Three Must-Have Sales Skills

The “gift of gab” and persuasiveness are often thought of as critical sales skills, but in today’s market they are totally outdated skills—you just don’t need them anymore. In this video I will explain some very crucial sales skills that are truly necessary for today’s selling world.

Click the video below:

Three Must-Have Sales Skills

#1. Able to engage. Get your prospects talking to you before they can shut you out. They’re thinking of a million things when you first start speaking to them. You must get through that clutter and engage the prospect.

When salespeople say things like, “I’d like to set up a call to learn more about your business,” what they are really doing is setting themselves up for rejection. Your prospects don’t want to set up a call so you can learn about their business because that’s not their goal. We need to engage them before we can ever ask them to share their business challenges.

#2. Able to listen. Once the prospect is engaged and talking, you must be a listener. Recall when you first began selling, and your prospects started talking, and you thought, “Oh man, what am I going to say next?” You must already have the questions you’re going to ask figured out way ahead of time, long before that phone call or meeting.

#3. Willing to hold your ground. In today’s market this is probably the most important skill, yet the least appreciated. So many salespeople believe that the customer or prospect “is always right,” but this is completely false. Prospects are often wrong. They may not even know what they need or want, and/or they don’t know what’s most important to them.

It’s our job to keep them in line, to help them figure out where they need to go. A great salesperson must be tough and be willing to call a prospect out when that prospect is off base. I do that all the time, and what you will find is that your prospect will actually appreciate it; they’ll see you as an expert, someone who really knows what he or she is talking about, someone who’s not afraid to lose the sale.

You can’t move fast and forward with your sales by relying on outdated skills that just do not cut it in today’s world. You need to implement the three skills just discussed.

I want to hear from you which of those three skills you feel that you most have to work on. I challenge you to reflect upon which skill you want to be concentrating on and developing over the coming months. Be sure to just share below in the comments section and I will get to as many comments as I possibly can.