A Few of the Most Underrated Sales Skills

Staff WritersB2B technologySales & MarketingSales Intelligence

By Paroma Sen On Mar 16, 2022

In today’s B2B selling environment, it is becoming a lot more crucial for sales people to hone tactics and processes that do not necessarily make them sound too salesy. Sales leaders like Andy Paul have in fact been constantly backing the concept of ‘selling without being salesy’ in today’s modern day sales environment.

While some sales leaders might like to think that a good salesperson is naturally born with certain traits that can enable better outcomes in the profession, the truth is that even for some of the best negotiators and persuaders who work in sales today, given the changing dynamics of the marketplace, there are a host of other key traits that need to be strengthened and embedded into the typical daily B2B sales process, to help drive sales goals.

What are some of them?

The Ability to do a Quick Research-Analysis on an Account or Target Prospect

With the plethora of customer insights tools and sales tech platforms today, sales and marketing teams can easily access real-time customer behaviors and purchase intent to enable a more seamless sales and buying journey as they help move prospects through the various stages of the typical B2B buying cycle.

It is at this point that sales people who have honed the ability to conduct a quick research and analysis of their own of the prospect or target account before they set out to get into a meeting with them will be able to use information from that research to drive a more fruitful conversation.

For instance, analyzing the most recent company updates (like funding, new hires, etc) to fuel the conversation or using the prospect’s most recent social activity to personalize a conversation (for instance, if you notice your prospect has interacted with a lot of anti-war posts off late, you can use this as a hook in a next conversation).

Nothing beats B2B potential and outcomes than better personalization and tactics that are not too salesy. And this is where salespeople can make a difference by humanizing every conversation after a quick research and analysis on their target account or prospect.

The Ability to Stick to a Goal-based Agenda

Sales people who are accustomed to setting up calls through the day have to also understand that their prospects are not only busy, they are also probably constantly evaluating similar other services and providers from the market to ensure they finally choose one that best serves their company goal and purpose.

To ensure a better meeting outcome all the time and everytime, it helps to not just build out a specific agenda but to also align a specific goal to it. At the end of each conversation, it will then help the sales executive or sales rep understand what worked and didn’t by evaluating whether they were able to achieve that particular call goal, or not.

An Entrepreneurial Mindset to Upsell / Cross sell

Irrespective of whether a sales rep is selling for a product based company or service-based entity, the common link is that every prospect or existing customer can benefit from other associated services/products from the same company.

When salespeople adopt a more entrepreneurial mindset without always looking at achieving just their quota every month, especially when they know when and how to upsell or cross sell other products or offerings from their brand, it can create larger value deals and build a better, healthier long term customer base.

Sales can be an exciting role and with today’s salestech innovations, sales people can do a lot more in a much shorter timeframe. Basic necessities like great communication skills, an understanding of people behaviour, the ability to identify and solve problems for prospects and customers have always been a part of the core requirements needed for most sales or customer facing executives.

As the market evolves, sales people have to as well, to better align to what customer’s need and create that buying experience that makes prospects come back for more.