Introduction
The world of sales is constantly evolving and sales training is a must nowadays. As technology advances and customer behavior changes, it’s crucial for sales professionals to stay ahead of the game. In this blog post, we’ll explore the top ten sales tips you need to learn right now to excel in the modern world of sales. We’ll discuss the importance of copywriting, how to utilize modern sales tools, and the essential techniques that will put your competition in the rearview mirror in today’s competitive market.
1. Master the Art of Copywriting
Copywriting is a crucial skill that every sales professional should master. This is a skill that hardly ever gets taught to salespeople with sales training. Effective copywriting can make the difference between booking the meeting or not, getting a shot at the RFP, or progressing a deal or having it die on the vine. It’s essential to understand your target audience, create a compelling message, and communicate the value of your product or service. So much of modern selling is cutting through the noise and conveying your message properly. Copywriting helps with emails, presentations, narratives for building value, and explaining why a business should invest in you to drive change. Writing better copy will also help you build a brand on LinkedIn to position yourself as a thought leader and a trusted advisor. This simple change will help you to stand out from other sellers and will attract more clients reaching out to you vs. you always having to seek them out.
2. Utilize Modern Sales Tools
In the era of virtual selling, utilizing modern sales tools and sales training is no longer optional; it’s a necessity. Implementing tools like CRM systems, email marketing software, and sales engagement platforms to streamline your sales process and improve productivity is essential if you want to be a top performer. These tools will help you automate tasks, track customer interactions, and measure the success of your sales efforts, enabling you to make data-driven decisions for continuous improvement. However, there’s an additional step that will put you light years ahead of your competition. Tools like ChatGPT will help you quickly scale your copywriting mastery and save you hundreds of hours. Conversational Intelligence tools will help you transcribe calls and get real-time answers, and they can help you self-correct or provide your coach the necessary data to help better coach you. Take some time to do your homework on all the amazing sales tools out there and utilize the ones that will enhance your productivity based on your individual strengths and weaknesses. If you have weaknesses (which we all do) there’s probably a tool that can help you, and if you want to scale your strengths, there are tools for that as well. It’s all about building your own personal operating system that will position you to have more success.
3. Eliminate the “Need to Be Liked” (Respect is the Key).
If I may be blunt, we aren’t in sales to make friends. The top 10% of salespeople would rather be respected than liked. The bottom 90% of salespeople would rather be liked than respected. The distinction is this: The top 10% of salespeople are all likable! They just DON’T CARE if their prospects like them. See the difference? If you fall back into old habits and your “need to be liked” rears its ugly head, you’ll revert back to doing things that cost you sales. It will stop you from asking challenging questions, it will hinder your ability to say NO, and it will negatively affect the way you navigate your way towards a deal. Strive to be respected first, trusted second, and likable third, and your prospects will have more faith in you as someone who can advise a real change in their business.
4. Develop Active Listening Skills
We were given two ears and one mouth for a reason. One of the most essential traits of top-performing salespeople is active listening. By genuinely listening to your prospects’ needs, concerns, and desires, you’ll be better equipped to tailor your sales approach and offer a personalized solution. I know you’ve heard this a million times… REALLY LISTEN! Don’t just listen to what they are saying, but read between the lines, and then dig in. “Tell me more about that,” is a great clarifier that will help show your prospects you’re actively listening. You can use phrases like, “I think I hear you saying this, but what does that mean?” “If you don’t solve this issue, what happens?” “If you could fix that, what would it mean to you?” Listening and hearing are two different things and they both mean nothing if you don’t pull the thread on what you heard. Active listening not only demonstrates empathy but also positions you as a problem-solver. This will help you get to the root of the issue faster, which will ultimately lead to higher conversion rates at every stage of the sales process.
5. Adopt a Solution-Based Mindset
Buyers are looking for solutions to their problems, not just products or services. Modern-day sales should be approached from a problem-solving perspective, and be based on how your offering can address your prospects’ pain points. A solution-based mindset, acquired through sales training, will help you stand out from competitors and add value to your customers’ lives and businesses. As a seller, your job is to drive positive change, and the fact they may choose you to help with that change is an added bonus. Your first step should be to focus on the “Why Change” approach. To understand the power of this concept more clearly, spend some time researching the impact our amygdala (part of our brain) has on decision-making. Top-tier sales professionals will trigger the amygdala and gain agreement that there is a big enough problem to solve before ever presenting a solution.
6. Master the Art of Storytelling
Storytelling is a powerful tool in sales that can help you engage your audience, create an emotional connection, and convey the value of your product or service. Share stories about how your offering has helped other customers or weave a narrative that demonstrates how your solution can impact your prospect’s life. Telling powerful stories will help make your pitch more relatable and memorable. Top performers know the ins and outs of every case study in their business and they can tell stories about them in their sleep. To develop more stories that are impactful, you can research your space with sales training to discover what analysts are saying about the future, then share that knowledge with your prospects. You can study your competition to find out exactly what they’re telling your customers, so you can stay ahead of the game and outduel them. The brain encodes what you are saying in stories and it’s how the human race transferred knowledge before the written word. Storytelling is primal, and it’s a skill you must master if you want to become a top performer.
7. Continuously Develop Your Skills
Sales training is an ongoing process, and it’s crucial to stay up-to-date with the latest trends, techniques, and best practices. Top-performing sales professionals attend workshops, webinars, and conferences to sharpen their skills and network with other sales professionals. They enroll in online sales training courses and read books or articles to stay informed to enhance their knowledge. Sales have evolved dramatically in the last few years and if you’re selling today the way you sold before the Pandemic, you’re going to get left in the dust. Buyers have changed. Industries have changed. Habits have changed. The amount of information available to buyers has caused them to do much more research before engaging a salesperson. More importantly, this plethora of available data has caused information overload for some buyers that oftentimes leads to decision fatigue. The modern seller needs to understand this and must become an expert in their space. They must deeply understand their product, their competition, and how the modern buying journey works, if they want to achieve their full potential in sales.
8. Leverage Social Media
Whether you agree or not, social media platforms are a goldmine for many sales professionals. These platforms provide a way for you to reach and engage with your target audience, build your personal brand, and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Social media provides ways for you to share valuable content, to participate in discussions, and to connect with your ideal prospects and customers. Positioning yourself as an industry expert/trusted advisor has never been more important than it is today. Top-performing salespeople share content from their company and their industry, and they also create their own content demonstrating the problems their solution will solve. Become someone that your clients can turn to for information to help them solve their problems.
9. Stay Up to Date with Industry Trends
Staying up to date with industry trends is an essential trait that’s present in most successful salespeople. You need to know what’s happening in your industry and get proper sales training, what your competitors are doing, and how your product or service will solve your prospects’ problems in today’s ever-changing marketplace. You should read what your clients read, follow the analysts they follow, and be familiar with the research that will help them excel in their current role. This data can serve as the foundation of the conversations you have with your prospect and will illustrate to them you’re both on the same level. If you speak their language, if you understand their world and your place within it, your chances of making a sale are far greater.
10. Be Persistent and Resilient
Last but not least, here are the final two traits that are abundantly common among top-performing salespeople. Persistence and resilience are required if you want to become successful in sales. As you’re well aware, we face rejection and setbacks on what seems like an hourly basis, sometimes, but we need to keep pushing forward in the face of adversity. If you view each failure as an opportunity to learn, you’ll start realizing the power of the mind and you can use that to your advantage. Success in sales requires a combination of talent, hard work, and perseverance. But sometimes, we don’t always see success as quickly as we would like. The true sales professionals will spend years, even decades, honing their craft. The top ten-percenters in sales are constantly self-evaluating their skills, improving their mental toughness, and dissecting their sales process to find what works best.
In conclusion, the best salespeople in the world have a winning combination of skills, knowledge, and tools. By understanding your customers, creating a compelling sales pitch, building trust and credibility, and using modern tools and technology, you’ll give yourself the best chance to win and you’ll achieve greater success than you could ever imagine. Listening to your customers, following up consistently, and focusing on relationship building will also help you build long-term customer loyalty and repeat business. Staying up to date with industry trends, embracing continuous learning, and being persistent and resilient can help you navigate the constant ups and downs of our industry and allow you to stay focused on your long-term success.
At The Sales Collective, our team of experts has a wealth of knowledge and decades of experience helping companies of all types and sizes become more effective. Many of our clients have seen dramatic increases in revenue, win rates, and profitability, and we’d be happy to share more if and when the time is right. If you’d like more information, please visit us at: TheSalesCollective.com.
