The Selling Skills You Need to Become the Ultimate Sales Guru

To become the ultimate sales guru you need 3 things:

1.      Marketing Skills

2.      Customer Service Skills

3.      Sales Forecasting Skills

Marketing Skills

Delivering continued customer satisfaction through value adding sales and marketing is essential to ensure that customers remain loyal to the product/service they enjoy. Customers care about their own satisfaction than they do about the success or failure of the company you represent.

As such, to be successful in selling, the product or service you wish to sell must be able to satisfy the customer. Good selling involves providing the right product and services to your customers thereby creating customer satisfaction and value. Your ability to fulfill your customers need will determine your level of success in selling or marketing.

As a general rule, you should try to create interest first in what you intend to sell. If you don’t believe in what company does, why work for them? If you don’t believe in a product/service, why sell it? Note that if you don’t believe in yourself, nobody will. There’s nothing more embarrassing than a salesman who lacks product knowledge.

When you acquire basic sales, marketing and business development skills, you will be able to:

·         Develop your personal sales standard:  Being known to exhibit excellence creates trust, dependability, responsibility and integrity for you in the market place.

·         Acquire basic customer communications skills: Good communication skills are a must earn to provide excellent sales and marketing. These customer communication skills involves listening, asking questions, being courteous, communicating clearly and accurately, minding your customers feelings, proper use of non-verbal language, skills in handling problem customers, use of technical knowledge and concepts, handling customer objections and questions and keeping your customers informed at all times.

·         Have an effective marketing strategy. This helps you to logically craft how to identify, create and manage the whole sales and marketing process. Your marketing and sales strategy will involve how to develop multiple outreach sources, identifying and creating product need, handling the actual sales and marketing process, handling customer objections during the sales and marketing process as well as closing your sales in a grand style. Researching the market is key to business development as well. This will enable you identify your target clients beforehand. This means that you will need to identify where and who your primary market really is. 

·         Identify your niche market and strategies to win your niche market as well.

·         Understand what business development is all about and the process by which new business is introduced.

Customer Service Skills

Secondly, you need to master the art of managing customers. To be precise, you need to display exceptional emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to learn or understand the feelings of others.

When translated to service delivery, emotional intelligence becomes the ability to learn or understand the feelings of your customers. To do this effectively, it becomes imperative that everyone in the organization learns to display a good degree of empathy in discharging service to the customer.

Customers are emotionally attached to companies that show them that they care about how they feel and not just about their money. Companies’ that display a high sense of emotional intelligence in service delivery ultimately get rewarded with repeated patronage. For instance, an emotionally intelligent salesman will develop the culture of smiling. A smile is one of the most powerful tools to engage in customer service delivery. When you smile, you are more likely to get one back in return. A smile is likely to calm you when you are having a bad day and may even rub positively off on a customer who came in frustrated or angry. A smile means many things to many people. It welcomes, shows happiness, demonstrates care, soothes an irate customer and could brighten someone’s day. An emotionally intelligent salesman will learn to maintain Eye Contact: Be sure to maintain eye contact when addressing a customer. Maintaining eye contact makes you come alive, creates a listening ear and makes you observant to the customers’ mood or feelings. Eye contact also shows you are attentive to detail. Not making eye contact could be interpreted in some quarters to mean a nonchalant attitude or disrespect. I have written a comprehensive article on emotional intelligence which you will find on my web page.

Sales Forecasting Skills

Thirdly, you need to master the art of sales forecasting. To be precise, you need to be able to anticipate future events with a certain degree of clarity.

Sales forecasting is the process of determining future sales and selling requirements based on information currently available.

Sales forecasts are critical to business planning. This is because every department in the organization relies on sales data for planning and allocating resources effectively. Planning requirements may be short term, medium term or long term. Short term requirements are usually determined to meet tactical needs in the nearest future such as production requirements while medium term forecasts are designed to meet organizational needs ranging from months to about 3 years such as budgetary requirements. Long term forecasts are mostly economic in nature and are usually made to meet the requirements of the organization in the long term. E.g. expansion plans.

The benefits of sales forecasting to organizations accrue from how its departments and organs use this information for organizations growth and development. For instance: The Production Unit needs sales data to help them determine how much more or less quantity needs to be produced, whether or not extra machines and labor would be required for production and how customers are reacting to the product offering of the company. The Human Resource Unit of the company will need to determine based on the sales forecast whether labor requirements are adequate to meet the staffing requirements of the company both presently and in the future, whether experts/specialists will be needed to champion growth opportunities etc.

You want to be an expert sales man? Then here you are. I believe I have just summarized the recipe to success in selling. Of course, you’re more than welcome to purchase my sales course to learn more. It’s simple, concise, practicable and straight to the point. That’s it.