Want to Boost Your Sales? Master These 3 Soft Skills
Created on 5 July, 2024 • Marketing & Business Communication • 87 views • 2 minutes read
We believe that selling is a skill. Since it’s a skill, it can be learned by anyone, even those who aren’t professional salespeople.
Want to Boost Your Sales? Master These 3 Soft Skills
We believe that selling is a skill. Since it’s a skill, it can be learned by anyone, even those who aren’t professional salespeople.
This skill is divided into two categories: hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills include abilities like talking to people and negotiating. Soft skills, on the other hand, come from within us and can influence others to buy. Examples include attitude and behavior. In sales, we need both.
Research shows that 89% of successful sales are influenced by attitude, while only 11% are influenced by technical aspects like product knowledge and negotiation skills.
Sometimes, salespeople with great product knowledge and speaking skills but poor attitudes struggle to close deals. Conversely, those with average product knowledge but excellent attitudes often close more deals.
Want to Boost Your Sales? Master These 3 Soft Skills
It’s crucial to develop soft skills to improve and increase your sales. This article will focus on soft skills, specifically three key soft skills you need to master. Let's discuss each one.
Rapport
Rapport is the ability to build relationships quickly, establish trust naturally, and show genuine interest in creating good connections.
Building rapport goes beyond just finding common ground with prospects. While mimicking a prospect’s body language is a hard skill you can practice, true rapport involves sincerely helping prospects and genuinely building positive relationships. When people like and trust you, selling becomes easier.
Set Expectations
The second soft skill is setting expectations with prospects professionally. Many salespeople make grand promises about their products, raising unrealistic expectations. For example, if you’re selling silk clothes and a prospect asks if the hijab can be machine washed, you might say yes. However, while it’s possible, machine washing could ruin the silk.
By mastering this soft skill, you’ll professionally explain what can and can’t be done with your product. You’ll also honestly share the strengths and weaknesses of your product, ensuring prospects don’t feel deceived after making a purchase.
Empathy
The third soft skill is empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand the motivations or "hot buttons" of others (prospects).
For instance, if you’re selling shoes and your prospect is looking for shoes to alleviate foot pain, understanding their needs is crucial. Knowing that they need comfortable, lightweight, and durable shoes for their fieldwork, you’d recommend a specific product that meets these criteria. This demonstrates empathy, showing you can feel what others feel. When you understand someone's motivations, you become their first choice in decision-making.
These are the three essential soft skills you need to master if you want your sales to skyrocket. We’ll discuss more soft skills in future articles. Hopefully, this has been helpful. See you in the next article!
Conclusion
To increase your sales, focus on mastering three crucial soft skills: rapport, setting expectations, and empathy. Building genuine relationships, managing customer expectations professionally, and understanding their needs will help you sell more effectively. These skills, combined with technical knowledge, will significantly boost your sales success.