It has often been stated that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It’s also a great idea if the person you’re emulating is successful in your field. Adopting the behaviours and attitudes of highly effective sales people is a good way to start enjoying their level of success. Very few individuals are natural-born salespeople. It takes time, training, and experience to learn the ins and outs of becoming a highly effective salesperson. One way to reduce the time involved is by looking at what other successful people have tried before you. By emulating these three behaviours of highly effective sales people, you can better focus your time and efforts, helping you reach your goals faster.

In the Know

Highly effective sales people have a broad knowledge base. They know about themselves, especially their strengths and weaknesses. They know how to play to their strengths, and how to mitigate their weaknesses.

Highly effective sales people also know about the products and services they sell. This isn’t just about dry facts and figures, it’s about making a value statement to the individual prospect. If you can’t explain the value of the product, and connect that value directly to the prospect, there won’t be any sale.

Connecting with prospects is also about understanding their needs, and knowing how to address them. Highly effective sales people listen to their customers, take notes of conversations, and conduct research on issues affecting clients. All of this information makes them the “go-to” person when a client has questions.

Putting Information to Use

Every sales person is bombarded with new information every day. This can be data on new products, changing sales projections, customer complaints-you name it. Highly effective sales people don’t just sit on this new information when it comes to them. They make use of the new data by incorporating it into their sales processes.

Highly effective sales people are the ones taking notes at conferences, participating in workshops, and researching new methods and best practices. They don’t just seek out this information out of curiosity. They actually implement the new information, and use it to improve their sales prowess.

On the other side of the coin, they also use new information to stop doing things. Customer feedback and self-analysis can reveal problems in your sales technique. When the new information tells you that you’re doing something wrong, it’s up to you to stop doing it.

Sticking with It

Even after you’ve learned everything you need to know about being a highly effective sales person, things will still go wrong. Big clients will back out of deals, prospects will vanish without a trace and, some days, it will seem that you can’t do anything right. Get used to it. To be a highly effective sales person, you have to learn to confront and overcome adversity, since it will always be a part of the job.

Adversity should be viewed as a learning experience. When things go wrong, you should examine them from start to finish, to see if there are things you can do differently in the future. In many instances, no action on your part could have changed the outcome. When this happens, you can learn to accept that some things will always be beyond your control. In other cases, there will be clear choices that you made that could have been made differently. Use this as a chance to examine why you made those decisions, and how to avoid making them again. People who want to be highly effective in any field must, at some point, figure out how to learn from their mistakes.