7 years ago
February 21, 2017

How to Improve Sales Skills and Boost Your Career

Keep reading for a step-by-step guide that shows you how to improve sales skills in order to give your sales career that boost that you desire.

Claire McConnachie Recruiter
Claire McConnachie

In the highly competitive world of sales, everybody wants to find out how to improve sales skills to enhance their career and achieve greatness. However, success in the sales industry cannot occur without an improvement in your sales skills. For this reason, we have compiled a step-by-step guide on the five most important skills that you should apply to your sales approach in order to give your career that extra boost that you want. This is how you can improve your sales skills today:

Master the Art of Specificity

If you have a general goal in mind, such as closing the deal or improving your sales skills, then you are lacking one important factor—specificity. In order to be successful in the sales world, you need to create a concrete plan that you can use to move forward in your career. Think of this almost as a mission statement. Now, you may wonder about how this can be done. The answer is simple: make sure that you have done enough research about the company for which you work and outline their main mission. This includes finding out what your company’s niche is or discovering how your unique skill set can help you better market the company’s products. One thing is certain—your company’s mission is also your mission.

Set Concrete Goals

Once you clarify what your company’s mission is and incorporate that into your own sales techniques, you have to be able to set your own specific goals. For instance, the area in which you feel you must improve the most mightbe in prospecting or appearing more genuine and sincere during your meetings and conversations with clients. If this is the case, then you have to set yourself daily goals that you could work on in order to see improvement in these areas. This might include scheduling an hour for each day of your week to do some additional research about prospective clients or working on your soft skills, such as interpersonal communication.

The most important part about these tasks is that they give you real concrete steps towards achieving your goal of improving your sales skills. As you work on your daily tasks, keep a progress chart for yourself to see whether improvements start to show.

Ask for Advice

Whenever you are in doubt about the ways in which you can improve your sales skills, you can always look to another more experienced sales employee for advice. The best sales people all started somewhere, and who is to say that you cannot achieve their success if you incorporate some of their how-to approaches towards your burgeoning career?

Sales teams are not simply there to foster competition, but also to encourage cooperation and mutual growth amongst employees. You may not always notice your mistakes or areas that need improvement, but a fresh set of eyes and ears might be able to help you out with that.

Get Feedback from Customers

Your sales team is not the only group that you can turn to for advice on how to improve your sales skills. Your customers are valuable sources of feedback, so make sure to provide them with the opportunity to give you feedback regularly. This might include having an email that asks for feedback more anonymously or handing them a more personal feedback sheet after your meeting with them. Either way, getting your customers’ feedback is crucial for your ability to improve your sales skills.

Practice Your New Skills

Once you get feedback on how to improve your sales skills from your sales team and your customers, it’s time to put those skills into practice. That is where taking an hour out of our day really helps. Make sure to prioritize the most crucial skills that you are lacking first to get the job done.

Claire McConnachie Recruiter

Claire McConnachie

Claire has 4+ years of experience in sales and recruitment. As a Director of Client Services, her main objective is to connect great people to great companies by building strong relationships with both top clients and candidates in the sales industry. She specializes in sales roles of all seniority levels for both enterprise and start-up clients North American wide. When Claire isn't networking with top talent, she enjoys being outdoors, traveling and spending time with friends & family.

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