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When it comes to effectiveness in sales it breaks down to a few essentials. After working with hundreds of salespeople I’ve observed that there are three important skills that every successful sales professional must have. If you are comfortable with these three things, you have the building blocks for sales success.

Skill 1: You need a refined ability to ask your customers and prospects open ended questions to develop a relationship and gather information. Remember that an open ended question is any question that requires an explanation to answer. As mentioned in an earlier post, most salespeople probably could use some work in this area.

Skill 2: A closed ended question only requires a one or two word answer and has a place in the sales process. It is important that you are competent in asking closed ended questions at the right time. When is that? They can be used effectively in two situations. The first scenario where they are helpful is in qualifying a prospect. When you first talk with a prospect it is appropriate and desirable to ask them a very limited number of directed closed ended questions to help qualify them. An example would be, “John, how many copiers do you have in your office?” However, be careful not to machine-gun them with a series of closed ended questions at this point. Once the prospect is initially qualified, you’ll want to move on to open ended questions. The second situation where closed ended questions can be used effectively is to move a customer or prospect toward a close. For example, “Mary, if I can meet your budget can we get this on order?”

Skill 3: The ability to prevent and handle objections is a primary skill in sales. Anything that a prospect or customer does that attempts to stop the selling process is an objection. We know that preventing an objection is far better than handling one once it’s been raised. “Before I quote any prices I want to let you know that our service package will cover you 24X7 and has a guaranteed one hour response time so there might be more cost than you are currently paying.” Can we always prevent objections? Of course not, but the ability to both prevent and handle objections is a key element in your sales success.

Sometimes it’s difficult to know our ability levels in these areas. Get with your sales manager or another sales peer you respect and ask them to observe you in action or role play with them. Once you assess your skills then work on your weak areas and practice. NFL players spend 95% of their time evaluating and working on their skills and 5% actually playing the game. We don’t have the luxury of that much practice time, but it’s smart to incorporate some kind of personal assessment and development into your profession for these three skills.

There are many competencies that are necessary to be successful in sales, but these are three that I have consistently observed in every sales leader.

Tags: skills

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