A lot has changed in the way we sell today, but most senior sales professionals believe that the fundamental core of selling remains the same. They emphasize often that the evolution rests in the advent of technology that equips teams so that they perform well and impact business outcomes. Today, sales professionals have means at their disposal that helps enable them to learn faster and deliver results in time. There’s also more access to information which makes the growth journey of a sales professional today very different from someone who’s been in the industry for more than two decades. However, at the end of the day, every organization looks at its sales teams from the lens of accountability. Companies care about their bottom line and what they can do to equip their sales team to drive business results.
We spoke to Rakhee Chachra recently who leads global sales and business development in IBM and has spent over a decade as a business leader. She reiterated that companies care about driving revenue, and when it comes to achieving that metric and delivering value as a sales professional, building good client relationships is of utmost importance. This is significant because organizations invest a lot of time and money in product, company and process training for sales professionals. However, what really yields results is training them in skills that allow them to not just chase a sale but bring it home.
You can listen to the full conversation with Rakhee on Spotify.
We have previously through our blogs spoken about the various power skills that play a very critical role in driving key sales metrics like win rate. Rakhee in her conversation with us highlighted three things that a sales professional must do on a daily basis. We’ll break those down for you into skills that they must develop to do them efficiently and effectively.
Active Client Engagement
Customer-facing teams that develop lasting relationships with their clients are more equipped to maximize output and increase revenue. Client engagement works on different levels, but many sales professionals make the mistake of approaching it from a single lead generation perspective. If done correctly, client engagement can help increase your Average Revenue Per User while also generating more collective revenue for the company than multiple clients in the long run. Skills like Empathy, Influencing People and Conflict Management play a huge role in determining this.
Empathy is the emotional ability to understand, share and anticipate the feelings of another.
- Understanding client motivations
- Unlocking client emotions
- Building a trustworthy relationship with the client
Influencing People is the ability to modify and affect a person's thinking, sentiment, behavior, or general perception towards some object or issue through request, reason, demand or indirect methods.
- Using solid data and examples to make a point
- Tailoring messaging and communication to client needs
- Influencing clients with targeted information
Conflict Management is the ability to dissolve perceived disagreements with tact and diplomacy to orchestrate win-win solutions. It limits the negative aspects of conflict and helps parties create open-mindedness within their relationships.
- Managing conflicts in time without process delays
- Aligning key metrics with the team to increase productivity
- Tackling internal conflicts without involving others
Build a Knowledge Repository
The ability to think beyond the obvious and address client needs with innovative solutions is one of the most underrated skills. In order to arrive at this point, a sales professional needs to build a repository of important information that they can routinely go back to and refer to. This allows the sales professional to deliver results that are impactful in the long-term while delivering solid value in the present. Skills like Critical Thinking and Result Orientation are crucial to develop in order to achieve this.
Critical Thinking is the ability to make objective decisions or logical deductions that support one's views and often solve problems and analyze information.
- Recognizing the implications of actions/events beforehand
- Identifying gaps in information
- Making informed assumptions
Result Orientation is the ability to purposefully create and accomplish goals while also prioritizing, raising achievability standards, and working within timeframes with a strong drive towards target achievement.
- Making clients feel heard to mold their perspective
- Achieving daily targets
- Handling obstacles preemptively
Upskill
Reflecting and continuously developing skills is usually taken for granted at work. However, for a sales professional, continuous learning is the differentiating factor between a good sales professional and a fantastic sales professional. This requires one core skill - Curiosity.
Curiosity is the ability to be driven by eagerness, logic and realistic observations to explore and seek out novel information or experiences.
- Understanding the needs of the client
- Disallowing biases and assumptions to influence observations
- Making informed decisions
These skills, if developed right from the beginning in professionals, can help organizations achieve business goals faster and with minimal friction. Fundamento’s skills readiness platform works with organizations to provide customer-facing teams personalized and data-backed learning delivered in the flow of work to ensure people are equipped with the right skills to achieve outcomes.
Reach out to us at business@fundamento.ai if this is the solution for you.
