Member Article

Sales Tips – “Skills, Skills, Skills”

It was an interesting day at the NE LEP conference on Friday at the Centre of Life with many interesting comments and discussions. The most interesting comment that got my attention and made me sit up was from Lord Christopher Haskins. He said that the key to success for the region was to focus on “Skills, skills, skills!”

This is a sentiment that I endorse and started to think about the skills needed to be successful in sales as well as business.

Here is the thing! To a lot of people sales skills are a mystery and believe that to be successful in sales you have to be born a natural salesperson and must have the gift of the gab. A lot of people also don’t want to be thought of as a salesperson as in their own experience sales people are shifty, untrustworthy, selfish and only in it for what they can get.

However to be successful in business and sales we all need to acquire sales skills. A lot of people believe that they can’t learn new sales skills but the fact is that anyone can learn to be an effective salesperson. Skills can be taught and improved you are born with talents, but skills you can learn

There are lot of different ways to approach sales with several different methods but they tend to rely on the same skills.

So I thought I would share what I believe are the most important skills every sales person must have. Today I will give you three skills and follow them up over the next two weeks with a further six sales skills.

1. Prospecting

Without a full pipeline of opportunities every sales person will struggle to meet their targets. This is the skill that most people who attend our courses claim they will never be any good at it because they just don’t like prospecting. Prospecting is the cause of a lot of salespersons frustration.

Sadly a lot of companies don’t teach the sales people how to prospect effectively. The two favourites are networking and cold calling.

However there are other ways to find opportunities including; implementing a referral process and using social media such as LinkedIn more effectively. You have to keep improving your prospecting skills so that you create more opportunities.

2. Smart Questioning

All sales people know that they have to ask questions to find out if they can help the customer and see if their product/service will be of benefit to them. The fact is that this is a skill that the majority of sales people fail to execute effectively

Too many sales people ask easy questions that don’t really get the answers they were looking for such as “What are your needs?” As a result, they fail to differentiate themselves from the competition, demonstrate their expertise or find out the compelling reason the sale will go ahead.

Professional sales people know the value of smart questions and ask questions that encourage their customer to share details and information about their business that will help put together a solution that will be of great benefit to them.

Smart questions get the customer thinking about their particular need or issue. If you ever hear one of your customers saying “That’s a good question.” .You will know you have got them thinking and you will get a great answer full of relevant details and information. One such question could be something like “What is the impact to your business if you do nothing?

Asking smart relevant questions will achieve two things, one you will stand out from your competition and two you will learn more about your customer’s specific situation

3. Active Listening

It is brilliant if you can ask smart questions but if you don’t listen carefully to what is being said you may be missing out on some great information and ultimately may miss a big sales opportunity.

To improve your listening skills is difficult for some people but it is actually very easy. It means asking clarifying questions when the other person says something that you don’t quite understand. It means when you are on the phone you don’t try to do other things at the same time such as sending emails or looking at your twitter account. Active listening means you give your full attention to the other person. One effective way to show your customer you are listening and understand what they have said is to recap and summarise the points they have mentioned.

Over the next two weeks I will give you another six skills to focus on in the meantime if you want to improve your sales skills we have several learning opportunities with our newest offering;

Selling skills – our new on-line sales training programme that give you access to some great tips, techniques and strategies for 12 months. You can find more information on our video by clicking here

If you want more information on our any of our sales training offers take a visit to our site http://www.arrowsales.co.uk/ or email me at michael@arrowsales.co.uk or phone us at 0191-2267366

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Michael McMeekin .