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For more information, check out our privacy policy. Written by Aja Frost ajavuu. Become more successful with this free productivity maximization kit. The difference between average salespeople and good ones is staggering. They skillfully handle objections and preemptively surface concerns to make them disappear. If you want greatness, good news.
Following these rules of good sellers will help you become one of the top-selling salespeople on your team — or even company. They also know how to handle rejection, and learn from both their most successful deals and ones lost. A positive first impression is important in establishing a professional relationship.
As a salesperson, you should have a well-put-together appearance and an inviting demeanor. Having motivation to get the job done shows that you are passionate. Good salespeople understand that each customer has different needs. By appealing to their sentiments, you can meet their needs in new ways. This may seem obvious, but being confident in your product or service can make your customers feel more confident in it, too. The same can be said for how confident you are in yourself.
Sales is a pretty volatile profession, and good salespeople are adaptable to those changes. Being able to pivot your approach, or manage time shifts are very useful skills in this field. Understanding the qualities that a good salesperson has is only the first step, and to become an effective one takes practice.
The following list is divided into three sections: selling habits, tips, and life habits good salespeople share.
Improve your strategy and become an effective salesperson with these tools. A clearly defined buyer persona is crucial to an effective sales process. And, a sales rep who sticks to that persona is effective in generating sales. Otherwise, a salesperson might fall back on spray-and-pray tactics that result in inefficient prospecting. They stick to their ideal buyer persona and know exactly whom they're selling to and why. Low-performing reps let intuition guide them.
Low-performing reps sometimes let things slip through the cracks. High-performing reps obsessively review key metrics and adjust as necessary. TL;DR: To be extraordinary, you need a consistent process.
HubSpot has a free Key Performance Indicator template if you want somewhere to begin. Being able to sell is half the battle. In the old days, selling relied on charm and snake-oil tactics. Once a great salesperson finds a strategy or technique that works, they use it — again and again and again and again, until it stops working. This is smart. Reps are always working against the clock, which means the more time they spend experimenting, the less time they have for true selling.
Just do so selectively, and get results ASAP so you can either implement the tactic or move on. Successful salespeople are completely present when they talk to prospects. The A players are in the office, too. Even if he wants to sell, it does not mean that he can sell. When an individual is applying for a job, he obviously will attempt to tell the potential employer whatever he thinks the employer wants to hear.
There are manuals on the market on how to beat sales aptitude tests, but, even without such a manual, the average intelligent person can quickly see what is sought and then give the tester what the tester wants. Thus, the tests may simply succeed in negatively screening those who are so unintelligent that they are unable to see the particular response pattern sought. In other words, since they are too dull to fake, they may be screened out.
The perceptive interviewer, however, is likely to notice this kind of stupidity even more quickly than the tests do, and he can probably do a better job of this negative screening than the average fakable test.
Recent critics of psychological testing decry the testers who are seeking conformity and the standardized ways in which they judge applicants for sales and other occupations.
This criticism is all too valid. The creative thinker, the impulsive free spirit, the original, imaginative, hard-driving individual is often screened out by tests that demand rigid adherence to convention—an adherence, in fact, that borders on a passive acceptance of authority, a fear of anything that might in any way upset the applecart of bureaucratic order. Paradoxically, this fearful, cautious, authoritarian conformist, although he might make a good civil servant, or even a fair controller or paperwork administrative executive, would never make a successful salesman.
Many of these tests not only fail to select good salesmen, but they may actually screen out the really top producers because of their creativity, impulsiveness, or originality—characteristics that most tests downgrade as strangeness or weakness.
We discovered a situation of this type recently in working with a client: A company in the Southwest embarked on an intensive recruiting effort for salesmen. We began receiving the tests of a number of applicants. These tests all appeared to follow a certain pattern. The men were not quite recommendable, and all for about the same reason—a definite lack of ego drive. For the most part, they had some empathy, and without exception they had good verbal ability, but none had the intense inner need for the sale that we look for in a productive salesman.
Many psychological tests screen out the really top producers because of their creativity, impulsiveness, or originality—characteristics that most tests downgrade as strangeness or weakness. After about 20 such tests came through our office, we questioned the sales manager as to what criteria he was using for screening the men who took the test.
We found that before he gave the applicants our test, he had them take the sales aptitude test that had been developed by his company some years before. Those men who scored high on that test were given our test. Men with strong ego drive could not as a rule score near the top of that test. And so the very men with the quality we were seeking—strong ego drive—were actually screened out.
We then asked the sales manager not to use that test but to screen only for credit reference and general appearance, and to give our test to those who passed this simple screening.
Most personality and aptitude tests are totally traitological in their construction and approach. The dynamic interaction that is personality, as viewed by most modern-day psychologists, is buried in a series of fractionalized, mathematically separable traits. In our research we attempted to bypass traits and to go directly to the central dynamisms that we believed were basic to sales ability: empathy and ego drive. By seeking these deeper, more central, characteristics, we immediately reduced the possibility of faking, since the respondent would find it extremely difficult to determine what in fact was being sought.
Needless to say, the importance of interest as a variable has been reduced sharply, and the conformity factor has been completely subordinated to the basic central characteristics being measured.
This use of central dynamics rather than traits, with its corollary implications, has produced what we believe to be a positive method of predicting sales success that is advanced beyond what has been done to date. Many sales executives feel that the type of selling in their industry and even in their particular company is somehow completely special and unique.
This is true to an extent. There is no question that a data-processing equipment salesman needs somewhat different training and background than does an automobile salesman. What is not so easily seen, however, are the basic sales dynamics we have been discussing, which permit an individual to sell successfully, almost regardless of what he is selling. To date, we have gained experience with more than 7, salesmen of tangibles as well as intangibles, in wholesale as well as retail selling, big-ticket and little-ticket items.
And the dynamics of success remain approximately the same in all cases. Sales ability is fundamental, more so than the product being sold. Long before he comes to know the product, mostly during his childhood and growing-up experience, the future successful salesman is developing the human qualities essential for selling.
Thus, when emphasis is placed on experience, and experience counts more than such essentials as empathy and drive, what is accomplished can only be called the inbreeding of mediocrity. We have found that the experienced person who is pirated from a competitor is most often piratable simply because he is not succeeding well with that competitor. He feels that somehow he can magically do better with the new company. This is rarely true. He remains what he is, mediocre, or worse.
What companies need is a greater willingness to seek individuals with basic sales potential in the general marketplace. Experience is more or less easily gained, but real sales ability is not at all so easily gained. Among butchers, coal miners, steelworkers, and even the unemployed there are many—perhaps one in ten —who, whether they themselves know it or not, possess the ability to be an A, top-producing salesman; and at least one in five would be on a B or better level for most types of selling.
Many of these are potentially far better salesmen than some who have accumulated many years of experience. We reported that he was the only A in the group, and strongly recommended that he be hired.
Related Questions. How to become a Sales Representative? What is a Sales Representative? How much does a Sales Representative make? Answer Questions. What is a Composer? How to become a Physician?
What does a Curator do? Related Jobs. Sales Development Representative. Entry-level Inside Sales Representative. Sales Representative — Rural Markets. Outside Sales Representative. Pharmaceutical Sales Representative. A sales representative definitely requires extensive product knowledge of whatever he or she is selling, and is more successful when skilled at talking to people and experienced at various sales tactics.
At some companies, sales representatives are required to learn specific sales tactics, and will even train employees on the way they want their products sold. Sales representatives have distinct personalities.
They are dominant, persuasive, and motivational. Does this sound like you? Take our free career test to find out if sales representative is one of your top career matches.
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