Top 5 Sales Skills That Will Make You Stand Out in 2019

The sales environment keeps changing. With new tech and strategies becoming widely available every year, you have to keep your sales team informed and up-to-date.

That being said, there are perennial sales skills that will always be valuable. Following are unbeatable skills that are a priority in every salesperson.

Effectively putting the point across

How well you communicate is a skill which is very important in sales. Some of the soft skills are never outdated. Anyone who has been in the sales industry knows that customers want experts who can communicate the value proposition and apply it to their unique needs.

The ability to communicate well is a salesperson's basic capacity. Much can be outsourced, but personal conversations with the prospects can never be outsourced. Chatbots fail to have an empathetic conversation; therefore, when a salesperson interacts with empathy it builds trust with the potential customer. It's more than just being a successful or eloquent speaker; salespeople have to know how to connect on an emotional level.

Ability to answer questions about the product/services rendered

Say for example you are with a potential buyer using a demo to show how your service or product will make a huge difference to their business. If something goes wrong and you have no clue how to make it right, this can be embarrassing and, ultimately, lose any chance of a deal.

It is so essential to ensure that you have an extensive understanding of your product's characteristics, advantages and limitations. If not, connecting the prospects with the right features for their needs can become an impossible task. Remember, in today’s world, selling according to the needs of the customer works best. If your product is amazing but can’t be applied to the needs of a particular customer, it is useless to them.

Critical thinker

The most significant marketing ability you need to understand that above all else is the ability to become an excellent problem-solver — one that will allow you to have a sound understanding of the tools, ways, systems, and fresh conversations that you will encounter as a sales rep.

Even if you think you have mastered the skill of problem solving, you will still encounter challenges, setbacks and failures along the way.

Being confident about the way you are addressing a problem is crucial, and being able to think critically in order to define the core problem is key. An issue will rarely be on the surface and will require effective thinking.

Building a happy relationship

Buying decisions involve more individuals now than ever before. You need to navigate the relationships between the client, the boss and the competitors. Building good relationships with the clients alone is not going to promise a smooth travel through the sales funnel.

Relationship-building is your capacity to participate efficiently with others and operate towards establishing a standard of connection that can go beyond the buying process. With your skilled communication, they can become a loyal client who will refer and also return.

Time management

"Time is money." We all understand that sentence, but as a salesperson, it is common to think that you don’t have enough time to do everything; the real problem might not be wasting time but a lack of effective time management skills.

Time is the only commodity that’s equally distributed throughout the world, because none of us can add an hour more to our day. Using the given time wisely will make all the difference.

In conclusion

There are no hard and fast rules in how you close a deal, but being honest and genuine will make you stand out. Even if you have the latest tools and tech for advancing your sales team, without interpersonal skills, your team cannot succeed.