What qualities does a good salesperson have? In these almost twenty years as an entrepreneur, I have seen salespeople of all kinds, and I have also had to act like one of them.
Commercial and commercial administration is a fundamental area within a company. On the volume of sales depends the profitability and survival of the company, success or failure. As professionals in the commercial field it is very useful to use market research techniques know the customer and design strategies to capture their attention and determine lasting relationships that add value.
At the end, every entrepreneur is truly a salespersonTherefore, we better be good, because the income of our proposal will depend on that.
Hence, here is what, in my experience, are the 13 main qualities of a good salespersonand how to apply this list to our daily practice.
Contrary to what superstition says, this number will bring us good luck.
1. Listening ability
Oddly enough, the qualities of a good salesperson should not begin with the ability to speak or convince, but with develop the ability to listen.
And not just any listener, but active listening.
The biggest mistake of many salespeople is that they have their speech and want to drop it and that, when the customer is speaking, it is hardly a pause in which they wait to say what they have prepared, no matter what the other says.
And you can see it.
The old saying that we were given one mouth and two ears to hear twice as much as we speak is true, at least in sales.
I always say it, the sale is like a focus, the more focus is on the other and less on us, the closer the sale is. One way to put it on is by actively listening, being honest.
Good salespeople are always good listeners. Like I said about how to increase charisma, Making the other person the most important thing in the world is essential to marketing, which is intimately connected to the next quality of every good salesperson.
2. Empathy
A good salesperson knows how the other person feels and puts themselves in their shoes. You know that you are selling a solution to a problem and you put yourself in the customer's shoes. That allows you an intimate knowledge of what the other is thinking, of how the product solves those problems.
And what is more, Empathy will allow us to anticipate what the client wants and the possible objections they will make, so that you can disable them beforehand.
But most importantly, empathy is not an empty word. The key to persuade or market (the same is) is make the other feel like the most important person in the world.
This is a skill of the good salesperson that is impossible to have if the quality of empathy is not developed.
3. Enthusiasm and motivation
Marketing is an emotional procedure and emotions are diffused, transmitted and detected through non-verbal language (the next quality we will see).
The main question is this: How are we going to want the customer to be enthusiastic about the product if not?
One of the best salespeople in the world, Billy Mays, had it very clear. He never sold a product that he did not use himself. Because in that way, he wasn't a salesperson trying to endorse something, he was a fanatic who wanted others to get as much value as him.
It is impossible to be motivated to market something that you are not truly excited about.
And trying to fake it is worse.
4. Mastery of non-verbal language
There are two communications that happen all the time, the verbal and the non-verbal. Both must communicate the same And, if they collide, people are hardwired to rely more on the non-verbal.
Hasn't it happened to you that someone seemed to be saying all the right words but something was wrong?
Body language or non-verbal language was what didn't fit the words. And we are experts in reading it, because for hundreds and hundreds of years we evolved to do so, since we had not yet developed the spoken language.
Therefore, every salesperson must master non-verbal language. this has to be relaxed, open and consistent with the speech.
The best way to always be like this? Cultivate the quality of a good salesperson we've seen before and don't try to market something you don't believe in.
5. Ability to create networks of contacts
Contacts are the most important thing and a good salesperson loves networks. Or at least understand its relevance and work on it, regardless of whether you like it more or less.
The good salesperson always creates new contacts, nurtures relationships, is honest with them, tries to help and, if he has a problem, turns to his network of contacts.
Of course, the main quality of a good salesperson is that brings much more to your network than you ask for.
(* 13 *) 6. Self-confidence
We have already seen that confidence in the product is essential, but self-confidence is another quality of a good salesperson.
Like it or not, studies show, and reality corroborates it, that trust convinces and sells. An example is Donald Trump. Like many other new generation politicians, he talks about things he does not know, but he does so with such confidence that it is contagious for many.
Confidence can hide mediocrity as in the case of politics, but when it is true it is unstoppable.
The same confidence is what we must show if we want to be good salespeople.
I wish I could give a magic formula to have more confidence in ourselves, but the reality is that this quality is very variable in general. It depends on the context and the situation, including how we get up.
Of course, in practice pretend until you do. In other words, "fake something until you become that something."
The fact is that if you are reading this it is because you want to improve, because you want to be a better seller. That already puts us ahead of a large majority of sellers, I assure you, who are only interested in money and nothing else..
This is why we just shouldn't be so hard on ourselves and have the confidence that, with that attitude of wanting to improve, and adopting the rest of the qualities of the good salesperson that we see here, confidence will come.
7. Perseverance
Now it's been called Resilience, because that word better captures the characteristic of mental resistance, as opposed to merely physical resistance.
We want to call it what we want to call it, it is essential. In its day we already saw certain sales statistics that give an exact idea of sales. Many marketers have a very distorted perception, far from the numbers that we can see in the content that I have linked.
Most notable is the number of attempts it takes to close a sale and how most sellers quit earlier.
Let's not fool ourselves the most important thing to get the sale is follow-up. And moving on takes perseverance.
That does not mean, far from it, that we have to market a lot. Pressure selling stopped working a long time ago, but the art of perseverance, tenacity, and patience is an essential quality of a good salesperson.
8. Preparation capacity
The good salesperson goes with the lesson learned, with an intimate knowledge of the product that allows him to face any objection or unexpected question, and at the same time has usually rehearsed a coherent and studied speech.
Make no mistake, the natural seller does not really exist, everything is learned, even when some have it easier or have done it unconsciously.
Steve Jobs was one of the best in his presentations, but all that charisma, enthusiasm and confidence he came from an almost military preparation of his speeches. In fact, it was such that it enraged his collaborators. The result was that this whole trial made him feel "natural."
It may not be necessary to take it as extreme as Jobs, but the good salesperson always conscientiously prepares for the battle ahead.
9. Ethics and honesty
Bestsellers, contrary to what movies and stories have sold us, they are the most honest.
Supporting the client something that does not require means "bread for today and hunger for tomorrow." At the same time, we will have broken trust, which is the most important thing and like a valuable vase, once broken, even when fixed, it will no longer be the same.
Because another quality of a good salesperson is thinking about long-term honest relationships, about repeat sales, something much easier and more profitable than always looking for new customers.
10. Adaptability
Rigid speeches don't work, and no matter how hard we prepare the scripts and potential objections, clients are always going to go where we don't expect.
For many that is a challenge, others are frozen by the fact that the script is derailed and what they have rehearsed in their head.
There is no doubt who is the best seller in those two cases and Darwin has already made it very clear, the world (and sales) belong to the most suitable.
11. Communication skills
Yes, I have not forgotten and it is another of the qualities of a good salesperson. At the end we have to communicate clearly verbally all that honesty, enthusiasm and benefits of a product that we think about and that adapts to the client's needs.
Little to say about this, since it is the part that most sellers focus on the most, so it is usually covered. The fact is that this quality complements all the previous ones and, without it, it is useless. It is an empty communication and devoid of sincerity.
Training and learning communication and sales techniques should be the minimum for a good salesperson.
12. Ability to tell stories
I know that this would be included in the communication capacity, but It is so important that it deserves its own section.
There are good communicators who are not necessarily good storytellers (even though it is rare), but every good storyteller is a good communicator.
the narration is the most powerful and underrated marketing technique. I have not met a prominent salesperson who was not also an excellent storyteller, both inside and outside of his business.
13. Proposal
This quality of a good salesperson is also very important because many let the customer go ahead with the sale. They settle when those customers say, "I'll call you," as an example.
And the customer does not call and it is normal.
It is not the customer's role to bring the ball to the goal, it is ours as sellers and therefore we must take the proposal. We must take the sale a step forward, worry, call… Without a proposal, most sales get out of hand.
How to apply these qualities of good salespeople in practice.
To get started, we can use them as a checklist. All of them are necessary to be a good salesperson. Fortunately, not a few of them will already have them, or they fit us more naturally than others.
The more introverted salespeople may waver a bit in proposition and perseverance, perhaps for fear of appearing "heavy," but they are likely to pay off with further preparation of their communication skills. On the contrary, extroverts can make up for that greater carelessness in preparation with the power to move around their network or push selling those last tough gauges.
Either way, the key is given to us by some German violinists.
According to a very interesting study On what separated elite violinists from basically "good" violinists, the key was that the elite rehearsed, methodically, to cover your weak points.
I'm not saying we should have every quality of a good salesperson honed to the max, that's impossible. But using this list we can clearly identify the skills that have made us lose more than one sale by not having them as well developed (and it shouldn't be difficult, as long as we do an honest enough analysis), to try to improve them.
The same can be applied to our commercials if we are responsible for a team of salespeople.
Because of this dynamic, we will go from being good salespeople to being elite salespeople.
