B2B sales is not an easy profession to be in, but by honing the essential skills, it becomes a cakewalk for sales people to drive more sales success. Sales teams are essential to the growth and revenue of any organization. The better the sales skills, the easier it is to close deals and even shorten the sales cycle.
Selling is an activity that can come naturally to a lot of people. Irrespective, for those who are exploring sales roles, honing in on specific skills and developing other crucial ones can eventually help sales people climb the corporate ladder.
In today’s digital buying and digital selling world, processes have changed and the skills required of salespeople have undergone a shift as well. In short, the main role of the salesperson of today now revolves around being more of an advisor to their prospects and customers while taking on a more consultative approach.
Here are a few sales skills that B2B salespeople and technology sales teams should develop more:
An Evolving Understanding of The Market you Sell in and Sell to
A big takeaway from the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic was that business trends and customer trends in a digital buying and digital selling environment have to be flexible and adaptable. For technology sales people, understanding how their market works and what inspires their prospects to consider using a new tech product is key to forming better customer relationships. This is why salespeople in tech need to know more about their prospect’s industry, how their prospect’s business works, what kind of solutions would help their prospect’s and why.
The answers to these baseline questions will help create a better sales messaging theme that pulls the right interest. When salespeople don’t spend enough time understanding their prospect’s industry and business, their sales pitch will always sound generic and there will be a lower chance of prospect’s wanting to get on another call.
In technology sales, it is crucial for salespeople to be able to speak their prospect’s business language and jargon, using their own challenges to relate to the product.
Besides this, salespeople should also develop a strong understanding of their own product and industry (not just that of the prospects) so they know who their own competitors sell to (and how!).
This can help them optimize their own processes and pitches to drive more impact.
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Great Research Skills
Your salestech stack and the right intent data can tell you a lot about your prospect’s buying intentions and buying behaviors. But salespeople today still need to spend a fair bit of time in doing more research on their prospect at an account and individual level. Salestech can complement these efforts but salespeople have to spend the required time in understanding their prospects team dynamics (for example: how does the organization function, what is the typical organization hierarchy and structure). Salespeople of today, especially those in technology sales can capitalize on an array of online data sources like company blogs, websites, media updates, etc t uncover more information that can in turn help drive more relevant sales conversations.
The deeper the research, the more prepared a salesperson will be to handle and take the lead in prospect meetings irrespective of whether they are pitching to one person from the company or a team of people.
Knowing how to Capitalize on Referrals
There could be an array of reasons for a prospect not wanting to buy your tech product or solution at the moment; they could need more time to make a decision, they may not have the budget, they may already be using another similar product with the same capabilities…
But when salespeople use the right tactics to improve their sales messaging and the content of their sales pitch, the quality of their conversation with prospects will always be better. This itself gives them room to ask prospects for a referral.
The ability to network and ask for referrals to warm prospects, cold prospects and even existing customers can help sales teams identify more sales opportunities and close more deals.
Prioritizing Sales Meetings by Qualifying the Right Prospects
No matter how good a salesperson is, they are wasting their time if they don’t know which prospect is worth going after.
With the array of salestech available today, it is not difficult for sales teams to have an up to date list of qualified prospects at their disposal. This is where sales leaders and even sales and marketing teams have to work closely together to come to a consensus on what makes for a SQL in their system.
Qualifying prospects also allows sales teams to prioritize the right sales tasks and meetings, giving more importance to those that have a better chance of closing. The ability to not only qualify prospects at bulk but do this at speed can help salespeople win their quotas.
There Is No Set Rulebook For The Right Sales Skills
Anyone who is in a customer-facing role has to sport certain attributes by default. The ability to communicate well and very clearly being some of them. Salespeople who can share the most relevant product and industry information within a shorter time frame will always find more success in sales.
In technology sales, or, in a digital selling environment, there are several attributes and skills that need constant development. Besides having good product demonstration skills and the ability to continue a conversation well, today’s salespeople have to be adept at social selling, they have to be comfortable using multiple channels like social media to capitalize on prospect engagement.
In many successful sales teams, sales leaders spend time developing hard skills in their sales teams while also holding regular training for them to improve their soft skills.
What matters at the end of the day is the ability to multi-task and evolve with changing business needs and trends.
