Sharpen your Sales Critical skill

“Salespeople are made, not born. For most salespeople, sales excellence does not just come naturally.”(Linda Richardson)

Top performers often say that their sales dialogues feel more like brainstorming with their customers than “selling.” These are the six critical skills that are fundamental to making their dialogues so fluid and productive:
• Presence—communicating energy, conviction, and interest when speaking and listening
• Relating—building rapport, using acknowledgment, and expressing empathy to connect with customers
• Questioning—creating a logical questioning strategy and effectively using probing skills to uncover needs
• Listening—understanding what the customer communicates in words, tone, and body language
• Positioning—persuasively demonstrating value and application to the customer by customizing your product knowledge to the needs of the customer
• Checking—eliciting feedback on what you have said to gauge customer understanding and agreement
These skills are the tools of selling. The sharper the skills, the more effective the salesperson. A weakness in any one of the skills puts a cap on effectiveness. For example, if the salesperson can’t establish rapport with the customer, it is unlikely the customer will open up in answering questions. If the salesperson is a poor listener, answers lose their value. And without an understanding of customer needs, it’s almost impossible to connect capabilities to customer needs.
Dialogue selling requires product knowledge and technical expertise, but equal to these is customer knowledge and skill. In dialogue selling, the salesperson becomes a resource person who, because he or she fully understands that particular customer’s specific needs, can meet the needs that relate to his or her product and also cross-sell and meet the customer’s broader spectrum of needs. To succeed in dialogue selling, you must master the six critical skills.
Here are ways you can sharpen these skills:
Assess your six critical skills: presence, relating, questioning, listening, positioning, checking. Force-rank the skills. Identify your strengths and areas for improvement. Work on one skill at a time to get it to the next level.
Commit to self-critique: At the end of each call, critique your skills as well as the content of the meeting.
Ask for feedback: Elicit feedback from your customers and colleagues.

Source : The Sales Success Handbook. Linda Richardson.2003