Top 17 Sales Executive Skills to Stay Top on Your Job

Top 17 Sales Executive Skills to Stay Top on Your Job

This post provides exhaustive information on the skills and qualities a sales executive needs to have to be successful in their career.

Please, read on:

Who is a Sales Executive?

A sales executive is like a manager who oversees the activities of the sales department, answering queries, responding to questions from clients, and offering advice and sampling new products.

One-on-One Coaching

It is understandable that sales executives are always busy. This makes it tough to stay on top of every activity on your to-do list, and most often, one-on-one coaching becomes difficult to achieve.

But in order to help your sales team reach and achieve its goal, that needs to change.

Regular coaching is essential to your team to be more productive, more confident, and more skilled at sales activities.

If your sales team is properly coached or tutored through a variety of customer relations, they will be better prepared to handle difficult and adverse situations.

And this means they will be able to attract more sales.

Effective coaching will allow your team to develop confidence in themselves since your methods are proven.

This will better equip them to be more productive and efficient in their job.

Coaching should be your thing as a sales executive or manager.

Encourage Continued Learning

Starting your salespeople off on the right path with comprehensive sales training ensures that you avoid many common problems that face the sales industry.

It is important to train your team periodically to keep the information fresh in their minds.

This will not only help them perform better but also gain relevant experience to help them to be successful in the long run.

Periodic training should be seen as a priority.

A great sales management strategy to enable you do this is to create a strategic training plan for the next sales year and make sure your team sticks to the slated plan.

This training should reintegrate previous trainings, while also adding in new strategies for them to continue building their efficiency.

Use Technology

No sales executive that wants to succeed overlooks the importance of current technology in the industry.

The use of technology is so paramount that there is nothing, absolutely nothing meaningful do you want to achieve in the sales department that does not require the use of technology.

The use of technology is very important to sustain the flow of information in and outside the workplace.

Information as you know is a livewire in every company.

You have to keep the information going round particularly towards the customers.

Also, technology makes your work easier in the area of keeping records of sales, inventories, and other facets of the sales department.

This is through the use of modern apps that can aid the above mentioned functions.

Never undermine the use of technology.

Streamline the Sales Process

This is the act of compressing or minimizing the sales process.

This is invariably an act of reducing complexities in the sales process.

One of the things that cause delays or mismanagement of time in the sales process is the use of unnecessary sales processes.

When you are able to streamline your sales process, you save time and this goes a long way to helping to reduce the amount of time needed to attend to one customer.

Look inwards and know which processes are not fully necessary and remove them.

Remember that as a sales executive, you are one of the brains that the company relies on to monitor sales processes and what is needed to increase sales.

So, this is one of your duties, which you must take time to study and know what processes are not worth the stress.

Establish a Good Company Culture

This point buttresses your role as an advisory one too, advising the company you represent on some of the cultures it needs in order to have the full backing of the customers in the marketplace.

Some of these cultures can endear the company to the customers out there.

One of the strong company cultures your company can promote is to sponsor some relevant events.

This can serve as a means of advertising the company to the public.

People are endeared to organizations that sponsor and identify with meaningful events in the society.

Also, it is pertinent that your company does not get involved in events that divide the society.

It will definitely tell on the sales of the company.

So, these and many others are some of the good cultures that the company needs to imbibe.

Understand Your Sales Team’s Differences

Your sales team is made up of different individuals with different ideologies.

This is a blessing in disguise but when not properly managed by you, it can be catastrophic.

This is where team management comes to play. You need to find a way to integrate everyone in the team without any problem.

Also, this means that you have to coach them on individual basis.

This is actually a difficult task to accomplish but very rewarding if well executed by you as the team manager.

Trying to ignore the individual differences of your sales team may have undesirable effect on the team performance.

When handling the differences in your team, show no bias or favoritism, it kills team spirit.

Team spirit must be maintained and encouraged and must start from you the team manager.

To help you do this, you learn the art of people management.

Inspire Your Team

Best sales executives are people known to inspire their team to go out of their way and make things happen.

It is possible for your team to exceed your imagination through their unprecedented effort and returns.

But guess what? They need you to start off the campaign on a good note.

Your team needs to be inspired. You need to make them believe that they are more than capable of doing what they think they cannot do and achieve amazing results.

You just have to be that reference point of what inspiration and motivation is about.

If you want to be an inspiration to your team, then you have to be result oriented and be an inspiration to yourself.

You have to improve yourself and become what you want your team to become.

If you can do this, then be rest assured that you will have that dream team that you desire.

Drive Competition

One of the ways to derive productivity in your team is to encourage healthy competition.

Where there is no competition, people don’t see the need to improve their skills in the team.

Encourage healthy competition and watch them do their best.

It is important to let your team know that competition is part of the game and not something to baulk at.

They should embrace it and make themselves better from time to time in order to stay relevant in the team and produce amazing results.

However, care should be taken to make sure the competition is healthy at all times.

If this is not well handled, it can turn out to be a nightmare to you the sales executive and this can have fatal effect on the output of the team.

So, encourage healthy competition and keep them competitive.

Get to Know Your Team

How much do you know your team? Do you know the team as a group or on individual basis?

Knowledge of your team is a sure way of establishing a good and a winning team to help achieve the designated goal set out for you by the company.

Knowing your team implies having basic knowledge of every member of your team.

This includes their strengths and their weaknesses.

You can’t say you know your team if you don’t know the natural tendencies and what keeps them going.

One good advantage of knowing your team is that it helps you know how to use the team to achieve maximum results set out for you by the management.

Know the individual strengths and weaknesses of the different individuals that make up your team.

This is a sure way of delegating the right individuals to the right jobs.

Build a Winning Sales Team

When you know your team, the next thing is how to build the team to become a winning one.

A winning team is not born overnight, it takes time to build.

So, you must be ready to take up the challenge of building your team to overcome the limitations facing them.

Coaching is one way you can build a winning team.

Without effective coaching, it is emphatically impossible to build a winning team.

You need to explore their minds and show them what to do as well as build resilience in them to do better than they have been doing.

Also, you have to keep the team positive in order to make it a winning team.

Sometimes, the team goes through difficult spells, it is your duty to inspire them, encourage them, and bring them back to their feet.

You have to be their inspiration.

Identify Sales Team’s Barriers to Success

What problems have you identified as the barrier to your sales team’s success?

If you can identify these barriers, congratulations because you will have an idea on what to do to lift the embargo, else the problems will persist in the team.

As earlier stated, different individuals make up the team and the different individuals have to be effectively managed in order to achieve the team’s goals both in the short and long term.

One way of managing your team is to ensure that you identify their individual problems and work towards helping them overcome them.

Some of the problems a team can face are fear of failure, inferiority complex within the team, unhealthy competition, and insufficient skillsets to meet contemporary needs in the market.

Take note of these problems and work towards providing a lasting solution to them.

Help Your Sales Team Create Effective Sales Plans

As much as the team needs to work as a team, it is important that they carve out a niche for themselves through individual brilliance and dedication.

This is one area where your coaching skills as a sales executive comes to play.

To achieve this, you have to set the example through personal and detailed planning of your own activities.

Your team needs to see you as a reference figure for what they need to know about effective planning and execution of plans.

Engage them in talks and share your experience and ideas with them on how to become a better sales team.

They need to hear you advise them out of your wealth of experience.

Your experience will help them improve their personal sales plans.

Organizational Skill

As a sales executive, your organizational skill should be top notch. There is no way around it.

Working with a team demands that you organize the team and guide them in the daily activities.

If you can do this, then you will be able to curtail excesses within the team.

Also, understand that if your team is not organized, the chances of the team achieving its goals and objectives will be very low because a lot of time will be wasted doing things that may not be beneficial to the team’s aims and objectives.

Organizational skill should be exhibited at all times.

Leaving the team to do what they want is an invitation to failure on your part.

Try as much as you can to put the team under control not with aggression but well explained rules and regulations that need to be adhered to.

Listening Skills

Are you patient enough to listen to what people in the workplace think about you?

How often do you give room for appraisal from the members of your team?

When working as a sales executive, you need to give room for feedbacks, which comes through patiently listening to what people have to say about you.

When you listen to people, you will know where and when to change certain things about your work ethics.

This can prove to be helpful in the long run. But if you are not considerate and patient to listen to what people have to say, you will miss it all.

When listening, remove sentiments from your mind.

Sometimes, what you might hear from people in the workplace might sound negative to you but understand that criticism is part of what you witness when executing your job in the workplace.

Responsibility

Responsibility in the workplace is your ability as a sales executive to perform your job at the stipulated time.

Every job given to you has a level of expectation it comes with.

So, responding to this and accomplishing your goal is the responsibility we are talking about.

Carelessness is one thing that can make you irresponsible in the workplace.

Try to be careful and detailed in whatever is assigned to you by the employer and give it your best, anything less than your best should be seen as improper in your sight.

Also, to be a responsible sales executive, it is not expected of you to engage in unethical behaviors or activities both in and outside the organization.

You are the image of the company you represent and should do your best to be a good influence to others, especially your team.

Identify and Communicate Both Team and Individual Goals

As a sales executive, you cannot do without communication. That is a fact you have to deal with.

Trying to evade communicating with people in the organization or in your team will not help you establish a working relationship with the company.

You have to work on becoming a better communicator to your team, to your employer, and also to your customers.

When you communicate better, you get good responses that can help your job in the company.

The need for communication arises when you have a team you need to coach and intimate with the company’s short term and long term goals.

Business Acumen

Your knowledge about business will be the determining factor as to how far you can go in your job as a sales executive.

The more you know, the more you are capable of doing great stuff in your job.

So, go for more knowledge and add to your already impressive knowledge base.

When you understand that the business world is a competitive world, you will sit up and do whatever you can to be at the top.

And besides, your employer wants to see you improve your marketing skills and how you achieve that they may not be interested to know.

You have to know that continuous research about the market is a good way to improve your business acumen.

Don’t miss a chance to gather knowledge of the market. This will give you an edge in your job and keep you abreast with the latest practices in the industry.

Sales Executive Skills for Resume

If you are writing a resume for a sales executive position, you can create the skills section by applying the skills and qualities presented on this page.

The sales executive skills and qualities discussed in this post are what most recruiters or employers usually require for hiring for the position.

Therefore, by developing them and highlighting them in your resume will definitely make your resume stronger and increases your chances of getting the sales executive job.

Conclusion

This article has listed and explained the various skills and qualities needed to excel in the role of a sales executive.

They are contemporary and are needed from day to day to be at your best on the sales executive job.

Therefore, to be successful in your sales executive career, it’s a good idea to work towards developing them.