Sales Skills | Hone Essential Sales Skills with Lessonly

Sales Skills and Abilities

Whether you’re offering a product to a customer, services to an entire industry, or an idea that is destined to change the future of commerce, the ability to sell those products, services, and ideas is dependent on developing professional selling skills. Sales skills, long considered the province of the person peddling insurance door to door, or the disreputable used-car salesperson down the block, is now viewed as instrumental expertise that does more than merely pad the well-documented retail sales resume.

Basic selling skills have more use than in business alone. For instance, what better chance do you have to go to the restaurant of your choice than by selling the idea to your friends and family? The point is, we live in a world that is guided by persuasion, and influenced by a compelling sales narrative, so burnishing your sales resume with selling tips and techniques that are geared towards identifying customer needs and closing sales in a prompt and satisfying manner that guarantees repeat business with that customer.

Honing your sales skills and techniques translates into improved performance and seamless transitioning between an interested buyer and a satisfied paying customer. Developing sales skills allows you the insight to anticipate customer concerns, which can be easily paired to a selling narrative that positions your products and services as the perfect solution to solve their problems.

Even in retail, retail selling skills can give the customer an extra nudge to purchase an item. Once they hear of the fire sale of the day, they might be a little more excited to pick up that winter scarf in June. Retail sales skills can be applied to any industry whether you are in sales or not. In retail, you can face customers that reject or even ignore you. Through experience, employees learn not to take things personally and move on to the next opportunity.

Why Sales Knowledge Matters

It’s plain and simple: the best sales teams consistently deliver for their organizations. But superb sales skills don’t come naturally to every rep. You see, sales knowledge comes from sales training, enablement, and coaching from dedicated managers, leaders, tools, and resources. And, the most effective sales training educates reps on sales skills and techniques via all-inclusive industry best practices that breed success.

Let’s break this down.

The basic understanding of essential sales skills is a fun little mix of what a rep might already know how to do, like manage their time, manage a relationship post-sale, or provide exceptional customer service from day one, but also what a rep needs to learn, like product knowledge, qualifying questioning, or the ins-and-outs of the sales process. And, in order to provide the best overall experience to a prospect or current customer, reps must be up to speed on the latest sales techniques. People don’t have time or patience for old-school selling techniques like being oversold a product, smooth talkin’, or fake enthusiasm. Prospects respond better to reps who pitch solutions over products, introduce unconsidered needs, and appeal to their emotions and not just data. In fact, strong sales skills mean being able to explain how your product works, what value it provides, and why your prospects need it.

How to Develop Sales Skills with Training and Enablement

Developing sales skills takes time. It might take a little time before a best practice is identified but the cool part is that by that time, it becomes a common practice. In order to get to that point, the proper onboarding and ongoing enablement need to occur to develop sales skills. Although training takes up a majority of the onboarding process, things like formal introductions, job shadowing, tours, etc, make an employee feel well-acquainted within a company.

Successful onboarding requires passionate players and efficient technology that gives admins the tools to create informative and engaging content. Onboarding training is important to help employees start performing at a company, but ongoing training will keep them informed, prepared, and primed for learning sales skills.

The sales enablement piece is an up-and-down ride that moves the needle where it matters, driving sales teams to peak performance and customers to brand loyalty. By investing in both onboarding training and ongoing sales enablement, you are helping your reps improve sales skills by giving them the information, content, and tools to help them sell more effectively. After all, the pure foundation of sales enablement is to provide sellers with what they need to successfully engage the buyer throughout the buying process.

Sales Training to Improve Sales Skills

Finding the right sales training program is key to your effectiveness with clients and customers. Top sales training programs should teach every aspect of a sale, from approaching cold leads to closing the deal. Companies that provide courses for employees to maintain and improve their sales skills after initial onboarding see drastic increases in their sales.

We all learn new skills differently. Some of us might thrive in a classroom, others might find reading the best way to absorb info, and some might learn better by watching videos online. Whatever your reps’ learning style, specialized sales training courses for beginners and seasoned reps provide high-quality training that you can learn in your own time to master the best sales techniques list. Some key sales training topics include:

Company background info

The first thing new sales reps need to know, regardless of prior experience, is the details of their organization. Part of their sales training should include an introduction into that business, along with its culture, mission, and vision statement. Your sales team will represent the organization to the outside world like little billboards running around everywhere; their messaging needs to be consistent.

Knowing the customer

Spend more time listening than talking. Without the focus on the correct sales training topics, reps too often qualify leads and send them down the pipeline when they are simply not a good fit. Why? Because. they. didn’t. listen. carefully. enough. to what the lead was saying on that initial call. Teach your reps to ask if they have the budget, authority, need and timeframe to pursue your solution.

Social selling

Don’t focus on just one method of sales approach. Phone calls, face-to-face, social media, emailing… they should all be part of this party. However, the experience of each rep can really come into play here. A veteran might spend more time dedicated to social selling and work on referrals, whereas a new rep may have to pick up the phone more or dedicate more time making face-to-face visits.

Negotiations and cold leads

Even without open pushback, every sales professional reaches a point at which contact becomes less productive, and the prospect seems unwilling to commit. At that point, it might make sense to move on to more relevant leads. Train your employees to recognize that point and know how to gently end a chain of messages or calls while still keeping the possibilities open for future re-engagement.

Marketing in a world of selling

In years past, there seemed to be a stark divide between the functions of marketing and selling. For instance, marketing skills were aimed solely at generating leads, which were subsequently passed onward to a motivated sales force to close the deal. Today, however, recognizing that garbage in typically results in garbage out, the savvy marketing professional understand that the marketing skills needed today are the ones that can recognize the difference between a viable lead and a prospect that is likely to do little more than generate frustration on the sales side of the office.

Introducing basic sales training topics without boring your sales team to death is tough, to say the least. But you can do it and we can help.

Hone Essential Sales Skills with Lessonly

Okay, so now you understand a bit better how sales enablement can help sales teams deliver ongoing training, practice, and coaching so reps and teams can improve their sales skills, right? But where do you begin?

With Lessonly’s sales enablement software, that’s where.

Enablement software, like Lessonly, usually fits into the picture when organizations prioritize ongoing learning. Sales skills training doesn’t end after Week 1. Sales reps not only need superb onboarding training but ongoing training, too. With Lessonly, we’ll guide you through how to practice sales skills, build an unlimited amount of learning materials, assign training, and assess skills. The result is faster onboarding and teams that increase sales by more than 75%. Click here to learn more.