.

Prospecting

Without a consistently full pipeline, you will struggle to meet your sales targets and goals. You will experience peaks and valleys and experience a great deal of frustration.

Unfortunately, very few companies actually teach sales people how to prospect effectively. And the vast majority of sales people rely on just a few prospecting methods such as cold calling or networking.