Top 20 Sales Skills Every Salesperson Must Master

The best sales team or an effective standalone salesperson can prove to be excellent assets for the organization. To hit their daily target, salespeople require plenty of knowledge of the product and marketing strategies to provide value propositions. Thus, a salesperson needs to have diverse, essential sales skills to be prolific and competent.

If you want to learn how to improve your sales skills, you are at the right place. In this article, we will take you through the top 20 sales skills every salesperson must master.

Top 20 Sales Skills and How to Master Them 

Excellent sales skills do not evolve naturally. Sales professionals should cultivate different skill sets by practically applying them in the actual market.

1. Understand the buyers' requirements: A salesperson needs to know the foundation of selling: understanding the demand of a buyer. Tools like Rafiki can help you there. Rafiki is a revenue intelligence and conversational intelligence platform that comes with unique features to organize and retrieve intelligible insights from a sales call.
2. Building a relationship with the customer: Bringing positive engagement in a conversation is an essential sales skill. Positive conversations establish long-term relationships with a mutual network that benefits both sides. Interactivity is a critical metric that determines how positive your conversations are. Rafiki measures the interactivity score of every sales rep in your team and highlights who is doing a good job and who needs improvement.
3. Sales prospecting: Most firms do not focus on precise prospecting. Unfortunately, this leads to a feeble strategic approach and projects an unfavorable impression. Sales prospecting should be the initial step to identifying potential customers. The salesperson can develop a database (using spreadsheets) of potential customers and systematically communicate with them.
4. Establish trust: Most buyers prefer doing business with people or organizations they trust. An expert salesperson must establish trust by delivering practical demonstrations or showing reports that define their product's capability.
5. Emotional intelligence: It is another powerful tool that will help you comprehend how the buyer is feeling. Many salespeople can convince their customers by showing emotions towards a product or service. If you have sound emotional intelligence, people tend to relate to you naturally and follow your guidance.
6. Time management: Salespeople should know how to respect their client's valuable time. Get to the point. Try to involve them in engaging conversation that is crisp yet clear to understand.
7. Know when to stop: A salesperson must know when to stop convincing and begin to listen to what the buyer wants. This method will make the salesperson understand the pain points and how to provide solutions adequately. Rafiki tracks the longest monologue of a sales rep and captures those who are talking too much and who are patiently listening to the customers. Interestingly, Rafiki also tracks the patience factor.
8. Storytelling: Selling a product to a customer does not demand revealing the product features only. It also involves convincing buyers by telling them about user experiences about how its features have benefited other users.
9. Product knowledge: Lack of product knowledge is not acceptable in the sales world. A salesperson without intimate product knowledge shows the organization in poor light plus wastes the buyer's time. Extensive product knowledge is a prerequisite, and demonstrating your product feature with confidence begets trust.
10. Active listening: This is an essential soft skill that requires attention with occasional follow-ups. Through this ability, a salesperson can glean complete and precise client requirements and expectations. The talk-listen ratio of Rafiki identifies how much time your reps are talking and how much listening. This instantly generated metric will help determine which reps need to focus more on listening over talking.
11. Objection handling: Not every salesperson can prevent showers of objections. Therefore, the organization must train its sales professionals to tackle complaints against the product or its features when they arise. The salesperson should not abruptly end the conversation when they face any objection. Rafiki provides you with an instant analysis of the call to track objection handling.
12. Sell over the phone: With the increased use of smartphones, field sales have shifted from face-to-face meetings to video conferences. Therefore, organizations should upskill their sales team to manage and convince their target buyers over the phone. Rafiki offers a professional salesperson to organize and retrieve comprehensible insights out of the sales call for better sales prospects.
13. Know Social Selling: Social media and social networking have become an influential part of our digital experiences. Therefore, as a sales rep, you should know how to use various social media platforms to bolster your sales process. Be it for selling directly or just for research purposes, you should know your way around all social media platforms.
14. Flexibility: Working as a sales professional sometimes turns into a whirlwind. Your meeting schedules might change, and the prospect might change their decisions and choices. You, as a salesperson, must adapt to the change of plans in a constructive manner.
15. Presentation skills: Gracefully presenting the demos of your product feature is an added advantage. Your presentation should also not be too product-centric. The sales team should focus more on the buyer's requests and requirements.
16. Negotiation skills: The salesperson should perform a disciplined negotiation process after offering the proposal.
17. Optimism: A salesperson witnesses many hung-up calls, blocked numbers, unanswered emails from leads, and other rejections while approaching product sales. The salesperson should be optimistic and accept those rejections with grace.  
18. Technology: A comprehensive grasp of technology can allow you to perform some tasks quicker. You can take advantage of several sales applications or conversational marketing software.
19. Policy knowledge: As a salesperson, you should be exceedingly aware of your company's policies and governance matters.
20. Closing techniques: It is harder to close a deal than to convince the buyer. Organizations should train their salesperson to identify the appropriate moment to ask for a monetary commitment and what to say before closing the deal. Rafiki makes it incredibly simple to learn successful closing techniques by analyzing all customer calls to see winning and losing patterns in sales. Click the image to book a demo and experience the tool.

Conclusion 

Developing constructive sales skills and knowing where and how to improve sales skills is an art.

Rafiki is the tool you need to possess to master that art. It includes Unlimited Conference meetings, Conversational topic tracking, advanced topic level summarization, 2-way synchronization with CRM, Advanced Smart Alerts on Revenue Intelligence such as Deal Risks, customer-market intelligence, API integration, Custom data retention policies, etc.

Apart from these,  users can make custom integrations, focus on revenue-tracking topics, and receive insight. With the Rafiki AI transcription feature, organizations can quickly segregate the vital segments of the call. 

Contact Rafiki to know more.