Selling skills are the basic techniques salespeople use to connect with prospects. These tactics are typically taught through coaching and refined thr
Selling skills are the basic techniques salespeople use to connect with prospects. These tactics are typically taught through coaching and refined through experience.
Today’s buyers expect personalized experiences from sellers. To do that, sellers must rely on collaboration and empathy skills.
A solid selling skill set allows salespeople to customize their messaging to each buyer’s unique needs and concerns.
1. Know Your Product
The more you know about your product and how it benefits customers, the easier it is to connect with them. Whether you sell a physical product online or a service, making a sale is ultimately about convincing someone that your item improves their life in some way.
This can be a tricky thing to do, as buyers’ motivations vary. For instance, one customer might purchase a pair of jeans to look cool, while another buys them to feel younger. With the advent of consumer research, however, you can find out what your audience values and then tailor your approach to suit them. For example, you might inform a customer that your products are made in the US to support local industry. This can be a major selling point for many consumers.
2. Be a Good Listener
In sales, good listening is a key trait. Prospects drop hints when they talk that can help you identify their needs and how your product or service can meet those needs.
A commonly heard bit of sales advice is that you should spend twice as much time listening as talking. However, many sales reps struggle to be effective listeners and may not fully understand what this means.
Sales managers should look for evidence of active listening during the interview process, such as how candidates handle a difficult question. In addition to their verbal responses, they should also pay attention to non-verbal communication, such as trembling hands or raised eyebrows. This can indicate their level of emotional engagement with the conversation. They should also avoid jumping in with their own thoughts or ideas.
3. Turn Objections Into Opportunities
Virtually every prospect will give you some kind of objection, even those who have every intention of buying. Rather than viewing them as roadblocks, use these as opportunities to learn more about your prospects’ concerns.
For example, if a prospect says they’re too busy to hear your solution, find out why they’re saying this by asking them open-ended questions. You can then demonstrate how your solution will save them time.
Relating is a powerful sales skill that requires a high level of emotional intelligence. Many sellers mistakenly think that arguing or strong-arming a prospect will get them to change their mind, but this is not effective objection handling. Instead, use your relating skills to build respect, trust, and rapport with buyers. This will enable you to overcome any objection — including ones about budget, authority, urgency, need, and value.
4. Focus on the Minimum Action
Selling products or services that provide customer benefits requires a sales process that includes building trust, identifying and understanding customers’ needs, selecting and presenting product solutions for those needs, handling questions and objections, closing the sale and providing customer support. Developing this process involves knowing your product, creating good first impressions, listening well, communicating clearly and building relationships with your customers.
Using marketing skills like content selling and customer profiling, salespeople can tailor their messaging to the specific demographics of the buyer, ensuring that the information they deliver is relevant and meaningful. This approach helps them build more trust with buyers and move them more quickly through the sales cycle. This also allows them to cross-sell or upsell during a phone call or email exchange.
5. Build Rapport
A salesperson needs to build rapport to connect with buyers at the personal level. For instance, when presenting a client success story, the salesperson should not only list the cold facts such as the revenue increase or the number of new clients but should also talk about what they had to overcome on their way to success.
Asking the right questions is another effective way to build rapport with prospects. Relationship-building questions should go beyond the superficial and be more personalized like bonding over common interests, kids of the same age, or a shared hometown.
Using these expert tips and implementing them into your selling skills training can significantly improve your sales results. Check out Richardson’s Accelerate platform to learn more about how to master professional sales skills with short video-based learning scenarios.skills selling
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