Successful sales professionals often possess a combination of skills, traits, and characteristics that enable them to excel in their roles.
Here are the top five characteristics of successful sales professionals:
- Excellent Communication Skills
Effective communication is at the core of successful sales. Sales professionals must be able to articulate their product or service’s value proposition clearly, listen to the customer’s needs, and adapt their communication style to connect with different personalities and customer types.
Remember, communication is not just verbal. It’s nonverbal, visual, active listening and written.
- Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
Successful salespeople have a high degree of empathy and emotional intelligence. They understand and relate to their customers’ emotions, needs, and concerns.
The four domains of emotional intelligence are:
Self awareness, self management, social awareness, and relationship management.
Each can help lower levels of stress and lessen emotional reactivity and unintended consequences.
The result is you build rapport, establish trust, and provide tailored solutions that meet customer needs.
- Resilience and Persistence
Sales can be a challenging and rejection-filled profession. Successful sales professionals are resilient and persistent.
The six components of resilience are
- Satisfaction with Lifestyle. People who lead a satisfying & fulfilling life tend to cope better with stress & adversity.
- Supportive Relationships.
- Physical Wellbeing.
- Solution-Focused Coping.
- Emotion-Focused Coping.
- Positive Beliefs.
Successful sales professionals use rejection as motivation to improve and keep pushing forward to achieve their sales goals.
You win or you learn.
- Product and Industry Knowledge
I don’t expect a sales person to know everything, and I certainly do not want them to be a know-it-all.
What I do expect is for them to know more about the product than I do.
- Problem-Solving and Adaptability
The World War II propaganda poster published by the British government in 1939 – “Keep Calm and Carry On” has since become an internet meme.
Keeping calm is a matter of emotional intelligence. But the “carry on” part can be the hardest. Sometimes you have to plow on, no matter how bad you feel or how badly things around you seem to be going. You learn to adapt and learn and (eventually), to succeed.
Time to go sell something.
