Sales Skills: Examples and Strategies for Real-World Success

Foundational Sales Skills for Every Situation

In today's selling environment, sales professionals need more than charisma to close deals. They need skills that differentiate them in the market and show the value of their product or service. With thousands of articles and training courses to choose from, identifying these skills can feel overwhelming. Whether you're just starting out or are a veteran sales rep, six critical soft skills make the foundation of a great seller.

These skills include:

• Presence
• Relating
• Questioning
• Listening
• Positioning
• Checking

Each skill works in a highly dynamic and interactive way together. By mastering these skills, sellers learn to effectively create a dialogue, foster the openness and trust needed to understand needs, communicate in a compelling way, and move the opportunity forward to commitment.

Read on for examples of these sales skills and how to apply them to your sales process for long term results.

Presence

While charisma isn't the only skill sellers need to focus on, it is the starting point. Establishing presence refers to a seller's ability to project interest, conviction, energy, professional appearance, and confidence.

However, there are nuances to establishing presence. Sellers need to know how to project confidence, credibility, and conviction in body language, voice, and words.

Here are two examples that show the importance of establishing presence. The first scenario shows examples of how ineffective presence can cause sellers to lose credibility, miss opportunities, and appear defensive:

With strong presence, a seller can confidently move the conversation forward. In this example, the seller makes a connection, gains respect, and inspires trust with the buyer:

Relating

Unless there is an already established relationship, sellers are essentially strangers to potential buyers. Sellers need to find common ground with buyers to promote successful relationship building. To relate better to buyers, sellers need to build rapport, use acknowledgment, and demonstrate empathy. When sellers build trust, buyers are more likely to collaborate and share information.

Without trying to effectively relate to the customer, a first-time meeting can go awry. Watch the following example and see if you can identify why the seller is ineffective in this scenario:

In this example, the seller uses effective relating skills to connect to their buyer and set a positive tone for the meeting:

Questioning

Sellers need to instill confidence in potential customers. They can do this by asking insightful questions that compel buyers to gain a sense of ownership of the solution.

Effective communication skills during this process hinge on asking the right kinds of questions in the right manner. To do this, sellers can follow the 4 P's:

• Pursuing - Ask drill-down questions to clarify and explore something the customer said that is vague or broad. This helps to learn more about the customer’s thinking.
• Pacing - Maintain an effective space that allows your customer time to think and respond.
• Prefacing - Introduce your question with a rationale. This makes you and the customer more comfortable with the question and encourages a more complete response.
• Phrasing - Tailor your questions to be most effective. Use open-ended questions and choose words carefully to maintain tone and shape perceptions.

By using the 4 P's in their questioning, sellers foster openness and create dialogue to uncover, explore, shape, and define needs.

Without this method, sellers may miss opportunities to understand the buyer's needs. Buyers may also become defensive if they don't feel heard. See how these sales rep skills come into play in the following example of an ineffective way to question.

By implementing these skills, sellers have a much better chance of engaging their buyer and instilling confidence. This is what happens when questioning goes right:

Listening

Effective communication requires a balance of speaking and listening skills. What a seller says is just as important as what a seller hears. Active listening allows sellers to build a deeper understanding of the buyer's words and the meaning behind them. It leads to a place of mutual understanding between the seller and buyer.

To do this, sellers can follow the 3 E's of Listening:

• Equip Yourself in Listening - Identify and address personal barriers, minimise distractions, and prepare your call plan in advance.
• Engage Yourself in Listening - Give your full attention (physically and mentally) to listening. Monitor your level of attentiveness, and refocus when your attention when it shifts or fades.
• Exhibit Signs That You Are Listening - Remain silent until the customer is finished talking, use verbal and non-verbal acknowledgment, express empathy, and ask drill-down questions.

Here is an example of ineffective listening from a seller. See if you can identify areas where she faltered:

In this example, the seller executes proper listening skills throughout her conversation. In turn, the buyer feels heard and establishes a connection with the seller. The seller also has a better understanding of the buyer's needs and positions herself to address those needs.

Positioning

Buyers are only interested in a solution that stakeholders deem as valuable. To successfully position a solution, sellers must present compelling information in a relevant, tailored, and logical way to be intellectually and emotionally persuasive.

To successfully showcase a problem-solving solution, sellers need to do four things:

• Create structure to organise information and make it easy to follow and remember.
• Customise the solution to the buyer's needs by highlighting relevant differentiators and capabilities.
• Use specific examples, evidence, and quantifiable value.

Watch this example and see if you can identify where the seller falls short in his positioning.

With effective positioning, the the seller presents his information in a more persuasive and personal way. See how he embeds these skills in the following example:

Checking

Checking refers to the process of asking for feedback from the customer on something that you have said. It lets you test for reaction, understanding and/or agreement.

Checking can feel unnatural for sellers, but there is more risk to not asking and not knowing. Checking opens the doors for sellers to move the dialogue forward and gives them a chance to bring up any answers and make corrections. On the surface, sellers can view checking as risky, especially if they think the customer will react negatively. However, with the right methods, checking increases your confidence to close because you have feedback from the customer on what you have positioned.

Watch this example to see what opportunities a sales rep misses when they don't utilise checking.

In this example, the seller uses effective checking which results in an interactive dialogue and important customer feedback.

Evolving Selling Skills Into Capabilities

These six selling skills are paramount in a seller's foundation for learning. They help sellers open more doors, understand customer needs, and show more value. However, sales teams need more than these soft skills to stay agile and adaptable to market changes and growing customer demands. They need effective sales capabilities.

Sales capabilities are the combined skills, strategies, knowledge, and resources that sellers use to succeed in their roles. They are essential for achieving sales targets, building customer relationships, and driving revenue. A sales capability framework can help organisations identify what excellence looks like in various sales roles and which capabilities should be developed to drive the most impact.

16 sales capabilities comprise Richardson's Sales Capability Framework. These capabilities are:

• Market Knowledge - Staying informed about customer market dynamics, industry drivers, and competitors to effectively evaluate and strategise against their strengths and weaknesses.
• Prospecting Efficiency - Maximising customer outreach outcomes and revenue potential through data-driven prospecting and strategic customer identification.
• Prospecting Effectiveness - Developing your capability to engage prospects with value-driven messages, connect via social media, and leverage past successes to identify new leads.
• Discovery - Building proficiency in using questions and insights to uncover, understand, and shape customer needs and perceptions.
• Value Differentiation - Building trust through ethical selling and weave value throughout the customer's buying journey. 
• Solution Creation - Customising products or services to match specific customer needs and maintain comprehensive product knowledge for tailored recommendations and successful customer engagements.
• Solution Positioning - Tailoring solution messaging content and delivery methods to individual audience preferences, ensuring maximum relevance and stakeholder engagement.
• Win-win Negotiations - Reaching mutually beneficial agreements with customers that protect both sides' interests and uphold value propositions.
• Strategic Account Growth - Driving account alignment and growth through analysis, strategic planning, and cross-selling efforts.
• Sales Meeting Execution - Leading effective meetings to explore and address customer needs, and collaborate with colleagues to win sales opportunities.
• Conversational Agility - Mastering the art of connecting with customers, understanding their messages, and presenting compelling information that resonates both intellectually and emotionally.
• High-stakes Conversations - Leading critical conversations with the propensity for greater risk and reward.
• Stakeholder Management - Driving stakeholder engagement and expanding presence across the organisation for impactful strategic account outcomes.
• Selling Standards - Following your organisation's processes, guidelines, and tools throughout the sales process to ensure consistent, ethical conduct and effective communication with all parties.
• Agile Opportunity Pursuit Management - Driving customer satisfaction and sales success by blending human insight and technology to guide customers through an informed decision-making process.
• Channel Partner Management - Building and maintaining strong, mutually beneficial relationships with channel partners.

This framework takes the six critical skills to a deeper level in areas such as Discovery, Value Differentiation, Sales Meeting Execution, and Conversational Agility. For example, the Discovery capability is about how sellers learn to use questions and insights. This helps them find, understand, and shape customer needs and perceptions. The foundation of this capability stems from the soft skill of Questioning.

Evolving selling skills into sales capabilities enables sellers to perform effectively in their roles to achieve strategic business goals. With a sales capability framework, sellers develop a clear understanding of the specific, individual sales capabilities that drive results.

Contact us today to learn how we help sellers gain the skills they need to improve performance and keep a competitive edge in the