Seven Essential Selling Skills

by Shamus Brown

Editor's Note: Shamus Brown is a Professional Sales Coach and former high-tech sales professional who began his career selling for IBM. Today he coaches high tech sales professionals for his own company, Industrial Ego. Shamus has some no nonsense advice on what it takes to be a top performer.



The top performers in any profession constantly work at improving their skills, and salespeople are no different. The big question for salespeople is, with so many different skills to work on, which areas of focus will yield the greatest return on investment for time and effort expended? I have identified the seven sales skills I believe are most important for professional salespeople to develop on an ongoing basis. Get good at these, and you will make a lot of money, no matter how the economy is doing. Skill #1: Qualifying fast. Do you chase after your prospects until they tell you "yes" or "no"? Conversely, do you ever tell your prospects "no", as in "No, I am not going to sell to you"? There are many things in selling that you can't control. The one thing you do have control over is your time, and how you choose to spend it. To qualify fast, you must have a set of criteria that clearly describes who you will and will not sell to. Focus on the prospects likely to buy your products, and drop the ones unlikely to buy, so you can find more good prospects. This sounds simple, but too many salespeople let sludge build up in their pipeline, constricting the total revenue that flows out. If someone doesn't meet your qualifying criteria, don't invest your sales time with him. Skill #2: Motivating prospects. Qualifying goes beyond budget, authority, and need. It involves finding prospects who want to buy from you. Finding prospects who need your products is usually not difficult. However, finding those who want your products can be very hard, if you wait for them to come to you. Products sold by professional salespeople are more complex and offer more value than commodity products offered through stores, catalogs, and brokers. Prospects generally do not know they need such products until they discover that they have a problem. This process takes seconds or years, depending on the nature of the problem, and the prospect. Prospects become motivated to work with you when you help them discover that you can solve their problem better than anyone else. Determine which problems you can eliminate or solve for your prospects. Plan and ask questions, to uncover and draw attention to those problems. Skill #3: Selling to people outside your comfort zone. Most salespeople who are "people persons" already think they are good at this. Let me ask you a question. The last time you lost a sale, how was your rapport with the key person who decided against you? You can't afford to look away and ignore people with whom you do not have natural rapport. The good news is people like people like themselves. To gain rapport, all you have to do is to stretch your behavior outside your comfort zone, until you become like the other person. Match speech patterns with people, to gain rapport outside of your typical sports or weather conversation. Skill #4: Reaching decision-makers through voicemail. There are two ways to make more sales. One is to close more of the prospects you contact. The other is to get more prospects into the pipeline. When prospecting, you can see voicemail either as your friend, or your enemy. With 70% of your prospecting calls going to voicemail, it's time to make friends with it. Although you will never come close to getting every voicemail message returned, you can get a significant number of messages returned when you treat them as one-on one commercials.

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