The 4 Most Important Skills For Success In Sales

There are four main areas of focus when it comes to striving for victory in sales. When a sales technician trains on these four components and learns to effectively mix these four important skills, it’s a recipe for success! 

1. Developing Listening Skills

From the beginning of the call, a technician’s ability to listen demonstrates respect, a helpful attitude and a willingness to work to solve the problem. While the ability to effectively listen allows the tech to show respect, it also allows them to gather information. 

When a customer opens up and the technician actively listens, it makes the sales process a great experience for both parties. This method also ensures that the technician is clear when presenting products and options that can effectively meet the customer’s needs and desires and result in closing a successful sale.

2. Learning To Ask Great Questions

Implementing proper questioning techniques helps the tech refine what a customer truly wants out of the sales process. While a customer may express the problems they are concerned about or the products they are interested in upfront, asking customers effective and focused questions that relate to their concerns and interests allows a tech to have a clearer idea of the products and services most beneficial to the customer.

Introduce the service agreement to your client on the phone – this will set your techs up for success. Your CSR should include the service agreement introduction in their call reminder script. Before the tech starts their diagnostic, they should plant a seed about the service agreement by mentioning it early on in the call.

3. Strengthening Closing Skills

While the closing portion of a sale is the most upfront component of the process, it is still important for techs to “read” their customers before asking for a close. Every customer wants a different type of close as well as a different speed at which the sale is closed, depending upon their personality type.

Closing is even more effective when it is done throughout the entire call. If a technician can get little “yeses” through the sale call, when it comes to closing the entire sale, the customer will have an easier time saying the big “Yes.”

4. Practicing Effective Word Choice

Closing skills and word choice go hand-in-hand when it comes to success in sales. A technician must learn words that work to build a bridge of effective communication between the client and himself as well as know the words that will quickly build a wall and hinder closing the sale.

Keeping great “power words” in the back of your mind when on a sales call such as using “options book” rather than “price book” or “invest” rather than “pay” as an easy way to make a client feel more comfortable as well as make the sale process smoother and more successful.

Perform A Professional Presentation of The Service Agreement at The Close

It takes skill and practice to tie in the service agreement when it comes to asking for the order. Here are a few points you can use on your calls to successfully close the sale and get more service agreements. 

• Communicate how today’s total would have been less if the system were being maintained.
• Communicate each benefit one at a time. Fully explain the benefits, not just the features.
• Undersell the discount – “The discount isn’t why you should get a service agreement today. You should get the service agreement because of the money it will save in future breakdowns.”
• Show the side-by-side difference in the totals for a person with a service agreement versus someone without one.