Some people are a born to be a salesperson, others aren’t. However, even if you are gifted with natural social competence and a competitive instinct, you still need to put in significant effort to become successful at sales.
Here’s five key skills that we believe are the most important in order to become unbeatable salesperson and our advice on how you can develope your skills even further!
Do you want even more tips on how to improve your sales? Read our B2B-guide!
Download 10 sales tips for B2B
Work structured to achieve your sales goals
To be able to meet your sales targets, you need to be able to work in a structured way. A good salesperson must have a good understanding of what activities they need to prioritise and what steps they need to take in order to close the number of deals (and preferably more) that have been identified as their sales target.
The best way to get structure in your day-to-day work is to map out your sales process and understand what the average value of a deal is. With this knowledge it’s easy to calculate how many calls you need to make, how many sales meetings you need to have and how many offers you need to submit in order to meet your sales targets. Read more about this in our article Control your sales process – 7 steps that build structure.
Work efficiently
Besides working in a structured way with your sales, you also need to work efficiently to ensure you get the most out of your working day. For some, this means tackling big tasks early in the day when you are able to focus the most and for others it might mean the opposite. Find ways that work for you and your workflow. It could mean that you utilise your commuting time to write meeting notes or that you assign specific timeslots for responding to e-mails, freeing you up from being distracted by reading and responding to e-mails as soon as they land in your inbox. Figure out what might be best for you and your situation and stick to it.
Care about your customers
Anyone that wants to become a succesful salesperson needs to have a geniune interest in helping and caring for their customers. When you take the time to see, listen and talk to your customers, you’ll be able to get an understanding of what your customers need. Armed with this knowledge you can put together attractive offers that actually solve their problems instead of just adding onto them. Solving their issues means your customers will be satisfied, loyal and will keep buying from you. You probably already know that it costs more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. That’s why a high customer satisfaction is critical, as it allows you to build a portfolio of recurring customers who help you achieve your goals over and over again.
Build trust
Sales, particularly within B2B, is about building professional relationships based on trust. No one wants to do business with someone they can’t rely on or trust. That’s why it’s important to always aim to build up trust in all the interactions you have with your customers.
Apart from being authentic and honest, our absolute best tip to build trust is to always deliver on your promises. Never promise something you’re not confident you can live up to. If you have promised to call the customer at a certain time, you need to do so! If you have committed to deliver a project within a certain time frame, you must ensure everything is delivered accordingly. It is always better to under-promise and over-deliver. Apart from the fact that under-promise and over-deliver builds trust with your customer, they will also be positively surprised when you deliver more than expected and/or ahead of time.
Keep up the motivation
Winning deals often involves numerous cold calls, many rejections and alot of tedious administrative tasks . There are no shortcuts to success! You have to find ways to keep your motivation up and keep pushing forward, even if you lose five deals in a day. Be mindful of when you start to lose your motivation and be aware of how to keep it up and regain your focus.
Do you find it draining when you experience a lot of rejections during your sales calls? If so, estimate how many rejections you have to get through to get a “yes”. Knowing what your hit rate is (Read more about hitrate in our article Control your sales process – 7 steps that build structure) makes it a lot easier to get through all the rejections, as you know they are simply steps on your way to a successful deal. Don’t give up, keep going and sooner or later you’ll get more sales!
Are you looking for more tips about sales? Read our guide with 10 tales tips for B2B!