Skills for successful selling

Everyone can learn the skills necessary for selling. You and your staff should be competent in basic sales skills, including customer relationships and product presentation.

Customer relationship skills

The most important skill for selling is the ability to listen. These days, good salespeople say a lot less and listen a lot more. Listening is a skill that everyone can master.

Other skills that can be used to build customer relationships are:

• questioning
• persuasiveness
• confidence
• motivation
• personal presentation.

Product presentation skills

The skill of turning product features into benefits is essential for good salespeople. Product knowledge is the key to communicating benefits to a customer, and will help you in each step of the selling process.

Features are physical, tangible, measurable characteristics of a product. Benefits are the advantage that a product feature has for a specific customer.

Planning and analytical skills also help you present your product to customers. You have to decide which product will best meet the needs of a particular customer and plan how you will use the product benefits to persuade that customer to make a purchase.

Also consider...

• Learn more about sales skills and the sales process.
• Find out how to develop staff through mentoring.
• Learn more about communicating effectively in business.