Why Is Sales Skills Training Important?

Salesperson skills training builds a sustainable competitive advantage because it differentiates your team in an increasingly commoditized market.

Selling skills are the “muscles” that give strength and flexibility to sales professionals. They are developed through experience, sales coaching, and training. They must be refined throughout a sales rep’s career.

Sales skills training focuses on building 6 Critical Selling Skills that empower professionals at every level to execute better sales conversations.

These critical sales skills work together in a dynamic and interactive manner.

6 Critical Skills Needed for Sales People

 1.Presence- It refers to a sales person’s ability to project confidence and conviction. It also builds credibility, respect, and trust between the buyer and seller.

2. Relating– Refers how sales professionals use acknowledgment, empathy, and rapport to connect with buyers. Although most salespeople feel they are strong at relating, but it is one of the toughest selling skills needs to master.

3. Questioning– Fosters openness and results in a dialogue that explores, shapes and defines the customer’s needs. Through this powerful tool it deepens conversations, provides insights, builds trust, and closes more sales.

4. Listening– It’s the ability to grasp meaning of what is being heard. There are three levels of listening: zoned out, efficient, and effective. Listening at the highest-level foster’s effective client dialogue. A combination of questioning and listening skills improves sellers’ ability to position their solution in a meaningful way for clients.

5. Positioning– Presents information persuasively throughout the sales call. It differentiates products and services by using words to shape client perceptions.

6. Checking– Similar to questioning, but the two skills are not interchangeable. Checking is asking open-ended questions to elicit feedback from the client on what the salesperson has said. Through checking client agreement, sales professionals can keep the dialogue on track and interactive.

How to Analyze the Skills of Your Sales Team

Businesses now have the access to a lot of data thanks to technology, but this data is useless if it is not used to make informed decisions.

To assess the skills of your sales force, understand and analyse the following metrics:

1.  Win Rate

A win rate is the percentage of proposals or bids that result in a win. This is commonly used to measure sales and marketing efforts.

A simple gauge of how many new pursuits close with a win status.

A low win rate is usually an indication of an opportunity for improvement at another step in the sales process.

2. Quota Attainment

A sales professional’s ability to attain the quota given during a set of time is an indicator of being productive. The entire sales organisation reach the percentage of sales targets achieved by a salesperson or sales team this only means that company develop strategies that enable sales representatives to perform their best and support business goals.

3.  Productivity Time

This time metric indicated of how productive a person or group accomplish over a given period of time. With time management skills this helps you to be a productive seller that achieves a high-level result of completed transactions.

4. Attrition

Attrition is referring to a staff that loss through natural process but haven’t replaced.

Also, it is an indicator of other measures, such as production time, productivity, and engagement.

5. Contract Value

This serves to a metric measure of a sales professional’s effectiveness, the ability to realise the full value of an opportunity.

Less contract values are the result of a sales professional’s that fails to build strategic relationships and set value across multiple products and services.

6. Profitability and Pricing

Profitability and pricing measure a sales professional’s ability to maintain the value of a deal throughout the selling process.

Diminishing profitability or frequent price concessions might indicate gaps in your sales team’s ability to position solutions or negotiate deals.

7. Sales Cycle

A company’s sales cycle reflects the effectiveness of the sales team’s ability to engage buyers and drive momentum throughout the course of a sale.

An increase in sales cycle duration might mean the entire team is in need of training or the cycle is not properly aligned with buyer behaviour.

How to Improve Sales Performance

Investing in training is one way to improve the performance of an individual or a team.

Underperformance against any one of these metrics might mean you need to participate in training to boost your selling skills.

Professional selling skills training should focus on developing one or two select skills at a time. Therefore, it is important to identify which skills will produce the highest return on investment.

A careful assessment of your team’s gaps will ensure your investment delivers the desired results.

Selling Skills Training for Your Sales People

Building the foundation to improve your team’s ability to execute the 6 Critical Selling Skills requires building capabilities that can be leveraged throughout every phase of the sales cycle.

Here we explore these capabilities and the types of sales training programs that will build them.

Sales Skills Training offers New Opportunities

Specific selling skills training programs offers new opportunities including:

• Consultative Selling: It is also known as needs-based selling, instead of pushing a specific product, sales reps recommend various solutions to potentials costumers based on their needs and pain points.
• Sprint Prospecting: Professionals are trained to develop relationship through customers interaction arms with the knowledge needs to assess to pursue new business.
• Sales Networking Training: Sales professionals are trained to learn methods and techniques to network with other professionals in the business community.
• Sales and Pipeline Management Training: In order to increase productivity, sales professionals are trained to segment a territory by giving priority to current customers and prospects.

Skills Training to Win Deals

Selling skills training programs that build the capability of professionals to win business include:

• Storytelling Training: Presenting information using stories to make it memorable and easier to understand.
• Team Selling: Organising team selling presentations that includes non-sellers like subject matter experts to add value for buyers.
• Sprint Negotiations: consistency executing a win-win negotiations by resolving objections throughout the sales process.

 Sales Skills Training to Grow Accounts

A sales skill that empowers professionals to grow accounts such as becoming a trusted advisor, establishing relationships, and expanding accounts.

Specific training programs that build the capability to grow accounts is sales skills include:

• Prosperous Account Strategy: learn the method for identifying opportunities to expand accounts by getting involved to good decision-making process.
• Exceptional Customer Service Training: Learn to take ownership of customer issues and turn it into new sales opportunities.