Many people think that selling is a talent that you are either born with or without. This is understandable because one of the key skills in selling is the power to persuade, something that a large part of the population seems to be able to do perfectly. Even so, selling involves more than persuasion. You need hard skills like pipeline management, research, negotiation, and product knowledge to succeed in sales. These are what you get in formal sales training. Besides these, it is crucial to have the soft skills, or interpersonal competencies critical to relating easily with others for you to successfully generate more sales.
You will find it easier to relate with buyers when you have the right soft skills. Clients mostly struggle to connect with salespeople that solely master data and facts then recite them. Below are five soft skills that salespeople should master in order to prospect and sell effectively.
Relationship Building
Most people confuse relationship-building for building rapport when complimenting buyers and talking about shared interests. However, the best salespeople use their ability to build rapport as a tool for building lasting relationships with customers to guarantee repeat business and build brand loyalty. Clients will readily respond to people who they think understand their positions, challenges, and priorities.
According to statistics by Brevet, only 13% of clients believe salespeople understand their needs. Relationship building centers on trust and an inherent desire to help people. This skill emanates from listening keenly to learn what a client needs rather than simply answer questions. The best salespeople should listen like friends, clarify issues while taking notes, and share positive stories with clients.
Emotional Intelligence
The sales process comes with different emotions. Salespeople need the emotional intelligence to understand and control their emotions even after they have a bad experience with clients. This soft skill also helps them to understand and know how best to respond to a client’s feelings. Four abilities encompass emotional intelligence, which include the capabilities to:
- Understand how emotional language affects the sales process.
- Perceive emotions from facial movements, body language, and voice.
- Use the right emotions at specific times to elicit desirable responses from clients.
- Manage emotions, more so negative ones, to accomplish set objectives.
Effective Communication
Between sending emails, talking on the phone, and giving demos, salespeople spend most of their time communicating. Solid communication skills are essential in order to get ideas across when you realize that only 3% of clients trust sellers. Salespeople should persuasively and clearly get their points across without going through meaningless phrases to win a customer’s trust. They should also understand how to communicate with people with different backgrounds, desires, and goals.
Listening to or watching recordings of salespeople or yourself will help you notice the issues that affect your communication so that you can effectively handle them to improve sales. If you have problems communicating with clients or want to see better results when communicating with people, join our upcoming coffee talk to learn how to enhance communication skills.
Resilience
Salespeople face rejections almost daily. Without resilience, these rejections can make most of them give up on their goals. Resilience, in this case, does not mean that the person should ignore negative feelings or pretend that they have not had a difficult sales call. Instead, it is crucial to process these feelings in a way that averts burnout before moving on to the next call to give it 100%.
Unlike most soft skills, resilience is developed over time. As people become more comfortable with clients turning them down, they easily process their feelings then start with a new potential client. Salespeople should understand that their subsequent calls might be the best deals they win.
Empathy
Understanding people’s perspectives and feelings then showing them compassion is among the building blocks of a healthy relationship. When empathetic, you are well-equipped to connect and react to people on a human level. Fortunately, you can slowly nurture and learn empathy even if you are not born with it.
According to researchers from Emory University, compassion meditation can improve your ability to empathize. This is thought to be because meditation activates the brain areas that are associated with compassion. Besides enhancing your sales skills, empathy strengthens your relationships, increases happiness, and improves your emotional intelligence.
Hard Skills vs Soft Skills to Generate More Sales
Hard skills are not all it takes to be the best salesperson and generate more sales within a short time. The above soft skills will prove crucial irrespective of the industry in which you work. Unfortunately, few people are born with the right soft skills to turn them into exceptional salespeople.
It is worth investing in training sessions, tools, or apps that will help you gain the right skills. As a sales manager, you should also consider paying for the training for your staff since this investment will pay off in high sales. Practice these soft skills, improve them and master them to maximize their benefits for your sales pitch. When they become part of a daily routine, they will eventually become habitual.
