10 essential skills learned in sales courses

Below, we’ll dive into several skills and techniques employees can sharpen to become better salespeople. Although this list isn’t comprehensive, it can serve as a starting point for learning and development leaders looking to level-up their sales teams.

Using data

The traditional sales model includes lead generation, prospecting, qualifying prospects, exploring their needs, presenting features and benefits, handling objections, closing the sale, and ideally, building long-term relationships. But being effective at sales in the digital age requires a rethinking of traditional approaches in order to deliver greater value to customers.

Organizations are beginning to take a more holistic approach to targeting potential customers and moving them up the engagement ladder. Sales is no longer all about solving problems that potential customers are already aware of, because finding a solution is something they can do on their own. Rather, sales today is a matter of proactively detecting problems that have not been recognized. Teams must now be able to gather, analyze, and use data to uncover unrecognized problems throughout the buyer’s journey. Sales courses can help them learn how.

Insightfulness

Sales management is faced with the challenge of enabling new hires to work effectively with customers who are more experienced than they are. And customers today have very little tolerance for open questions about their pain points. They know what keeps them up at night, but they want to know how other organizations are solving these problems.

Salespeople can bring valuable insights to busy executives who don’t have time to do their own research. They can also provide clarity to customers who do conduct their own research but are drowning in information. Making sense of market data for customers, curating it, distilling it to its essence, and separating out the signal from the noise can reveal hidden insights.

Clearly, there is more to selling in today’s environment than simply explaining product features and benefits. In sales courses, staff can learn how to identify and articulate game-changing insights that bring the market perspective to customers and link those insights to what is going on in the customer’s world.

Influence

Influencing behavior is a process rooted in emotion. People prefer to say “yes” to those they like, and they’re more apt to like those they have something in common with. In sales courses, employees can learn to communicate in such a way to find common ground and use that to build a relationship in which the other party wants to engage.

Another one of the universal principles of influence is that people want to give back to those who have given to them. This concept supports the previously discussed skill of learning to provide valuable insights to buyers, rather than simply explaining product features and benefits.

Persuasion

Many mistakenly believe that influence and persuasion are the same thing. To influence someone is to motivate or inspire them to take a specific action. Influence grows out of trust and is grounded in a relationship between the influencer and the influenced. The goal of persuasion, on the other hand, is to make an effective argument in favor of a certain action. It requires no former trust or relationship. The other person simply makes a decision based on the strength and credibility of the argument.

Successful persuasion depends on the persuader’s ability to see the world from someone else’s viewpoint and “get into their head” to understand their interests. They can then find common ground to leverage. For that to happen, inquiry — understanding another person’s reasoning, values, and concerns — must take precedence over advocacy — asserting one’s own reasoning, values, and concerns.

Some sales courses also address pre-suasion, the process of arranging for the recipient of a persuasive message to be receptive to it before they even hear it. This can be achieved by appealing to a known need or something else that can be concluded about the person.

Negotiation

Sales courses can help employees become more aware of their unique negotiation style, which can be either assertive, analytical, or accommodating. An assertive negotiator is direct, hard, and honest to the point of uncomfortable bluntness. An accommodating negotiator is relationship-oriented, finds it easy to establish rapport, and is pleasant to deal with. And an analytical negotiator needs facts, figures, and time to think through all of the options, which can make them seem cold or aloof.

The best salespeople tend to have elements of all three styles. They have the confidence and drive that comes from being assertive, as well as the pragmatic, longer-term analytical style, and they’re kind. They also have the social awareness to be able to switch styles according to the situation and their understanding of their counterpart’s communication style.

Listening with purpose

For many, active listening is the most difficult aspect of communication. It involves asking questions and making statements aimed at increasing one’s understanding of another person’s reasoning. This can be questions like, “What concerns you about that?” or simply, “Please, tell me more.”

Sales courses may also teach employees about intuitive listening, which involves using visual and other cues to help interpret another’s words. Reading body language and noting the tone and pitch of their voice can help with forming tentative conclusions about what a person may be thinking or feeling.

But intuition is not infallible, so such conclusions need to be confirmed using statements like: “I’m sensing that …” or “Is that why …?” Summarizing or paraphrasing the gist of the speaker’s words is key to ensuring understanding before moving forward with the conversation. Lacking that clarity and proceeding on the basis of inaccurate information is a sure-fire recipe for failure.

Collaboration

Especially in business-to-business operations, sales are often complex, involving multiple decision-makers and layers of approval on the buyer’s side. This is where collaboration comes into play. When sales teams work together rather than individually, they bring together different perspectives and areas of expertise that enable a smoother experience for the buyer. Sales can also collaborate with the marketing team to keep leads warm over longer sales cycles.

The smartest companies are beginning to more consciously integrate their sales and marketing functions. Sales courses, particularly for team leaders, are increasingly emphasizing collaboration between the two. They’re also addressing the challenges of bringing together vast amounts of external and internal data to support this collaboration.

Authenticity

A person’s authentic self is their most natural self, without pretense or artifice. Authenticity helps salespeople build genuine, trust-based relationships that lead to sales. Quite simply, people are more likely to buy from someone they feel they can trust to tell them the truth.

Sales courses can’t ensure that learners will always act in accordance with their values, but they can help employees learn the importance of saying what they mean and meaning what they say. They can also help salespeople recognize how they’re presenting themselves and how they’re being received.

Emotional intelligence

A high level of emotional intelligence is a key characteristic of people who are successful at sales. Self-awareness can help a salesperson understand how they’re either helping or hindering their own ability to influence others. Social awareness can help them recognize how the emotional needs of others shape their behaviors. Both can be utilized in interactions with buyers to establish rapport, provide the kind of experience they’re seeking, and increase their receptivity to proposed solutions. These are all skills that can be learned in sales courses that include lessons on emotional intelligence.

Empathy

Empathy is the ability to place oneself in someone else’s position and figuratively walk a mile in their shoes. It’s essential to understanding what others care about and meeting them where they are. That makes it an extremely important skill for anyone involved in sales. Not everyone is naturally attuned to the feelings of others, but they can get better at it by taking sales courses that provide training in empathy.

To strengthen empathy, employees can learn to identify emotions in others and respond appropriately. For example, simulations of realistic scenarios can depict what empathy looks like in sales interactions. This can help learners practice interpreting facial expressions, vocal tones, and paraphrasing what someone else said to check for understanding in a conversation.

Getting started

Good salespeople aren’t born; they’re made. Traditionally, sales has been a field in which the inexperienced view the most successful as role models. They look to them for advice and best practices to hone their skills and increase their success rate. But oftentimes, top salespeople have little time to adequately instruct new employees.

Sales courses taught by credible and experienced thought leaders, with wisdom acquired through their own personal successes and failures, can serve much the same purpose. At Big Think+, we bring together today’s leading experts on the art and science of selling to offer premium training content. Request a demo today to learn more.