15 Top Sales Skills for Career Success

You need to develop certain sales skills and qualities to help you increase sales and succeed in your career If you are a sales person or business owner.

Please, continue reading to learn about important sales skills and qualities you need to develop:

The basic idea behind business is to exchange goods and service for the profit in return.

The purpose of every business venture or organization is to maximize profit while minimizing cost.

The art of selling has become more complicated and more demanding in recent years due to some factors related to customer satisfaction and constant change in trends.

This demands that there are some skills that are needed to match the contemporary demand of selling.

What are Sales skills?

Sales skills are those requisite skills needed by sales personnel to enable them make products available to customers, as well as ensuring maximum satisfaction of customers.

15 Top Sales Skills for Career Success

Here are important selling skills and qualities you need to have to improve in your sales delivery:

1. Policy knowledge
2. Sociable
3. Passionate about selling
4. Responsibility
5. Networking skills
6. Presentation skills
7. Active listening
8. Customer engagement
9. Conflict management
10. Basic IT skills
11. Product knowledge
12. Research skills
13. Time management
14. Business acumen
15. Relationship building.

1. Policy knowledge

To work effectively as a sales person, one thing you must not ignore is policy knowledge of your business environment.

This is very important for smooth execution of your job. You need to take your time and study the business policies of the marketplace.

There are policies that control the operation of the industry. These policies are put in place majorly to ensure smooth running of the industry.

They are set up by relevant bodies in charge of the industry.

So, good knowledge of the policies that control the industry is a good way of jumping the huddles in regards to operations in the industry.

Failure to do this can make your job more difficult than you can imagine and that’s not what you wish for.

2. Sociable

A sales person is at the forefront of customer and company relations.

This means that the relationship that exists between a company and customers is largely dependent on the disposition and social skills of the sales personnel.

To this effect, sales personnel must present themselves sociable at all times when relating with customers.

This is important for the success of the job.

Your customers deserve to be greeted with smiles rather than with a worrying or frowning face.

Being sociable also means presenting yourself to be accessible to customers.

Customers will always desire to share one or two ideas or experiences and this entails that you have to create the right atmosphere for them to do so.

Without this, the relationship between the company and the customers will be strained.

3. Passionate about selling

As a sales person, if you are not passionate about selling, then it is evident that you are in the wrong job.

This is your job and for that reason that should be your major passion in the marketplace.

Not being passionate about selling will always undermine your desire to succeed in that role.

Passion for sales should make you develop yourself better to be a successful sales person the company can bank on.

As stated earlier, if there is no passion in your job as a sales person, then it means that you are not doing the right job.

This passion is seen in some ways like excitement to attend to customers’ needs, passion for sales and personal development that can help generate more sales for the company.

There is no place for lackluster performance in the industry. This can only be avoided through passion for sales.

4. Responsibility

By reason of the fact that you are faced with the prospect of meeting customers every day demands that you have to be an able representative of the company you are working for.

You have to develop the personality and mindset of a sales person.

To develop good personality in the industry or in your job, you have to be responsible.

This reflects in the way you dress, your professionalism, your speech, and your general work ethics.

This is important even in your relationship with the customers.

Also, being a responsible sales person demands that you do not engage in any activity that can demean or deface your job or your company.

5. Networking skills

This might be needed at some point in your job. This is one skill you should have to be successful in your sales career.

You have to know how to mobilize people to help bolster sales for your company.

This is with the understanding that the greatest tool for succeeding in business is getting more capable hands involved in the job.

This will demand team spirit coupled with basic networking skills.

Knowing how to mobilize people is one thing, however knowing how to work effectively with each and every one in your team is another.

This is what networking is all about.

Networking provides you with more physical and mental capacity and leverage you need to do your job.

The more capable hands you have, the more you are able to grind out more impressive results in your job.

6. Presentation skills

Presentation skill is one skill demanded for anyone in the business world.

The essence of presentation is to disseminate information and educate customers on the importance or the benefits of using the product you are presenting to them.

The presentation might be in an organized gathering in the form of seminar or impromptu upon enquiry by potential customers.

This is why you have to develop your presentation skills in case you find yourself in a position where you have to make an impromptu presentation.
Also, training yourself to become a better presenter demands that you work on your body language and confidence level precisely.

There is no way you can convince potential customers if your presentation lacks confidence and corresponding body language.

7. Active listening

A sales person deals directly with customers every day and has a lot to hear and say.

They speak to customers and in return listen to customers as a form of feedback.

Every company desires feedback from their customers by any means possible.

One of the ways this is possible is through the sales personnel.

With constant interaction with customers, the sales personnel is able to relay with the company what the customers think about the products and services rendered by the company.

Now, to be able to do this, the sales personnel must be a skilled listener.

He/she listens and grabs the minutest of details spoken by the customers.

He/she listens with patience and empathy with the sole aim of making sure he/she understands what the customer thinks about the company’s products and services.

8. Customer engagement

Engaging customers is a good way to know what they think about the products and services rendered by your company.

You need to hear what they have to say; you need to know what they think and probably know how to plan your next line of action.

To get the best feedback or response from customers, you have to be creative in your engagement with them.

By this, we mean, you have to learn to ask indirect questions that allow customers to speak out and maybe confide in you.

Customer engagement is one good way you can carry out market research, and the truth is that it is first-hand information because you are getting it directly from the customers.

So, be skillful enough to get the best response or feedback from your customers.

9. Conflict management

Conflict management entails you managing misunderstandings and other conflicts with customers in the workplace.

This is very important for you to know. There is no way that once in a while you will not have a situation where a customer has complaints about one thing or the other.

Conflict management is needed every day if you are to succeed in engaging the customers to get the best out of them.

Conflict management involves having a problem solving skill which will help you calm frayed nerves.

Also, if you manage to find yourself in a team, you also need to employ this skill.

You have to find a way to resolve conflicts between you and other sales personnel or between two colleagues in an office.

10. Basic IT skills

The world is going more digital by the day and the business world is not left out.

For the fact that you are faced with the physical presence of customers should not deter you from being able to reach out to them through other means.

Such means require some basic IT skills like basic computer literacy and use of modern day gadgets like smartphones to enhance sales.

You have these gadgets at your disposal to help you do your job anywhere and anytime of the day.

Through social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram etc., you have a golden opportunity to leverage on the power of technology to make your job easy.

11. Product knowledge

The product you are selling or marketing is the essence of your job. It is the reason you have that job.

The product you are selling for your company demands that if you want to excel in the marketplace, you have to be competent in the area of the knowledge of the product.

As a sales person, you have to have 100% knowledge of the product you are selling for the purpose of presentation.

Remember that earlier in this article, we were able to establish that presentation can be organized or impromptu.

Either way, you should be able to do justice to any presentation you are asked to do through adequate product knowledge.

Also, you have to know a lot about the product you are selling to help boost your confidence when confronted with questions or enquiries by customers.

This should be your concern as a sales person and one to be taken seriously.

12. Research skills

To be complete and well-rounded sales personnel, you have to have in-depth knowledge of how the market works.

The marketplace is your primary place of assignment and there is no way you can make any meaningful inroad into the market if you are not conversant with the way things happen in the market.

This is where you will need a lot of research skills.

When being faced with the prospect of dealing with the taste and desires of customers, one way to do that is through in-depth research on the market changes, and from there you can make suggestions to your employer on what to do to capture the market.

13. Time management

As a sales person, you don’t have the whole time in the world to do what you want to do.

This is because everybody wants to accomplish much within a relatively short period of time and you should be mindful of this fact when dealing with customers.

In the marketplace, you have a lot of things to do especially discharging your basic duty of attending to the needs of the customers and also giving advice to them on how to use the products your company offers.

All these need to be done within a relatively short time.

Also, you have to be sure to arrange your activities in a detailed manner.

This is where you have to be precise and concise with the activities you have in your hands.

You have to line up your activities, prioritize them, and work them out the way you have planned them.

14. Business acumen

Won’t it be strange for a company to have a sales person that has no adequate knowledge of how business works?

No organization desires to employ such individual no matter the position or capacity.

Business acumen is great for managers and other people at higher levels of an organization; however, it is also good for anyone involved in the business processes carried out by the company.

It is good that you have sufficient business ideas in your capacity.

It is basically for your self-development. It is for your own benefit when you have enough business ideas/acumen to help you succeed in your role as a sales person.

This should be your thing and what you should have insatiable desire to have.

15. Relationship building

In any sphere of life, relationship is paramount and instrumental to whatever success you wish to experience, whether in your personal life or your business life.

When you have a working relationship in business or marketplace, you are sure to scale through difficult huddles.

Consider the fact that your success in the marketplace is not only a question of your personal skills but how skillful you can be in harnessing the benefits of building some business oriented relationships.

This involves networking and teamwork. Understand this and be intentional in your relationship building.

Sales Skills for Resume

If you are making a resume or CV for a job that requires some sales skills and you have got them, you can highlight the major ones in the skills section of your resume.

You can make a compelling skills or competence section for your resume or CV by applying the sales skills and qualities shown above.

Conclusion

To help you increase sales for your company, you need to improve yourself by developing certain skills and qualities.

This post provides valuable ideas you can work with to develop sales skills and qualities to succeed in your career.