What it takes to Succeed in Sales
By Interviewing Nick Rundlett and reading quite a few articles and blogs across the internet about sales I’ve come to the conclusion that the vast majority of sales success involves building soft skills. There are so many different soft skills that can help in a sales role that it’s tough to say exactly which one is the most important. What I’ve learned is that the best way to acquire sales skills is to start selling and going through the process of closing deals.
That being said, here are a few of the skills I think could bring about the most success in a sales position.
Resilience
The reason resilience is important in a sales role is quite obvious. There’s quite a stigma around sales and being sold to and thus there is a subconscious rejection of everything sales on the side of the customer. I learned from Nick Rundlett that its peoples' immediate reaction to get irritated and reject everything you have to say once they learn you’re trying to sell them something.
Having resilience and getting past this rejection is what separates a below-average salesperson from someone who succeeds in a sales role. The number of times you’ll get rejected before you get really good at closing deals is extremely high and if you can’t get through this rejection and have the resilience and maintain a charismatic and empathetic tone to all the future customers than it’s going to be harder to have success in this role.
I believe that resilience is built through failing over and over again, and learning how to deal with that failure. The more you fail, the more success you’ll have in sales.
Charisma
Before I explain why charisma is important for success in a sales role, let me talk a little more about the nature of charisma. Charisma is not something that you’re born with, it’s something that you can gain through intentional effort. This was an idea put forth in the book The Charisma Myth.
Charisma is the charm to inspires other people. When you can speak in this way you’ll be more persuasive, empathetic and people will trust you a lot more. Thus having charisma I believe is something that can help one grow leaps and bounds in the sales world.
Empathy/Compassion
But Charisma isn’t everything. There have been charismatic individuals in the past that have used their inspirational abilities in negative ways. Another trait of success in sales is the ability to relate and have empathy for the person on the other side of the phone. If the person feels like you really understand where they’re coming from they’re going to be more likely to put their trust in you.
But to look at these traits from the viewpoint of how to get the most sales isn’t the right approach. Everything isn’t about money, and sometimes being truly empathetic and compassionate can make one's work more fulfilling. Especially, as Nick Rundlett says, when someone thanks you for the amount of money they’ve saved and how much his service helped them solve a problem they had, this is what’s really fulfilling about a sales role.
This kind of fulfillment leads to success because it makes you enjoy your work much more and have a much more enjoyable and meaningful experience when working in this type of role. And isn’t success more than just money? With empathy and compassion, we can define success as much deeper than a monetary value, and that of human connection and sincerity.
And with this in mind, we can perceive sales from a much different viewpoint than we may have before reading this, and through the process of uprooting our assumption and changing our perception of sales, if even by just a little.
