Client Onboarding Checklist: Steps, Templates & Best Practices
There's no denying that the business world is more competitive than ever before. According to a competitive intelligence research, 90% of businesses say that their industry is more competitive than ever. So, mastering effective sales skills will go a long way toward helping you tailor your pitches, negotiate with the customers and bring home the bacon before your competitors.
Are you interested in mastering your sales skills and closing deals faster? Well, the good news is that you can. You need to dedicate yourself to learning how to master sales strategies that can help you succeed in your sales career.
In this post, we will discuss the most powerful sales skills you need to master to close more deals.
Sales skills are the abilities required for a salesperson to succeed in their job. These skills cover everything from building rapport with customers, asking questions, listening to them and closing the deal.
Sales skills can be learned and honed over time. However, all great salespeople have the same goal: to understand their customers' needs and then find a way to meet them while also making a profit.
The sales skills will help you quickly build rapport with your customers, listen carefully and ask them questions about their needs. From there, you can tailor your pitch to appeal to those needs. You also know how to close the deal and ensure that both parties feel satisfied.
There are many different types of sales skills. Some of them are more important than others, depending on your industry and the type of sales job you want.
For example, if you're selling cars, you'll need to know how to assess the condition of a car and tell potential buyers about it. If you're selling a service like web hosting or computer repair, you'll need to know how to explain what makes your company different from the competition.
That being said, there are three major types of sales skills: soft sales skills, hard sales skills and role-critical sales skills.
Let's discuss them further.
Soft sales skills are the most important type of sales skills. They're about understanding your customer's needs and finding ways to meet them.
Soft skills include things like listening, communicating clearly, asking questions and building rapport with potential clients. They also include things like communication and relationship building.
Soft skills are essential for B2B salespeople, who may spend more time talking to prospects than actually closing a sale.
Hard sales skills are also called "technical" or "functional" sales skills. They're about your ability to deliver on the promise of your product or service. Hard skills include things like pricing, product knowledge and customer retention tactics.
Hard sales skills are essential for B2C salespeople, who may spend more time closing deals than building relationships.
Role-critical sales skills are those that are required to do your job. For example, if you're a sales manager, your role-critical skills might include recruiting, training and project management. Role-critical sales skills can be learned in school or on the job through mentorship and experience.
Soft sales skills are essential for sales professionals because they're all about relationships. Softer skills are often more difficult to master than hard skills because they involve human interaction and emotions.
Below are five soft sales skills that every salesperson should develop:
Time management is essential for achieving success in any industry, but especially in sales because it's such a fast-paced industry where results matter more than anything else. One of the ways to improve your time management skills is by learning to prioritize tasks and manage your schedule accordingly.
This can be a challenge at first, but once you start getting used to managing your time efficiently, things will become much more manageable.
Here are some tips that will help you manage your time better:
Communication is another crucial skill for any job, especially in sales, where communication with customers is key. You must communicate clearly so that your customers understand what you're saying and vice versa. This will help create a better relationship between both parties involved in the transaction and make things easier for everyone involved (including yourself!).
To improve your communication, practice good body language by standing up straight, making eye contact with the person they're talking to, nodding when appropriate and smiling occasionally.
Solving problems is another important skill for any job, especially in sales. You want to highlight the client's pain points so they'll feel confident that you understand their needs and can help them fix whatever problem they're having.
This will help create a better relationship between both parties involved in the transaction and make things easier for everyone involved (including yourself!).
Collaboration skills are a must for any sales professional. The ability to work with others is a skill that will help you succeed in any business. There are many ways that collaboration can benefit your business, from working with your team members to meeting with clients or even working with suppliers.
Collaboration is all about sharing ideas and working together so everyone can benefit from the shared knowledge. The ability to collaborate effectively will help you increase sales, decrease cycle times and increase conversion rates.
Visme can help you collaborate with your team to create amazing sales enablement content and publish it from the app.
Watch the video below to learn more about Visme's collaborative features.
Check out the 10 best collaboration software that can help you increase team productivity.
Networking is an essential skill for sales. You need to connect with people who can help you achieve your goals, whether getting more clients or just finding ways to improve your skills in general. The more people you know, the easier it will be for you to succeed as a seller!
Remember that networking is about making connections and strengthening ties, not about selling yourself or trying to make a sale.
Focus on building relationships with people and showing them that you’re an expert at what you do. The more people who know about your skills, the easier it will be for you to get new clients!
Here are a few tips to help you build a network as a salesperson:
These are the basic, fundamental skills that everyone needs to have to be successful in their career as a salesperson. Without them, you're likely going to struggle and find yourself unable to sell at all.
Social selling is the new normal for sales professionals. The ability to source, nurture, and close deals through social media is crucial for success in today's business climate. Because more than ever before, people are doing business online and online reviews can make or break a sale.
So, to stay ahead of the competition, you must be equipped with social selling skills. Read our ultimate guide to social selling to learn everything you need to know about the art of social selling.
The ability to persuade people is another critical skill that every sales professional needs to possess in order to be successful in their job. Salespeople have to convince their clients to buy something that they might not have thought about buying before meeting with them.
Persuasion skills are, therefore, extremely valuable to salespeople because they enable them to close more deals than they would without using these techniques.
Here are a few tips to improve your persuasion skills:
One of the most challenging sales skills is qualifying prospects. This means you can determine whether someone is a good fit for your product or service. If they are, you want to work with them and help them achieve their goals; if they're not, then it's best to save your time and theirs, as they won't get anywhere with what you're offering.
You can ask questions to find out more about your prospect's needs and goals. Ask them what challenges they're facing, what their biggest obstacles are and what they hope to achieve with your product or service. Find out if they have already tried other solutions that haven't worked and why; this will help you understand what makes your offering different from the others they've tried.
Be sure to listen carefully and ask follow-up questions. This will help you uncover the real reasons behind their challenges and determine how your product or service can address them.
Your job as a salesperson is to know everything about your product, industry and ideal customers. This means you need to know what you're selling inside and out, its benefits, limitations and use cases.
This will help you make better sales pitches. But it also means that when people ask questions about the product, they'll trust your answers more because they come from someone who really knows what they're talking about.
Here is a template from Visme's library that you can use to train your sales reps to know your products or services better.
Presentation skills are vital in influencing the customers' decision-making process and promoting their products or services. How you present yourself and your product or service determines whether or not your customers want to buy from you.
Sales professionals who can present their ideas and products in an interesting manner are good at closing deals. If you want to be successful at sales, learn how to present yourself properly before meeting with your clients or employers.
If you need to create an actual sales presentation for your clients, use Visme's online presentation software. Choose your favorite sales presentation template from Visme's library and customize it to give a killer sales presentation that will impress your clients.
Watch the video below to get the top five tips for an effective sales presentation pitch.
You can also take advantage of Visme’s free presentation certification course and become a certified presentation expert in no time. Upon completion of this course, you will get a certificate that you can add to your resume and LinkedIn profile. So, hurry up and join us today.
Sales professionals are often required to wear many hats such as sales manager, accounts manager, territory manager, public relations, marketing director and many others.
These are the role-critical skills that every salesperson should acquire, regardless of their position.
In order to make sales, you need to be able to close deals. Closing techniques are the strategies and tactics you use to convince your customers that they should buy from you rather than someone else.
Mastering this skill will make all the difference between an average and a successful salesperson.
While sales are all about closing deals, customer support is a vital part of the process. It can be said that customer support is just as important as sales because, without it, there wouldn't be any customers to sell to in the first place. A good salesperson should quickly identify their client's needs and wants before presenting a solution.
Here are a few ideas to help you provide customer support:
A salesperson needs to prospect regularly to find new customers, which will generate more revenue for the company and increase profits for the individual employee. Prospecting involves
The best deals are those that both parties feel like they've won, so you'll need strong negotiation skills when dealing with new contracts, clients or partners.
You should be able to negotiate for a higher percentage of revenue from each sale. You can do this by asking for more money upfront or offering incentives such as discounts and free products in exchange for clients agreeing to purchase products from you regularly.
Preparing contracts for your business can be difficult and time-consuming, but you should always know what your business is worth to a client.
So, prepare your contract in minutes using Visme's contract templates. Take advantage of the pre-existing content and delight your clients with eye-catching designs.
Here is an example of a contract template from Visme’s library that you can use:
According to HubSpot, 66.5% of sales professionals say customer referrals are the highest quality leads they work with. And as a salesperson, especially if you are relatively new to your field, you must take advantage of this huge opportunity with a referral network.
A referral network is a group of professionals that other salespeople have recommended as trustworthy and reliable. You’ll have an easier time getting clients if you're able to build up your own personal network of people who trust your judgment and recommendations.
Sales is a skill that you can learn and improve upon over time. However, you don't have to rely on your natural instincts alone. There are ways to enhance your ability to sell yourself and your products or services.
So the next time you have to make a sales pitch, whether it's a hard sell or just greasing the wheels for an important deal, remember these 15 sales skills. They can be game-changers when it comes to closing the deal.
In the digital world, you will need the right tools along with your sales skills to succeed at selling. Visme is one of the tools that every sales professional should have in their toolbox.
Skyrocket your sales by making Visme a part of your sales process. Sign-up for Visme's branded templates to create infographics, presentations, lead magnets, proposals, social media graphics and many other sales collateral that help you sell effectively.
Design visual brand experiences for your business whether you are a seasoned designer or a total novice.
Try Visme for free
