The 5 X Selling Skills You Need To Thrive In Sales
Selling skills are a much needed and required asset in today’s busy landscape, due to level of and amount of competition in the marketplace.
The difference between landing clients for life and making a meaningful difference to your business’s bottom line – or being just another average Salesperson or Business Owner, comes down to your understanding and implementation of selling skills.
In this article, we’ll be looking at the top five selling skills you need to perform and thrive in today’s marketplace.
The 5 x Selling Skills You Need To Thrive In Sales
1 – Know Your Ideal Clients
One of the common issues Sales Professionals and Business Owners have, is that they don’t completely understand their market and ideal prospect.
If you try to sell to everybody; you’ll end up serving nobody.
Marketing is an expensive exercise, so one of your key selling skills is to identify and know exactly who your ideal audience is, and hone in on that audience well and effectively.
If you try a spray and pray approach, your message will become diluted and you’ll quickly blow through your marketing budget, as well as spend too much time on prospecting efforts that won’t go anywhere.
Niching down is important for your business success, and one of the crucial selling skills to know.
Below are two related articles to help you achieve this.
Related article: Marketing Strategy 101 – What You Need To Know
Related article: Sales Targeting Strategy – Your Complete Guide
2 – Be A Master At Building Rapport
As the famous saying goes, people do business with people they like and trust.
Rapport is the art of finding commonality between you and your potential client/ prospect. Fortunately for you; you can create rapport if you know what to focus your efforts and attention on.
There are a number of steps to build rapport at a deeper level. These steps include:
- Appearance
- Displaying a sense of relaxation and comfort
- Building commonality
- Empathy
- Matching and mirroring
To learn more about each of these areas in more depth, visit the related article below.
Related article: A Guide To Building Sales Relationships / Building Rapport
3 – Learn About The Decision Makers
Have you ever experienced speaking with people who seem interested in buying, only to find out later on that they’re not in fact in a position to make a buying decision?
We’ve all been there – and this is one of the common mistakes Sales Professionals make early in their sales careers.
A quick way to contribute to your selling skills, is to ensure you speed up the process to speak with the right decision makers.
Learn about the decision makers as quick as you can, so you can learn how to bridge the gap on what needs to happen to get in touch with them as soon as possible.
This will minimise the back and forth of speaking to people who aren’t able to make a buying decision, which cost you both time and resources.
Secondly – it’s important to get in front of decision makers, so that you can understand the methodology behind what it is they want before making a buying decision.
If you speak to people within your prospects organisation who aren’t making the buying decision, they’ll speak with the decision maker and do the selling on your behalf.
Always be in control of the sales process.
4 – Implement A Sales Process
One of the most important selling skills, if not the most important of them all – is to use a sales process. A sales process; also known as a sales methodology, is a step by step framework you can use to guide yourself to win more sales.
A sales process is generally broken up into an acronym, or simple framework to help you remember when you’re conversing with your potential clients. It helps you stay focused towards a common goal.
There are various types of sales systems and processes, which all work well when followed.
A sales process is crucial if you want to have successful selling skills, because it allows you the opportunity to see what you’re doing well and improve upon the steps you need more work with.
Without a sales process, you’ll be winging it and hoping your sales follow though, versus using a consistent and proven system.
Our sales methodology is called The 5% Sales Blueprint. The steps are:
- Rapport
- Setting pre-frames
- Sales questions
- The pain process
- Pleasure and future pacing
- Talking about money
- Presenting
- Handling objections
- Closing
If you want to learn more about each of these steps in more detail, visit the related article below.
Related article: The Sales Process – A Step By Step Guide
5 – The Last On This List Of Selling Skills; Become A Master Of Asking Questions
There is so much emphasis out there on closing or increasing your closing selling skills and techniques; that it draws attention away from something a lot more important.
This selling skill is asking open ended questions.
Open ended questions are one of the more important selling skills, because if done correctly – you can help lead a potential client to close themselves, instead of doing all the hard work of trying to hard close them instead.
Open ended questions help create clarity with your prospect on where they’re currently at, where they want to be, and the implications of inaction.
These are important topics to discuss, because without this information you won’t certainly know whether you can serve your prospect or not.
Related article: 15 Powerful Open Ended Sales Questions To Close More Sales
Related article: 10 X Powerful Sales Discovery Questions To Add To Your Toolkit
Final Thoughts
There are many selling skills out there needed to reach the top of your sales game, however the ones listed above are a powerful foundation to get you on your way to winning a lot more sales and making a bigger impact.
Do you have any other selling skills you’d like to share? If so, feel free to share them in the comments.
In the meantime, if you want to increase your own selling skills in a bigger way, feel free to register for a 7 day sales challenge here.
Want To Close Sales Easier?
Are you committed to closing sales a lot easier, and consistently?
If so, you should check out our self-paced and affordable online sales training program; The 5% Sales Blueprint.
It’ll give you everything you need to close sales consistently.
To learn more, simply click on the link below for more information.
Our Online Sales Training Program – The 5% Sales Blueprint.