What is the most important sales skill that helps close more deals?
To help you identify the important sales skill you need to close more deals, we asked sales managers and business leaders this question for their best insights. From being organized to knowing how to pitch to showing empathy, there are several skills that you need to develop and sharpen as a salesperson to help you close more deals.
Here are 10 sales skills these leaders use to close deals:
- Be Organized
- Keep Learning About Your Product
- Be Prepared To Deal With All Questions
- Exude Confidence
- Make Yourself Available
- Know How to Pitch
- Communicate Well
- Show You Understand Your Goals
- Ability to Execute a Call to Action
- Show Empathy
Be Organized
One of the best ways to close a sale is to be organized and have a consistent follow-up schedule. This is one of the top ways that sales needs in order to be effective as it is important to build trust in a relationship and deliver for your client. Organizing will help know what your clients need, be prepared for prospects and know what to say to close.
Loren Howard, Prime Plus Mortgages: Real Estate Note Investing
Keep Learning About Your Product
Keep researching the product you are selling. Even if you feel that you have done as much research as possible at any given point, you can always do more as the product is bound to experience upgrades and new features. Furthermore, your product could relate to different demographics for different reasons as time goes on. So, do not stay stagnant and keep learning about what you are selling so that the information you give is always fresh and not too repetitive. Remember, your leads can probably tell if you have been on auto-pilot repeating the same information for too long.
Nick Shackelford, Structured Agency
Be Prepared To Deal With All Questions
The most important sales skill that helps close more deals is to be prepared. It’s pretty obvious, but plenty of people are not prepared enough. You have to be prepared for every question, even the most difficult ones. If you are able to answer questions easily, you will seem more confident and trustworthy to your customer. If you can’t answer their questions, it looks like you don’t know what you’re doing. The best way to be prepared is by asking questions yourself. This will help you understand their needs better than anything else could!
Piotr Buczynski, PhotoAiD
Exude Confidence
Confidence is contagious. Usually, the more confident you act as a sales professional, the more confidence you will instill in your leads regarding how worthwhile your products are. If you can present your products with strong positivity and enthusiasm, this will help to make your leads feel just as excited.
Drew Sherman, Carvaygo
Make Yourself Available
When trying to close a sale or make a deal whether it’s with a customer or a big company, the key is availability. Make yourself available on their time, especially when they are making the decision after the pitch. They may email you or call you with a question after hours. I’ve always appreciated extra availability when making a decision, especially if it’s between two different companies. If one sales rep gets back to me after work hours, while the other takes a day or two to answer my question, I take that into consideration. Some decisions are made on the fly and you increase your chances of locking down a deal when you give them more availability.
Seth Newman, SportingSmiles
Know How to Pitch
To me, this is the single most crucial ability for every salesperson to have. In the course of making sales, you’ll have multiple opportunities to pitch your product or service to potential customers. For instance, during conferences, conventions, trade exhibits, fairs, etc. If not, you’ll have to resort to cold phoning and cold emailing to market your product or service to a potential client. A sales pitch’s primary goal is to start a dialogue, not to close a deal. Keep your presentation to a maximum of two minutes in length. You should also learn the art of succinct communication as a sales talent.
Daniel Foley, Daniel Foley Consultancy
Communicate Well
I think this is the most important sales skill that helps close more deals because it takes good communication skills to build real relationships with customers. Finding a buyer’s pain areas requires constant communication. Remembering that communicating well requires more than just words is essential. Especially now, when omnichannel communication is on the rise, the ability to switch gears is crucial. Various modern methods of communication exist, including email, social media comments, video conversations, and more.
In the workplace, the consequences of not doing so might be severe. Customers may even choose to stop purchasing from you altogether. A 70% increase in contact rate can be achieved by salespeople who phone leads six times. This demonstrates the value of maintaining dialogue throughout time. The following principle, active listening, is crucial to having productive conversations with other people.
Frederic Linfjärd, Planday
Show You Understand Your Goals
The true mark of a good salesperson is not one that can force every prospect into a closed sale. The true mark of an incredible salesperson is knowing that your goal is to help the prospect make a decision, not get them to a yes. When you frame your goal around helping the prospect make a decision you can align yourself with an outcome that is best for both yourself as a salesperson as well as the client. Your product or service may be fantastic however, it may not be the right product for your potential client. The way to close more deals is to spend more time in front of clients that truly want your offer, and less time trying to convert a hard no into a cold frustrated yes. The yeses help you create income, and the no’s help you get closer to the yeses and save you time in the process!
Andrew Jenkins, Catalyst RVA Marketing Agency
Ability to Execute a Call to Action
Too many people in sales evade the most important point of the process, and that is the call to action. What is it that you want the person you are pitching to execute? A simple exercise is to go and ask someone to stand up, repeat after me, or raise their right hand. The majority of the time, people will do what they are asked to do before they realize why they’re doing it. You can liken this concept to ordering a pizza, some salesmen will literally talk themselves out of a sale. If you are a pizza joint, you don’t ask the buyer who orders a pepperoni pizza if they would like to read more about the different toppings before making a decision, or whether they want a picture of the finished pizza before they buy it – yet many salesmen do this and they all lose money.
The simplest pitch is: “You should buy it now.” The above is a call to action and a close, all in one. If you use it, you will make more money.
Akos Jankura, Diecast TV
Show Empathy
Being able to see things from your customer’s perspective is key to successful sales. Don’t be focused on yourself, your company, or your product, particularly at the start of a sales encounter. Your customers are primarily interested in themselves. You should focus on how their lives will be easier, less stressful, more successful, or whatever benefits they’ll get from doing business with you. If you start your sales presentation with “a little about me,” you’re probably doing it wrong.
Clif Brown, Joe Joe Industries, LLC d/b/a LoveCube
