I was on a radio talk show recently and the interviewer asked me, “What do you view as the number one sales skill employers are looking for in a professional sales person?”

This is a common question that comes up quite often in our sales training and conversations with business owners. The answer is not organizational skills, charisma, the ability to persuade, presentation skills, tenacity, aggressiveness, affability, analytical ability, etc.

 

The most sought after skill is the ability to listen effectively. Followed by the skill to ask great questions, and establishing and maintaining positive working relationships. 

 

People learn how to listen. It is not an inherent characteristic at birth. Although it is critical to advancing meaningful conversations in social much less business situations, there are very few training experiences that focus exclusively on this vital sales skill.

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At a recent sales seminar I was asked by a sales manager,  "which sales people statistically should I spend the most time coaching and managing?"

I responded by asking, "where are you currently spending the majority of your time?" His response, "with his the problem performers."

Unfortunately this is frequently the case. Sales managers spend their precious coaching and management time with the poor performers in hopes they will somehow become "winning horses".

Let's take a step back, statistically 20% to 30% of a given sales team members generate 50% to 80% of the sales. They generally fall into three categories:

1. High Performers ~ The Horses

2.  The Hope Fulls ~ potentially moving up

3.  Problem Performers ~ resource drain

The following advice may seem stark and in some sense cruel. But bottom line a sales manager's job is to help the team sell  more.

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I was consulting with a client helping them create their strategic sales plan.  The concept and notion of 'the customer is always right' was brought up as a stop gap between sales and operations.

The management team stated that repeatedly the sales team seemed to drop this "bomb" on the entire enterprise causing internal strife and sub-optimizing profits.

The client sighted the typical mantra from Sales:

if we don't do it now someone else will the customers pay the bills don't blame me if we lose the business ok you tell the boss we can't do it etc., etc.  A book could be written on the ever present tactic sales professionals use and customer's consciously or unconsciously reinforce to get what they want.

The problem is played out in two lethal insidious ways.

Internal tension and mistrust is created between sales and the rest of the organization...

As a sales professional we are always looking for ways to be more efficient and save a little time; watch our most Microsoft CRM Tip - using Microsoft CRM Outlook Email - Click and Drag.