Sales is often derided as a field that requires little skill to get into. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. While having a natural gift of the gab helps, few people are born with innate sales skills. It takes significant practice, effort, and often training to reach a point where you can achieve consistent results.
Learning how to build sales skills isn’t just relevant for salespeople, however. Sales skills touch on many of the points that anyone in a management or communication position needs, from building a rapport with people to convincing them of your position. Here’s why sales skills are so important, and how to build sales skills that can improve your work output and help you achieve your goals.
Is sales a skilled job?
The easiest way to answer whether sales is a skilled job is to consider how often you are personally convinced by a salesperson. As a salesperson, you’re not just battling against the stereotype of being pushy and not taking no for an answer, but also the current economic reality. People are less willing to part with their hard-earned money than ever, and a salesperson needs to be able to truly convince them, and not just wear them down.
Achieving this takes a range of different skills. You need to be a good listener, actively assessing what it is a customer is looking for, and finding something that addresses their needs. You need to be personable, engaging someone in conversation in as natural a way as possible, and preventing them from feeling like you only want to make a sale. And you need the skills to do this across platforms; not just being a good talker in person, but being able to engage people and tell stories online.
Very few people are naturally good at all of this, and fewer still can naturally balance the skills required with the fast-paced and demanding nature of the work. Yet all of the skills mentioned above are incredibly important, and can have lasting benefits for your career progression. Any salesperson who masters all of these skills will be well-positioned to rise up the ranks, and secure a future place in management.
Why are sales skills important?
Sales skills are important because so many of them are transferable. Listening skills and empathy are vital for sales, but they’re also key for managing teams, and successfully communicating a message. Being able to construct an argument, tell a story, and convince someone of your position is key for sales, but also for higher level negotiations, both internally and with external partners.
Modern sales is also intertwined with digital literacy. Being able to analyse and utilise data, communicate effectively through text as well as speech, and craft a convincing slogan or turn of phrase are all key skills that will benefit you in almost any career. Beyond all of this, key communication skills have also been impacted by the pandemic, and the phenomenon of digital isolation. Mastering these skills today puts you in a small group that’s uniquely positioned to succeed in the modern world of work.
What are the four basic skills of a sales representative?
The four basic skills of a sales representative are often summarised as:
1. Communication
Though broad, nothing is more important for sales than effective communication skills. One way to delineate this further is physical and digital communication skills. Physical skills would include conversation skills, but also non-verbal skills like reading and managing body language, and making consistent eye contact. It also means being a good listener as well as a good talker, understanding the customer’s needs and honing your messaging in response.
Sales also increasingly includes digital communication skills. While many sales positions may still involve minimal online work, denying yourself the option to improve your digital communication will limit your progression. Gaining a better understanding of how to formulate and write a compelling email or proposal will help to improve your in-person skills, and ensure the relationships you’ve built up in person don’t fall away over time.
2. Persuasion and negotiation
Though innately linked to communication, persuasion and negotiation tend to be categorised separately. More than just listening to and understanding the customer, you need to be able to formulate a convincing argument, and tweak it on the fly as the customer responds. This is the process of negotiation, where you answer questions and scepticism in a way that affirms what the customer is saying, but without ceding ground on your own position.
Everyone ultimately needs to be convinced not just to part with their money, but to choose your product or service over that of a myriad competitors. Doing this is a back-and-forth process that involves persuading the customer that your option is the superior one, but also affording them the feeling that their concerns have been allayed, their questions have been answered, and that they’ve gotten away with a great deal.
3. Product knowledge
It’s hard to form a coherent argument when you don’t know what it is that you’re selling. This isn’t just a case of knowing the specs or features of a product inside and out, but also having an innate understanding of how it will be used. If you’re selling a car whose primary selling point is its off-road handling, but your customer doesn’t care about that, you need to be able to illustrate situations where that could come in handy.
Part of this is knowing what the competition is selling. If there’s a seemingly similar product on the market that’s undercutting your prices, you need to know what features distinguish your offering, and where the comparative value is coming from. It also helps to have case studies, drawing on examples where similar customers have benefitted from and enjoyed the feature set provided by a product or service.
4. Time management
Sales is also full of blind alleys. You can often feel like you’re seconds from a successful sale, only to come away empty-handed. Part of this is communication and people skills, and being able to intuit when someone is wasting your time. But it’s also a case of considering how your time is best spent, and the quickest way to reach your goal without antagonising someone or putting them off, and ultimately damaging your brand.
A large part of this happens behind the scenes. As well as training for these conversations, it’s important to have a grasp on software and processes that can help you better manage your time, and track your outcomes. CRM software will form a large part of this, but it’s also helpful to have a methodology for setting and achieving goals, and be able to manage daily tasks to ensure you’re making consistent progress.
How to build sales skills
As with any role, learning how to build sales skills often comes through practice. The nuances of evidencing the value of what you’re selling, adjusting your argument, and identifying pain points and presenting solutions all come with time and experience. However, there are a number of things you can do to better prepare yourself for sales, and put yourself in the strongest position to succeed.
The first is building a complete repertoire of product knowledge. You may have encountered this when giving a presentation, or being asked questions at school or in a meeting. The more thoroughly you know what you’re talking about, the less likely it is that you will be caught off guard, and the more likely it is that you’ll be able to pivot and adjust your argument to counter any resistance you find.
The second step is sales theory. It’s all well and good being able to talk to people, but you need to go into each conversation with a plan and a strategy for achieving a sale. Courses such as our Effective Sales Skills & Techniques teach you how to make a good first impression, as well as how to deploy modern techniques as part of a step-by-step approach, learning what the customer is looking for and matching the right product to them.
Finally, sales comes down to comfort in approaching and talking to people. This is harder to master, and can only really be achieved through practical training. Our Sales and Negotiation Skills and our Influence, Persuasion & Negotiation Skills courses both drill down into this, providing both a basis in theory and a safe environment to practice sales conversations and negotiations, bringing those theories to life.
–
Far from being a low or zero-skill position, sales is one of the most demanding roles in the modern workplace. As such, it’s also one of the hardest roles to fill for many businesses—a problem for anyone hiring, but an enormous opportunity for people looking for job security in a difficult jobs market.
While part of building sales skills will always happen on the job, there’s also a huge amount to be said for training and preparation. Investing time in both will not only help you to succeed in sales, but impart skills that will help you to climb the ladder, and give you a leg up in almost all areas of your life.
