Top skills you need to become a star in Sales

With a right share of ardour, professional drive, and great dedication, a career in sales can be surely rewarding. Apart from offering attractive deal percentages, the sales representative role is praised for being transversal and applicable to a broad range of industries and gifting an employee with a set of highly requested transferable skills as a career asset.

If you are a fresh graduate or a professional changing your career path (which might become a common practice, according to a recent Jobrapido research), you will most probably begin at the level of an office sales assistant/sales executive, explaining the new products and installing client relationships. From that point, progression in career towards the roles of key account manager or senior sales manager is subject to your good performance levels, ability to inspire others, and willingness to achieve ever more.

To be hired as a sales manager, you need to prove to the recruiting team your strong commitment, a dynamic personality, a hands-on experience, and, most importantly, certain skills indispensable for the job. So, which skills and abilities do actually matter?

Cultivating seller-client relationships: liaising and advertising your personality

One of the crucial characteristics of a successful sales rep – the ability to unleash his/her personality and, as a result, develop a strong connection with the client. Being perceived as an earnest, upright, authentic person will endear you to the counterparty and install a greater level of trust. Jonathan Ball, sales executive at Lookers, believes that building a strong rapport with customers is the key to success: “People buy people; you’ve just got to convince customers that you’re the best person to sell the product to them”.

Confidence and resilience

Having an unyielding confidence and strongly believing in what you are selling is the fundamental part of the process. This determination will reach the customer and back up your persuasiveness about the purchase. Adequate, sound knowledge of your product is a great asset for building up your confidence: “you must know enough about your products and services to suggest a solution to every client or customer, and to tailor groups of products or services to their needs or desires”. However, sometimes it is more about your inner work and personality development. Lacking confidence at first may eventually grow into a greater resilience: “reacting positively to knock-backs is essential. Each sale can be full of obstacles, so you must have the belief to overcome any challenges thrown your way. You may have put a lot of time and effort into trying to land a deal, but it didn’t work out. You have to be resilient and dust yourself off and believe that you will land the next one”.

Appealing storytelling

Something not to underestimate in your communication skillset is the storytelling competence. Good salespeople incorporate the product or service they’re selling into a larger story frame that has a certain development line that ends with the client receiving what they want and solving the customer pain points. This is supported by the “Always Be Helping” (ABH) mindset that all sales reps should cultivate.

Resolute work ethic

In comparison to other career tracks, sales area requires a lot of bustling and striving. As written in Forbes, “even when you get leads, it takes (sometimes many) follow-ups to close the deal. Other times, you’ll have to work with tough or unreliable clients who require constant attention or a gentle push. Not to mention, if you’re working on commission, your income basically relies on you to get stuff done”. What is important in this case is to keep your work ethic to a high standard: it is great to have an extreme professional grit, but it is never acceptable to trample over your colleagues or get the others’ merits.

Other important skills for a sales manager are:

Honed presentation skills, active listening, entrepreneurial drive, never-ending self-improvement, strong knowledge of business software, negotiation and closing skills, adaptability, positive thinking, and many more.

Are you dreaming of a prosperous career in Sales? Explore the amazing Sales job offers on our Jobrapido site! Many positions in the best companies waiting for dedicated and bright candidates – just like you!