Top 17 Sales Supervisor Skills to Stay Top on Your Career

Top 17 Sales Supervisor Skills to Stay Top on Your Career

This post provides complete information on the skills and qualities a sales supervisor should have to be effective on their job and successful in their career.

Please, continue reading:

Who is a Sales Supervisor?

A sales supervisor one appointed to organize, direct, plan and executive company plans in the sales department to help reach out to potential customers in the marketplace. He also serves as a middleman in the company.

Top 17 Sales Supervisor Skills and Qualities to Stay Top on Your Job

1. Communication

Communication remains a key skillset to be possessed by anyone that wants to succeed in business.

To you the sales supervisor, it is advisable to improve your communication skills as this will serve as a veritable tool to you achieving both your personal goal and company goals.

You need to establish good and effectual communication flow within and outside the company.

This is important, you need to stay in touch with your employer as well as your colleagues in the workplace.

You relay your ideas to them and know what their responses are.

Most importantly, it is through effective communication that you will be able to know what others think about your effort within and outside the company.

Try being effective in your communication and you will get more feedbacks that will help you grow in your job.

2. Problem solving

The test of your professionalism and expertise is your problem solving ability.

You are employed to solve pressing matters.

So this shouldn’t be a sort of surprise or panic to you.

It is expected that in regards to your job, you have what it takes to bring forth solutions that can solve long standing problems.

Your problem solving skills improve when you keep improving other skills you need in this job.

This may sound strange as you may ask what is the relationship between problem solving skills and others skills?

The answer is simple, the more skills you possess, the more problems you are able to solve.

When you don’t improve other skills, your ability to solve the pressing needs of your company both within and without will definitely be on the low.

So, this is the thing you need to know about problem solving skills, it works with other skills.

3. Critical thinking

The brain is to think. However, critical thinking involves taking the mind on a long journey of productive, well guided processes of thoughts.

That is the kind of thought that produces meaningful results. Shallow thinking wouldn’t do that.

When faced with difficult problems in the course of executing your job, one thing you need to do always is to engage in meaningful and focused thinking, analyzing, dissecting and bisecting the problems facing you.

Through careful analysis, you should be able to know the cause of the problems.

Critical thinking after unraveling the problem helps to find the solution to the problems under consideration.

This is however an offshoot of careful analysis of what is on ground and what can be done to make things work in regards to what is obtainable in the business world or industry.

4. Negotiation and persuasion

Dealing with both customers and fellow colleagues in the workplace is one aspect of your job where you need the ability to both persuade and convince them to believe your ideas and buy into it.

You need to develop this skill regularly.

Your employer needs your ability to persuade and convince them that you have what it takes to make more profit for the company.

If you can, then you have your way but if you cannot, it is unfortunate what may be in the long run.

As someone tasked with unraveling strategies needed to make new inroads in the market, you have to develop strong persuasive attribute.

For the customers, you have to negotiate rightly to get the best deal for your company.

Customers want value for their hard-earned money, so are bound to negotiate.

Your negotiation skills need to be stronger in this scenario for you to get the best for your company and not cause it to incur losses.

5. Interpersonal skills

Your relationship with everyone in and outside the workplace should be a major concern for you.

Believe it or not, your character and attitude plays a key role in your job as a sales executive.

When you relate well with people, you are sure to get the best out of them.

In the organization, it is important to see yourself as part of the team and not seeing yourself as someone that can work all alone.

To this effect, you have developed skills to help you maintain a good relationship with both your colleagues and customers out there.

Some of the interpersonal skills include empathy, communication etc.

These skills will not only keep you in your job, but will ensure that you really get the best from your sales team.

And when you get the best out of your sales team, you can be rest assured that your job will get better and easier.

6. Strong work ethic

As the competition in the industry gets stronger and tougher, it is important to watch out for pitfalls in your job.

Watching out for possible pitfalls can help you stay afloat in your job for a long time and actually help you to get better in it.

One of the pitfalls to watch out for is weak work ethic.

Your work ethic is important to your survival in your job.

If your work ethic is weak, then the chances of being top of your job are extremely low.

This is not to sound negative but to caution against bad or wrong work ethic.

If you want to succeed in your job, then you need to improve on your work ethics.

Be professional in your conduct as well as in your speech.

You have to exude good work ethic to please your employer and establish a good and working relationship with customers.

7. Confidence

Your performance on your job has a lot to say about your confidence.

People tend to be at their best when their confidence is sky-high.

This unlocks the best in them and makes them dare new heights and ideas in the business world.

To be top in your job, you have to put your confidence level in check at all times.

This is important to your survival in your job.

You must build your confidence and keep it high always.

This is because, your performance is sure to go down if your confidence goes down.

One aspect people struggle is gaining their confidence back after a miserable period of lack of tangible results to show for the effort they have made.

In this matter, you need to try out new things and consult a more experienced expert in the field for advice.

This will help you gain your confidence back.

8. Leadership

A supervisory role is more of a leadership role.

You have a team you need to work with, however this team needs your leadership skills to be able to do what is right and in the interest of the company.

You tutor them, lead, and organize them.

You are made a supervisor over them by your employer to oversee the affairs of your sales team.

If anything goes wrong with their input or output, you sure know what the reaction of the employer will be.

This should spur you to being a better leader every day.

As a leader, you should be able to be a teacher, a mentor, a tutor, and a reference figure to your team.

This is to say, you are expected to know better and impart relevant knowledge to your team.

This will help them become better sales teams.

9. Responsibility

Some people do say that responsibility means responding to ability.

This sounds funny but true.

In your job description, your abilities are meant to be used to fill the void that may be in your position.

You have to make sure that you do what you ought to do and at the right time.

This is what you can refer to as being responsible.

Also, in the course of doing your job, you can make mistakes but responsibility demands that you own up to your mistakes and make amends where necessary.

Don’t be afraid of owning up to your mistakes and never repeat them.

In your job, negligence of what you should do or what your team should do is tagged irresponsibility.

As a supervisor, you are supposed to monitor activities of your team and make sure nothing goes wrong at all times.

Though delegation is good, however ensure that you monitor how the delegated duty is being carried out.

10. Handling pressure

Stress is one common factor to watch out in your job as a sales supervisor.

Daily you are faced with tedious and difficult decisions to make.

This can really mount pressure on you and make you uncomfortable on your job.

However, stress management or pressure management is needed.

As a sales supervisor, it is nearly impossible to run away from activities that require your rapt attention, observation, and intervention.

This is common to people having your job description; you have to find new ways to do things in order to minimize pressure.

One good way of managing pressure is through delegation.

You cannot do everything by yourself without heaping pressure on yourself.

Sometimes, you delegate one or two persons in your team to help relief you of the pressure.

But be guided not to lose control of them at any point.

11. Time management

Managing your time and the time of others is a great skill you should have always.

Time wasted can’t be gained back.

You do know that everyone has 24 hours a day, but only the productive ones manage their time effectively.

Time management can make a big difference in the productivity of your team.

You have to also understand that when you manage your time well, you will achieve more in quite a short time.

That is the power of time management.

One way to manage your time as a sales supervisor is to delegate duties to different individuals in your team.

You should delegate duties according to the capacities of the various individuals in your team.

This is logical. The more hands to do the job, the more effective and time saving it will be to do the job.

12. Planning and organizing

You cannot talk about leadership and time management without making mention of the individual roles played by accurate planning and organization.
Before you execute a task, either as an individual or as a team, you need to plan and organize those plans.

To be successful in your job, you have to learn the act of planning and organizing your labor.

When you don’t plan your activities, you will keep struggling even on simple tasks.

Planning and organizing your team should be your daily work.

Lay down the order of activities in the team and make sure every member of the team adheres to it and follows it strictly.

This shows that the team is organized and with this, it becomes easy to achieve the company goals.

13. Learning

Life is like a bicycle, you only maintain your balance when you keep moving.

This is applicable to your job as a sales supervisor.

You keep moving forward and getting better as long as you keep improving through conscious learning.

You need to add to your knowledge base regularly.

People known to be the bigwigs in the industry are people known to be good learners who desire to know from people higher than them.

This is the secret of getting to the apex of your career.

You have to constantly improve through concise effort to add to what you already know.

You cannot talk about learning without mentioning the importance of reading.

Reading is one way you get the ideologies of successful people even without meeting them face to face. It is also an indirect form of mentorship.

14. Initiative

This is another way of expressing creativity. As a supervisor, you need to have your own initiative.

This is one skill that can help improve your efficiency in solving problems.

Your problem solving skills cannot come to the fore if you don’t make your own initiative count.

Sometimes, you will be faced with challenges and your initiative to find solution to them will be your saving grace.

You are expected to think out of the box and develop ideas that are not conventional.

Work on them and make sure to fine tune them to bring out the best in yourself.

Your initiative might be the distinguishing factor between you and your counterparts in the industry.

The industry is for the most creative people. Those are the people that enjoy more privileges than others.

So, if you want to be in that bracket, put your initiative into motion.

15. Integrity

Being a sales supervisor and a representative of your company, integrity is one thing you should have.

Integrity ensures that you do not engage in any activity or practice that can undermine the future of the company.

Such acts include, leaking company secrets or strategies, as well as engaging in other unethical activities.

You should be trustworthy in all your doings and conducts.

You shouldn’t be known to be a threat to the company through certain behavior or relationship with customers.

This is important not just for the growth of the company but also for your sustenance in your job.

Integrity breeds trust and dependency. If you cannot be trusted by your colleagues in the organization, then there is every possibility that you are not known to be a person with integrity.

This is definitely a situation you will not like to find yourself in.

16. Adaptability

Life at work is never rosy always. There is a time you experience changes both at the top and at some other points while executing your job.

You are meant to be resilient and find a way to survive despite the difficulties you might be experiencing.

This is where adaptability comes to a useful play. As earlier stated, know that at some point in your job, changes will come; it may not be business as usual.

So, sometimes you have to adapt to different conditions and avail yourself the opportunity to gather valuable experience.

Sometimes, the cause of these changes may be a change in some policies particularly from the government which demand that the method of doing certain things be changed.

In that case, you have little or nothing to do about it other than to adapt.

17. Commercial awareness

Commercial awareness is your ability to identify various ways of pushing the product to the end user, which are your target customers.

There are different methods you can apply to reach out to your target customers in the marketplace.

To reach out to your target customers, it is necessary to conduct a good market research.

Study the markets, know the latest trends and know the taste of an average customer.

Keeping a blind eye and deaf ear to latest market trends is a sure way of finding yourself down the pecking order in the industry.

Also, in your own little way, find a means of portraying the company products in the marketplace.

It is part of your job to create a commercial awareness of what your company has to offer customers in the marketplace.

You need to do it and guess what? Your employee will love it.

Sales Supervisor Skills for Resume

If you are making a resume or CV for a job that requires having sales supervisor skills and qualities, you can apply the above skills in making the competency section of the resume.

By highlighting some of the above sales supervisor qualities and skills (which you actually have) in your resume, it will be easier to convince the employer/recruiter that you are the right person for the job.

Conclusion

The job of a sales supervisor is more of a managerial role as well as an advisory one.

This automatically puts them on the spotlight of everyone in the company to know what they can do.

Since the expectations are there, it is important for the sales supervisor to develop and apply the above skills and qualities to succeed in their careers.