Essential selling skills to master whether you are starting out on your sales career, maybe you have just completed your onboarding sales training or you are already an experienced salesperson in reaching out to customers. Hopefully this list of essential selling skills will make you feel more confident in all aspects of selling to customers. In this article, we’ll focus on some practical and essential selling skills to include in your sales tool bag to act as points of reference in your sales activity. Essential Selling Skills from Theory to Practice OK, firstly we all know that it’s essential for you to develop a whole range of selling skills in order to do your job successfully. A lot of sales training programs fail to engage salespeople due to outdated methodologies or delivery channels. Sitting through lengthy presentations or reading outdated training materials will probably not help you in completing every day-to-day sales tasks. To be effective, you need to acquire selling skills that focus on the actual activities you do and can easily relate to as you go about selling.   Additionally, as you go about learning and acquiring more knowledge on the essential selling skills, research shows it’s best to do this in bite-sized sessions or micro learning. You can begin by listing out all the skills you need in your current sales role. Prioritize the areas or sales stage where you may have a gap. Then break them out into manageable chunks so that they are easy for you to learn and implement in your role. For instance, instead of reading up on your sales playbook for an hour, think about dividing your learning into shorter, five to ten minute video lessons or modules. These will be much easier to absorb with the added benefit of fitting into your daily schedule. Selling Skills to Consider. Any sales training topic you wish to focus on should be related to your own goals and the selling skills gap you have identified. For the more inexperienced salesperson amongst us, you may want to brush up on the basic selling skills such as discovery questioning, value propositions etc. Then, you can go about learning the more advanced sales skills such as negotiation skills, presentation skills etc. You could even list out different skills based on the type of customer you interact with, inbound v outbound or map your selling skills to your companies sales process. Here are the most essential selling skills and topics you should consider adding to your knowledge base: Sales techniques to close sales: When it comes to the stage where you are closing a sale, remember that is more than just selling products or services. Every sale has to be personalized, you need to build trust along the way, understand their needs, be a credible provider of information and provide solutions that solves their pain points. Closing a sale is a process, not an event. Here are some closing essential selling skills to help you win over more customers. Solution selling: Successful salespeople provide insights and compelling perspectives on their customer’s challenges and critically how to successfully deal with those challenges. This requires you to put the buyer first, have meaningful business conversations and become a trusted advisor who solves business issues. It means understanding all your customers’ needs, values, and priorities. Then, you present customized solutions that relieves all their pain points. To close effectively, you need to be both a market and product expert. You need to have a deep understanding of all your products FAB (features, advantages, benefits). This will help you to navigate how your product or service works, provide proof, and paint the future picture of how it will benefit the customer personally and the business. Selling skills are critical when you have to decide whether your product or service is a good fit for the customer. You can only sell to a customer who is receptive to your approach based on their own internal challenges. You cannot sell to everyone so learn when to walk away.   The skill is to master how to identify if the customer has pain points and challenges that they are open to discussing. Then and only then can you demonstrate how your product or service can address their challenges. Upselling and cross-selling: When it comes to existing customers, some essential selling skills will include the ability to upsell and cross-sell. These sales skills involve offering additional benefits that complement the customer’s existing situation. To generate revenue, remember that the decision by a customer to invest more money is much easier than the decision they made on investing in the initial purchase. The reason upselling and cross-selling is so valuable in the sales strategy is because they maximize the potential of each and every phone call. Up-selling involves using your sales skills to present the customer with a recommendation for another product or service. Cross-selling is a sales technique where you will offer to present a related product or service alongside the one the customer is already using. Both techniques will have to be mastered as they not only provide additional revenue and sales for you. Sense of urgency: Creating a sense of urgency has to be genuine and not some false panic sales tactic. The customer must feel the need to make a purchasing decision because the pain and challenges you have gotten them to accept, cannot be tolerated much longer. If the pain acceptance is missing, then it’s doubtful any urgent sales tactics will work. If executed correctly, the customer will be motivated into action, now you can layer a sense of urgency on top of the pain.  The urgency could be time based, offer based, implementation based or even FOMO (fear of missing out) on the opportunity presented.    Account-based selling: With these essential selling skills, you prioritize higher value, targeted accounts that match your company’s ICP (ideal customer profile). Account based selling involves you conducting deeper levels of research into markets, profiles, news, industry,Essential Selling Skills Easily Mastered

In this article we discuss the essential sales skills that every salesperson should seek to master as selling moves into the next phase of its evolution. Nearly every sales skill that is essential for engaging buyers today can be acquired with regular sales training. The world of selling is moving fast around us, moving towards digital, moving towards soft skills and moving towards helpful consultative selling without the hard sales pitch. Regardless of how we consume our sales training, the program content should ideally target the essential sales skills. Make sure the online sales training program includes some of these sales skills. Soft Essential Sales Skills Salespeople who excel at the soft skills outperform their competitors by more than 30%, outperform them in areas such as close ratio, size of sales, and customer retention. Success in today’s marketplace is all about the soft skills. Formal qualifications and technical skills are only part of the requirements for the modern sales professional. ‘Soft skills’ and personal attributes are just as important to success. To handle interpersonal relations. To take appropriate decisions. To communicate effectively. To navigate the sales environment. To make good impressions and impact. To gain professional development. To compliment hard skills. To building relationships based on empathy. To demonstrate intellectual curiosity. To be comfortable with new experiences. To demonstrate flexibility when things change Soft Skills. The relationship building skills, the skills that encourage our prospects and customers to know us, like us, and trust us. They determine how we act. While the line between the two can get blurry, they are distinct sets of skills and all of us are going to need both. Emotional Intelligence Emotional Intelligence is our ability to attend to and use our inner experiences (both good and bad) in a more mindful, productive way for our sales career. Developing our emotional intelligence involves cultivating our curiosity (business and personal), growing our knowledge, and producing new ways of looking at things. On the surface, it’s a repetitive process. So, we will need consistency and patience. Tending to our emotional intelligence brings new opportunities from discovering a new sales tactic, having a eureka moment, connecting the dots between two issues, getting involved in a lively sales conversation with a customer. Emotional intelligence will and should always be present in sales, even more so with the implementation of automated processes and AI. As long as we serve humans, we need human empathy to balance the impersonality. Communication Skills In sales, communication is the sum of all the things we as salespeople do when we want to create understanding in the mind of a customer. It is a bridge of meaning and purpose. It involves a systematic and continuous process of telling, listening, and understanding.” Effective communication happens when we follow the basic principles of professional communication skills. These can be abbreviated as 7 Cs, i.e., clear, concise, concrete, correct, coherent, complete, and courteous. The right sales training course can provide us with the skills we need to develop effective communication and will include techniques such as: How to ask open-ended questions. The ability to convey your views. How to be open without compromise. Observing emotions and feelings. Constructing a sales conversation. Offering feedback and opinions. Verbal and non-verbal language.   Develop Your Sales Mindset Essential sales skills include understanding that today, salespeople operate within a complex, demanding, and dynamic working environment where we are prone to experience an array of different emotions through our various interactions with customers, managers, and co-workers. Sales training programs should help us to grow our sales mindset. By having a growth mindset, we can develop our abilities through hard work and dedication. We understand that all of us can improve or learn more about sales or life in general, as long as we put in the effort. The law of attraction is about focusing our thoughts so we can take actions that lead us to the things we want. Expectancy theory states that we generally get what we expect; if we listen to the things that we say to ourselves, our thinking shapes our results. Create a Sales Habit Loop Learning about selling or new sales skills, should lead to a relatively permanent change in our behavior as a result of experience. Deliberate practice involves attention, rehearsal and repetition and leads to new knowledge or sales skills that can later be developed into more complex knowledge and skills. Research shows that what pulls that desire out of us and turns it into real–world action is not our level of motivation, but rather our plan for implementation. Salespeople who make a specific plan for when and where you will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through. Essential Sales Skills Includes Listening We speak at around 100 – 125 words per minute but think at around 500 words per minute.  This means that we need to concentrate on what is being said and the meanings to stop our thoughts from straying.  This is the essence of Listening. When we deliberately enter into a sales conversation with a fixed purpose of listening for what’s different, we all hear more. We become more actively engaged. Our minds will be less likely to wander and fill in the blanks. We’ve all developed certain habits when it comes to listening. We prioritize and filter for certain types of information. We respond differently to different types of delivery. We tune out, without realizing it, when style or substance doesn’t resonate with us. Understanding our own listening habits can help us heighten our awareness and become more versatile in our listening. We become more receptive even when what’s being said (or how it’s being said) is less appealing to us. Learn Negotiating The Close In sales negotiation, we have to make choices that impact the likelihood of achieving a successful outcome. To get the best outcome, it’s important we know the steps involved in the negotiation process. One of the essential sales skills, negotiation involves a buyer and a seller finding an acceptable solution to an identified problem. Successful sales negotiators control the sales process and come away with a result they’re satisfied withThe Essential Sales Skills