Becoming a better salesperson isn’t just a great way to boost your confidence and impress your boss. The more sales success you achieve in your role, the more you can potentially earn. With extra commission and bonuses online, it pays to be passionate about your job.
However, while just about anyone can start a sales career with virtually no experience or background knowledge, it takes time and commitment to become a top seller. Cultivating the right sales mindset, honing your strategies, and developing new skills takes work.
Today, we’re going to be sharing our top tips for anyone interested in becoming a better salesperson, and taking their commission to the next level.
Sales Success: What Makes a Good Salesperson?
It’s easy to assume that becoming an effective salesperson is all about harnessing good technical skills. Sales professionals need to be masters of things like cold calling and emailing, social selling, and similar strategies to achieve their revenue quotas.
However, it’s worth remembering that boosting your sales performance also means cultivating the right soft skills and attributes. The top performers in sales tend to have a few crucial characteristics in common. Notably, leading salespeople are:
- Friendly: Good salespeople know how to build relationships with customers. They’re friendly, welcoming, and fun to talk to. If you can’t connect to customers on an emotional level, you can’t be a great salesperson.
- Enthusiastic: As a sales rep, you’re going to encounter a number of challenges, rejections, and difficult situations. A good level of enthusiasm for your role and the business you serve is how you stay motivated.
- Analytical: Great salespeople know how to do their research. A top sales performer will always go into a conversation with a prospect with information about their needs, a comprehensive sales strategy, and a good knowledge of buyer personas.
- Thorough: Part of being a great salesperson is knowing how to get to the bottom of a problem for a customer. Through active listening and careful analysis, you can position yourself as a trustworthy source of insight for your customer.
- Adaptable: Salespeople need to be able to bounce back from failures, and adjust to different situations. You should be able to learn from your successes and failures, pivot your approach when necessary, and stay positive in the face of rejection.
- Confident: Confidence is key in sales calls and conversations. If you can’t show your potential customers that you believe in yourself, why would they believe in you? Nurturing your self esteem and confidence will make you a good fit for a sales role.
- Empathetic: The best sales professionals have a high degree of emotional intelligence. They know how to not only master their own emotions, but connect with the feelings of their prospects and leads, so they can compassionately address pain points.
Tips for Becoming a Better Sales Person
For most professionals, sales success is something that increases naturally over time. The more experience you gain in the world of sales, the more effective you’ll become in your role. You’ll learn from your sales team, your managers, and every call you make or email you send.
However, there are steps you can take to improve your chances of becoming a good salesperson too. Here are our top tips to help boost your performance.
- Adopt a positive sales mindset
The right “sales mindset” is everything to a great seller. As mentioned above, in the world of sales, you’ll need to be resilient. It’s important to stay positive, even when you’re faced with rejection, and keep following up with customers, no matter what. Adopting a growth mindset, and committing to constantly expanding your knowledge will help you to become more successful.
At the same time, it’s worth thinking about your mindset when approaching customers and prospects. Rather than presenting yourself as just another “salesperson” to leads, take a more educational, helpful approach. Try to approach each customer with a focus on how you can help them overcome their pain points and achieve their goals.
- Know your Customers
Having a good understanding of your buyer personas can be extremely useful in the sales landscape. The more you know about your target audience, the easier it will be to determine whether a prospect is a good fit for your organization. That means you waste less time on the wrong leads.
Understanding your buyer personas can also help a lot with your sales strategy. It ensures you can customize every sales pitch and call to the needs of your target audience. The more you customize your sales strategy to what really matters to your audience, the more likely you’ll be to close deals regularly, and build long-term relationships.
- Use the Right Processes
Most companies will give their sales professionals a measurable and repeatable sales process to follow. That’s because following a consistent strategy often makes it easier to guarantee results. However, as you spend more time developing your sales skills, you might find that you need to adapt your process to unlock better results.
Analyzing the outcomes of your sales efforts regularly and making changes to your process based on what you learn will help you to reach your quotas more efficiently. High performing reps know how to monitor their own metrics, and use those insights to their advantage.
- Develop the Right Knowledge
Knowledgeable sales professionals are always more successful than their counterparts. Learning as much as you can about your target market and audience is a good first step. However, it’s also important to have a clear understanding of the product or service your selling.
Knowing exactly what kind of issues your solution can address, and why it’s beneficial to your customers means you’ll be able to craft more convincing sales pitches. Plus, a high degree of knowledge will make it easier to overcome objections and answer questions in sales calls.
- Use your Time Wisely
The best salespeople always say, “time is money”. Every moment you spend on the job needs to be used wisely, otherwise you could miss out on opportunities. With that in mind, think about how you can make your day more efficient, and organize your time correctly.
Use calendars and apps to track your productivity and look for ways to reduce any roadblocks in your sales process. Think about how you can automate or simplify certain tasks. For instance, could you use an email tool to reach out to customers during a follow-up process in bulk? You could even look at using AI to help you with crafting emails and messages.
- Work on your Emotional Intelligence
As mentioned above, emotional intelligence is one of the core characteristics of good salespeople. A high “EQ” will help you to become more resilient, so you can deal with rejections and objections without feeling overly stressed and overwhelmed.
Good emotional intelligence also encourages you to empathize with your customers, using tactics like active listening to build rapport. Working on your emotional intelligence will help you to build stronger relationships, and reduce your risk of losing important deals.
- Learn from your Sales Team
The people in your sales team aren’t just there to take some of the pressure off you. They can also offer new perspectives and insights that contribute to you becoming a better salesperson. Pay attention to the wins and losses of the people around you and analyze what caused them.
Collaborate with other people whenever you can, and look for opportunities to learn in your existing team. You could also look into finding your own mentor, who can help guide you through the process of enhancing your sales strategy over time.
- Know When to Walk Away (and when not to)
Crafting a good sales mindset sometimes means knowing when you should double-down on an opportunity, and when you should walk away. There are times when the best thing you can do to close a deal is keep following up with a prospect until you overcome their objections.
However, as you’ll learn through your career, there are also times when it makes more sense to walk away. If you discover the prospect you’ve been working with isn’t a good fit for your company after all, there’s no shame in calling it quits.
Learn to Be a Better Sales Person
All of the steps above will help you on your path to becoming a better salesperson. However, there’s one more thing you can do too – expand your education. The world’s top sales professionals set themselves apart from the crowd with a constant thirst to learn.
Many of the best top performers achieve their goals because they’re committed to constantly seeking out sales training opportunities. They take advantage of the coaching their company offers, but they also look for certifications and learning experiences independently.
If you want to guarantee sales success in your future, expanding your education is a great way to get started. Join the Hard Skill Exchange today to learn all about how you can cultivate the skills and mindset you need to become an incredible sales professional.
